Instant paid permission to reuse a figure or excerpt from Indian books
TL;DR Citewell lets a coaching institute, edtech team, video-platform teacher or author buy a small, clear licence to reuse a diagram, table or passage from an Indian publisher's book, in minutes and for a few hundred to a few thousand rupees. Publishers set the prices and keep most of the fee.
Under Indian copyright law, copying by teachers and pupils while teaching isn't infringement[1]. In the Delhi University photocopy appeal, the High Court read that broadly enough to cover course packs for classroom teaching[2].
Commercial coaching and edtech sit outside that comfort zone. Courts protect their own course material firmly though - in 2023 the Delhi High Court restrained 17 parties from sharing one coding-coaching brand's paid content[3].
So a commercial creator who wants one figure from a textbook has two options. Email the publisher and wait weeks, often with no reply, or copy it and hope. Most copy. Publishers lose a small fee each time and have no easy way to say yes.
What it does, in regulatory terms: licensing software where each publisher is the licensor. Indian law bars anyone except a registered copyright society from running a business of granting licences, though an owner may license its own works[1]. So Citewell never grants licences in its own name. Each licence is issued by the publisher through the platform, and Citewell takes a service fee. Get a legal opinion on this structure before launch.
The seed pitched blockchain micropayments to replace publishing models. I reframed it, because readers already pay small sums by UPI and a per-story paywall is covered elsewhere in this directory. What lacks a simple payment is reuse. A licence record with an ID and a UPI receipt proves the deal without a token.
A buyer searches a title, picks the page range or figure, chooses the use (a video, a paid course, a printed book), the audience size and the territory, and sees the publisher's price at once. You pay, download a licence PDF with an ID and add the credit line it gives. Publishers set rate cards once and can auto-approve standard requests.
The reuser pays per licence. Publishers pay nothing upfront and Citewell keeps a share of each fee. In the UK, a permissions service run by publishers' own licensing body charges a 12% handling fee on paid licences and nothing on free ones[4], which is a fair starting point in my opinion. First buyers are coaching institutes and edtech content teams producing paid courses.
Courts have shown they'll act quickly for content owners, and that coaching-brand order came as an ad-interim injunction[3]. The same logic cuts against coaching firms that reuse publishers' material without permission, which gives them a reason to license. Large Indian publishers have also digitised their catalogues for ebook sellers. One Indian ebook store lists major educational publishers[5], so page-level files exist.
No public figure exists for permissions revenue in Indian publishing. IRRO, the registered society for reprographic rights, licenses photocopying by institutions but doesn't publish its tariff on its homepage[6].
Abroad, a self-serve permissions desk sustains itself on a 12% fee[4]. Treat India's market as unproven until 20 publishers sign up and price their rate cards.
IRRO licenses institutions in bulk for photocopying[6], not one-off digital reuse by a video-platform teacher. Indian ebook stores, and an earlier chapter-sales service, sell chapters to readers, from ₹3 to ₹1,146 a chapter in the latter's case[5][7], but those are reading rights and not reuse rights. A publisher-run permissions service does this job in the UK[4].
I found no Indian self-serve service for small reuse licences.
| Difficulty | Moderate (36/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹35–65 L |
| Time to launch | 6–9 months |
The software is modest. The hard parts are the legal structure under the copyright-society rule, and persuading publishers to set prices for uses they've never priced. Buyers will come only once a useful share of the most-used textbooks is listed, so supply comes first.
No licence for the software itself, but the structure has to respect copyright law, and that is the whole game.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI decide whether a use is fair dealing or whether a licence is needed. That is a legal judgment, and a wrong answer exposes both the buyer and the publisher.
Want to work out the AI layer for Citewell? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
I see a narrow but plausible business for a founder with publishing rights or legal experience and relationships with educational publishers. If you expect consumer scale then it's the wrong idea. Prove first that 10 publishers will list rate cards and 50 paid licences sell within a quarter.
Plan for roughly ₹35–65 L, mostly on the platform, legal structuring and signing publishers.
Only a registered copyright society can run a licensing business, so each licence has to come from the publisher. Get a legal opinion on the structure before launch.
Yes, a publisher-run service does something similar in the UK. Collective licensing rules differ by country, so check local copyright law first.
The free Citewell validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the copyright and payments checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for publishers and reusers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Citewell or something close to it? The make-or-break work is a licence structure that clears the copyright-society rule and gets publishers to price reuse, and that's the kind of problem I help founders work through. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.