Introduction
The growing use of generative AI tools for producing text, music, and images has raised a fundamental copyright question in India: can content created with minimal human involvement qualify as an ‘original work’ under the Copyright Act, 1957? This article examines this question through existing Indian copyright jurisprudence on originality and authorship, while drawing comparative insights from foreign jurisdictions.
According to section 2(y) of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, “work” means any of the following works, such as literary, dramatic, or musical works. Meanwhile, the author is defined under Section 2(d) of the Indian Copyright Act,1957, which refers to a person who causes the work to be created about any kind of work, such as literary, musical, or artistic, etc. This definition raises questions about whether AI-generated works can still be protected under copyright law. Further, the questions as to whether a few changes to the already existing artwork by AI can be said to be the work of AI, and whether content generated by AI should be considered legal or vague.
Current Legal Position in India
Currently, Indian copyright jurisprudence does not recognize artificial intelligence as either an author or creator of copyrightable works. The Copyright Act, 1957, is based on the principle that the right of authorship vests in a natural or juridical person, and no statutory arrangement has yet been made regarding works autonomously created by an artificial intelligence system.
Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act defines the author of a computer-generated work as “the person who causes the work to be created.” That language was added in 1994, at a time when computer-generated works predominantly were the result of human-directed activities, rather than autonomous generation. For that reason, its application to the current generative AI tools, which often create outputs with very limited human contribution, is legally unclear.
Indian courts have consistently placed human creativity and intellectual effort at the base of copyright protection. Jurisprudence from cases such as R.G. Anand v. Deluxe Films and Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak develops this principle further with holdings that originality would arise from some act of a human author requiring exercise of skill, judgment, and labour. Without that human contribution, it is not clear if AI-made content can meet the threshold for originality under Indian law.
Till date, there are no judicial pronouncements in India directly addressing the copyrightability of purely AI-generated works. There is still no legislative clarification or regulatory guideline with respect to ownership and enforcement of rights over AI-generated content, thereby keeping the creators, developers, and commercial users relying on artificial intelligence for content creation in a legal dilemma.
Revisiting Originality: Judicial Barriers to AI Authorship in India
In R.G. Anand vs. M/s. Delux Films & Ors. (Supreme Court of India), decided on 18 August 1978; Equivalent Citations: 1978 AIR 1613, the Court reinforced that copyright protection extends to original expressions and not ideas, and that originality stems from a human’s personality. If a machine generates the content based solely on prompts, is this creativity enough? Or is the programmer the real creative force? This has been a long debate since the development of AI. In another case of Eastern Book Company & Ors. vs. D.B. Modak & Anr. (Supreme Court of India), decided on 12 December 2007; Equivalent Citation: AIR 2008 SC 809 , the court held that copying someone’s work in which they have invested labour, skill, and capital is not fair and also held that if someone wants to secure copyright for their work, then the labour, skill, and capital invested must be sufficient to turn it into a work of quality or character.
These judgments create significant legal ambiguity regarding whether applied work generated by artificial intelligence (AI) can be qualified as copyright. In scenarios where no human exercises direct creative control over the output, it becomes difficult to analyse whether such work would be considered as “work” in which required labour, skill, and capital were invested, as held in previous judgements we discussed above. Take, for example, an AI software, Google’s MusicLM, which converts text prompts into music without direct human composition. It becomes difficult to assess whether such outputs possess the requisite human creativity to qualify for copyright protection.
Global Jurisprudence and Comparative Law
Recently, the United States recognized such a right in the Zarya of the Dawn (‘Zarya’) case. Here, the US Copyright Office granted copyright protection to a graphic novel, even though all images were created by artificial intelligence. The Copyright Office ruling was based on a finding of the skill, judgment, and creativity exercised by the author in the choice, editing, and arrangement of the images created by AI, which ultimately led to their being transformed into a physical form – a graphic novel. Later, the US Copyright Office issued a formal policy statement stating that a work based on AI-generated content is potentially eligible for copyright protection, provided it has enough human authorship to meet the standards required for copyright application.
UK is one of the few countries that provides copyright to computer generated work hence under section 9(3) of UK’s Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988 it is mentioned that any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer generated the author shall be taken to be the person by whom arrangements necessary for the creation of work are undertaken that means that work would be considered as work of author hence he could claim copyright against it.
China is also relatively willing to recognize AI-generated work under specific conditions. For example, in the case of Feilin v. Baidu, the Court held that even though the report was produced using legal software, it also contained AI-generated content. The court carried out an assessment to determine the extent of human intervention and ruled that only works demonstrating sufficient human creativity, such as analysis, selection, and expression, qualify for protection under copyright. The judgment acknowledged that such AI-generated content involves economic and social investment by the author and suggested these deserve legal recognition, though not necessarily through copyright.
India, in contrast, lacks statutory or judicial clarity on the authorship of AI-generated work. The Copyright Act 1957 requires the author to be a natural person. Section 17 of the Indian Copyright Act states that only persons can be authors, which creates ambiguity in recognizing non-human authorship. However, as there is growth in the use of AI and dependence upon it for content creation, India should consider adopting these changes from countries like the UK and China. After all, generating quality content through AI still involves imagination, skill, and careful prompting by a human. Giving such human-guided AI work some form of protection could be a balanced way to reward innovation.
Key Legal Issues that persist
The Indian Copyright Act was modified in 1994 to include cases where work is done by a computer. Precisely, Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act specifies the author of a work produced by a computer as “the person who causes the work to be created.” Even though this provision seems to include material produced by artificial intelligence, it was drafted when AI did not work independently like it does today. Therefore, it is unclear whether work produced by generative AI models, like those producing music or paintings with minimal human intervention, would fall within this section.
In the absence of any legislative reforms and required provisions, these issues continue to pose challenges for creators and innovators in the country. Without legal clarity, both the originality of the AI content and the right of authorship remain open questions in India’s copyright regime.
Proposed Standard Test for Determining Copyrightable Content
To strike a balance between the competing principles of safeguarding human involvement in creative works and recognizing the copyrightability of AI-generated content, we propose the Standard Test. It is a simple test to see the involvement of human intervention, that is, labor, skill, and capital invested in making any content in which AI is involved. If the content has enough human intervention, then it can be declared as original content and could get copyright protection. The Indian government should come up with new provisions to determine how much content generated by AI could be considered original. This would not only help many developers who include the content of AI but would also help the country move forward in the direction of recognizing the work of AI.
Conclusion
The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence has brought to light some worrying gaps within India’s copyright regime. As AI-generated works are increasingly put into use within the creative and commercial sphere, the Copyright Act of 1957 maintains its reliance on traditional concepts of human authorship and thereby leaves very crucial questions of ownership and enforceability wide open.
Indian jurisprudence has laid emphasis on human skill, labour, and judgment as the foundational elements of originality. Since there is a lack of any statutory or judicial guidance regarding AI-generated works, it is not clear whether results with minimum human intervention would be considered original.
The comparative analyses of various jurisdictions, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, show that a balanced framework is possible, one that recognizes meaningful human involvement without giving complete protection to machine generated works. These models emphasize that creative control and intellectual contribution should be evaluated, not the use of technology alone.
Within the Indian context, the need for legislative or regulatory explanation does indeed become convenient. The introduction of a clear test for ascertaining human contribution in AI-assisted works would protect essential copyright principles while providing much needed clarity to stakeholders. Until such reforms are enacted, the courts are likely to continue to decide these issues on a case-by-case basis, thereby shaping the future contours of AI-related copyright law.
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