Intellectual Property Rights In The Digital Age: Balancing Innovation, Public Access And Enforcement In India
Srishti Singh, Amity University
ABSTRACT
Intellectual property rights (IPR) sit at an uncomfortable meeting point between private reward and public benefit. They exist so that creators and inventors can recover what they spend on new work, yet every exclusive right also narrows what the rest of society may freely use. This paper looks at how that tension plays out in India, where the law has moved from a weak, access-oriented regime before 1995 to a TRIPS-compliant system that still keeps several flexibilities. Using a doctrinal method, the paper reads the main statutes, the leading judgments and the international instruments together, and then tests them against three present-day pressures: access to patented medicines, online piracy and platform liability, and the arrival of generative artificial intelligence. The argument is that Indian law has, on the whole, struck a defensible balance in pharmaceuticals but is lagging in the digital field, where statutory text written for an earlier technology is being stretched to cover new problems. The paper ends with a short set of practical recommendations on AI authorship, intermediary duties, enforcement capacity and awareness among small creators.
Keywords: Intellectual Property Rights; TRIPS; Patent Law; Copyright; Section 3(D); Artificial Intelligence; Online Piracy; India.
