YouTuber Mohak Mangal posted videos on his channel detailing exchanges with ANI representatives, who demanded damages and licence fees extending to ₹48 lakh for using clips from ANI’s library without obtaining a licence for them. Photo: X/@mohakmangal
Days after YouTubers complained of high licensing fees and demands for damages from the newswire agency Asian News International (ANI), the Press Trust of India (PTI) on Tuesday (May 27, 2025) offered to provide video creators affordable rates for using its footage.
“As India’s most trusted news agency, we at PTI remain committed to credible journalism and ethical business practices,” the agency said in a statement.
“To support responsible content creation, we offer individual YouTube creators highly affordable access to PTI videos for your YouTube content and for use in other social media platforms.”
Like ANI, PTI is a newswire agency that provides text, photo and video feeds from all over the country and from some foreign capitals to news publishers in India. PTI did not indicate precisely how much it would charge for its feeds.
YouTubers such as Mohak Mangal and Rajat Pawar posted videos on their channels over the last week detailing exchanges with ANI representatives, who demanded damages and licence fees extending to ₹48 lakh for using clips from ANI’s library without obtaining a licence for them. ANI insists that its claims were appropriate.
The YouTube users claimed that their use of brief snippets from ANI footage fell under “fair use,” a legal doctrine that permits analysis, criticism, and other kinds of use of copyrighted material that do not seek to replicate the work directly. Jurisdictions like the United States have had fair use principles evolved through several court cases. In India, the concept of fair dealing under the Copyright Act, 1952, has been tested in a few education and entertainment-related cases, but it is unclear whether the courts have considered copyright issues concerning newswires.
Published – May 27, 2025 08:12 pm IST