Balancing Innovation And Authors' Rights In The Era Of Artificial Intelligence
Suryamani Bhaskar, Yashwant Rao Chavan Law College
ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence has moved from a peripheral tool to a central force in creative production, generating text, images, music and code with diminishing human intervention at the point of output. This shift unsettles foundational premises of copyright law, particularly the requirements of human authorship and originality, and raises difficult questions about the legality of using copyrighted works to train generative models. This paper examines the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, against this backdrop, asking whether it can accommodate AI-assisted and AI-generated works, whether the use of copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence systems amounts to infringement or qualifies as fair dealing, and how adequately authors' economic and moral rights are protected against AI-driven exploitation. It situates the Indian framework within comparative developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and China, and analyses recent judicial developments, including the Delhi High Court's interim order in ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI OpCo LLC and the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter. The paper argues that India's existing statutory language, drafted for a pre-generative-AI world, is inadequate to resolve contemporary authorship, infringement and remuneration questions, and proposes a calibrated set of legislative and policy reforms intended to preserve incentives for both technological innovation and human creativity.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Copyright Law; Authorship; Computer- Generated Works; Text and Data Mining; Moral Rights; Copyright Act, 1957.
