Body representing Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco against one-size-fits-all deepfake regulation in letter to IT ministry

Regarding the deepfakes issue, the ministry has issued multiple advisories to the industry and conducted meetings with platforms

In a letter to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), a trade body representing major IT and business-to-business companies have requested the government to not introduce a one-size-fits-all regulation for tackling deepfakes.

The submission by The Software Alliance, which represents companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and so on, said: "MeitY should consider the differences in the role and function of intermediaries when prescribing obligations related to deepfakes. This is crucial due to key service-level, technical, functional, and user-based distinctions that ensure that all intermediaries do not have the same ability to address this issue."

"The services provided by intermediaries may not pose the same kind of risk. For example, business- to-business and enterprise software services pose limited risk to user safety and public order, given the size of their user base and the fact that they do not provide services directly to
consumers," it added.

The submission was addressed to Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, along with MeitY Secretary S Krishnan, additional secretary Bhuvnesh Kumar and group coordinator Sandip Chatterjee. It was penned by BSA's country manager (India) Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy.  The trade body's other members include Oracle, Zoom and Cisco.

This submission comes at a time when the IT ministry has been planning to come up with an amendment to the Information Technology Rules, which would bring in additional requirements for all types of intermediaries for tackling deepfakes.

Miscreants have been using this technology to make sexually suggestive photos and videos of actresses, such as Rashmika Mandanna, and also to leverage credibility of famous personalities such as Sachin Tendulkar, for promoting suspicious applications and games.

In the submission, BSA urged MeitY to look towards the usage of watermarks and other disclosure methods for identifying AI-generated content.

"BSA also supports the Content Authenticity Initiative’s (CAI) efforts to
combat misinformation.4 The CAI has promoted an open-source standard developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity that generates tamperevident content credentials for content authenticity and provenance," it read.

Last year, the IT ministry issued advisories to social media companies and other intermediaries in a bid to tackle deepfakes on such platforms. Specifically, in the advisories, the government has asked platforms to list out the 11 types of content that users cannot publish on platforms.

However, Chandrasekhar had last month said that compliance with the multiple advisories the ministry issued to social media platforms on deepfakes has been "mixed".

"We will wait and see the compliance of the advisory. If we find that there is still some noncompliance or partial compliance, we will follow it up and notify rules where we will prescribe social media companies to mandatorily amend their terms and conditions and align with the said rules," Chandrasekhar had said on January 16.