AUTHORSHIP WITHOUT AUTHORS: ANALYZING COPYRIGHT PROTECTION FOR AI-GENERATED WORKS IN INDIA

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence systems, which are capable of producing literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic works of remarkable sophistication has indeed precipitated a sort of jurisprudential crisis, at the intersection of technology and intellectual property law. The basic principle of copyright law, namely that authorship attaches to the person, not the object, and that the person is endowed with ‘creative volition' is conceptually undermined, particularly if the originating intelligence is synthetic. This paper conducts a thorough legal analysis of the Copyright protection of the AI generated works, which falls within the ambit of Indian law, in light of the uncertainties of the Copyright Act, 1957, the judicial interpretation and the comparative legislative approach of the UK, USA, and EU. The paper highlights the critical research gaps such as the lack of a statutory definition of artificial intelligence in the Indian law, the uncharted territory of the exception of 'computer-generated works' in the Copyright Act, 1957, as well as the undecided issue of moral rights attribution, and the policy lacuna around platform liability and AI training data. The paper concludes that judicial interpretation alone, without legislative action, may indeed not be enough to meet the need of the machinery of creativity in the face of a structural mismatch between the human-centric architecture of copyright law and the new reality.