Reconciling Consent-Based Data Processing With Perpetual Copyright Ownership: A Legal Analysis Of Conflicting Digital Rights In India
- IJLLR Journal
- Nov 6, 2025
- 2 min read
Siddhantika Vatsa, Legal Researcher, High Court of Jharkhand, Ranchi and Kumar Mayank, Legal Associate, GVAS Legal, Patna, India
ABSTRACT
The new age rapid advancement of digital technologies and escalation of online platforms have fundamentally transformed the ways in which information is created and shared, consumed and conversed. The augmented growth of cloud computing, social networking websites, e-commerce platforms and content sharing services have rapidly led to massive collection of both personal and non-personal data. In this dynamic digital environment, two critical legal domains have an intersecting significance- data privacy and copyright law- which have gained a recent significance. While the data privacy law aims to protect and secure the individual centric sensitive data from unauthorized access and unsanctioned use, copyright law safeguards the right of original creators over their creations and expression of ideas. The convergence of this idea has generated legal, ethical, and policy challenges, as a large amount of personal data and copyrighted content circulate across interconnected digital ecosystems.
At the point of this intersection, a significant question lay down whole heartedly: how can the legal framework be used to effectively balance the protection of data which is personal in nature with the enforcement of copyright in digital environment. For example, the enforcement of copyright against the infringing content available on online platform often involves access to and process of the user data, thereby raising concerns about individual privacy rights. In a different perspective, confidentiality enhancing measures such as encoding and encryption obstructs the identification of copyright infringers, complexing the right holder’s efforts to protect their works.
These areas have become more complex with the advent of technologies like cloud storage, social media, content creation and sharing platforms, and generative artificial intelligence driven data processing.
This paper tries to explore the niche relationship between digital data privacy and copyrighted content, examining the existing legal framework adjudicating both the domains, the point of intersection and conflict between them, the implications of right holders, users and digital intermediaries. This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on harmonising digital rights in light of the recent enactments and protection of privacy in an increasingly data driven world.
Keywords: Data privacy, copyright, digital data, perpetual ownership.
