NFTS, Generative AI And Copyright In India: Re- Examining Authorship, Originality And Infringement Tests
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Sanvi Singh, Symbiosis Law School Pune
ABSTRACT
The Indian copyright system faces increasing demands to manage creative works and commercial activities which have emerged after its original design because the system must now handle blockchain-based non-fungible tokens and AI-based generative systems and human-machine collaborative artworks. The Copyright Act of 1957 protects original literary and dramatic and musical and artistic works through Section 13 while Section 2(d) establishes computer-generated works as protected creations which identify the creator as the person who makes the work actual. The current digital practices raise three main questions which existing legal texts fail to answer because they lack specific definitions about who becomes an AI-enabled author and which originality standard should apply to works created through multiple production processes and what infringement doctrine should determine when copyright protected material gets used for minting and model creation and output generation and public distribution without permission.
The Indian legal system needs to change existing legal principles through a complete shift in practice instead of this complete transformation of current legal standards. The primary purpose of NFTs exists to function as transaction-based digital assets which only transfer copyright ownership when users fulfil statutory written assignment requirements. The evaluation of generative AI outputs requires a human-cantered investigation of authorship which divides between two types of creative control because originality must follow the Indian standard of skill and judgment rather than machine-generated originality. Courts need to divide infringement cases into three categories which involve training inputs and model outputs and tokenized dissemination because each category involves distinct exclusive rights under Section 14 and requires different evaluation of substantial reproduction and public communication and intermediary accountability.
Keywords: NFT, generative AI, copyright, India, authorship, originality, infringement, computer-generated works.
