The Copyright Conundrum: AI, Innovation, and Ownership

The Ministry of Commerce & Industry stated in a circular dated February 9, 2024, that AI-generated works are adequately protected by the country's present intellectual property rights (IPR) system under existing legislation, including the Patent and Copyright Act. The circular reiterated India's commitment to ensuring that legal persons, including AI developers, have sufficient safeguards for their creation, emphasizing that there is no need for a special category of rights for AI-linked innovations.

AI is driving innovation and changing how we approach problem-solving across sectors, altering entire industries in the process and Intellectual property rights, on the other hand is essential for protecting the inventions and discoveries that drive technological progress. Because AI can create content, products, and solutions, it raises important questions about who owns the intellectual property rights to these inventions. As a result, the convergence of AI and IPR has become a key issue of discussion. According to a study by NASSCOM in their paper ‘AI Patents – Driving Emergence of India as an Innovation Hub’, India now ranks fourth in AI scholarly articles and eighth internationally in AI patents, having experienced a tenfold increase in AI-related patent filings since 2012. The paper further specified that the need for AI by enterprises to increase productivity and resilience in their operations is a major factor driving this expansion. The leading industries for AI patent filings include consumer electronics, healthcare, and technology, indicating the nation's growing significance in AI innovation. Therefore, innovation, creativity, and economic growth are all significantly impacted by this convergence of AI and IPR, particularly in a nation like India that is quickly becoming a centre for AI research.

Even Though the Ministry’s circular assures that the current regime is sufficient to protect AI related innovations there have been instances and recommendations which suggest otherwise. Let’s start with ChatGPT.

The idea of assigning ownership of AI-generated content, like the output from ChatGPT, to a user or developer doesn't hold up well under Indian law. In India, copyright law—specifically Section 17 of the Copyright Act, 1957—requires a human author for any work to be protected. For instance, under Section 16 of the Act "no person" can be granted copyright unless specifically authorized by statute. When you apply to register a copyright, you need to provide the name, nationality, and address of the creator, which is another way the law ensures that only humans can claim authorship. When it comes to AI, things get complicated. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act does allow for authorship of computer-generated works, but it says the person who "causes the work to be created" is the author. So, if all you did was give ChatGPT a one-line input, it's hard to argue that you actually "created" the output. This creates a legal grey area—who owns the work if AI made it? The developer of the AI? The user who typed in the question? According to current Indian law, it seems like no one can legally be the author of an AI-generated work. Interestingly, despite these challenges, there was a case where an AI app, "Raghav Artificial Intelligence Painting App," was listed as a co-author for an artwork, alongside a human. However, a year later, the Copyright Office issued a notice to withdraw this registration, acknowledging that it likely shouldn’t have been approved in the first place.

The courts in India have been trying to protect an individual’s inventions and prohibiting the improper use of AI tools to violate copyright, for example in the case of  Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India, the court imposed an injunction against the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to produce altered, false content for commercial advantage. Additionally, the Calcutta High Court in 2013 and Delhi High Court in 2019 have discovered that, in order to preserve the rights of particular personalities, websites and platforms that stream copyrighted music for profit are not protected by Section 52(1)(a)(i) of the Act.

With so many advancements and conversations around AI and AI-based technologies, nearly everyone has an idea about how it ought to go. Although "Artificial Intelligence" encompasses a wide range of topics, from definitions to applications to potential threats to human life, remarkably little public policy has been discussed in India regarding the convergence of AI and IP. From 2018-19 directions of Shri Arun Jaitley, then Finance Minister, to NITI Aayog to establish the National Program on AI to a discussion paper titled ‘Adopting the Framework: A Use Case Approach on Facial Recognition Technology’, in 2022 there have been massive discussions regarding AI growth in India and inculcating it in mainstream practices but not much emphasis has been put on IPR and AI. In this ever-changing technological landscape, a strong, flexible intellectual property rights (IPR) framework is necessary to protect creators' and developers' rights and foster innovation.

The 161st Report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on ‘Review of the Intellectual Property Rights Regime in India’, also emphasised the need to create a separate category of rights for AI related inventions and solutions should be created for their protection as IPRs. Lastly, The Indian government's National AI Portal, INDIAai, has released a report on generative AI. It acknowledges that copies of human-created works that are protected by copyright are read, viewed, and heard in order to train generative AI systems. According to the paper (Page no. 37), there are currently no copyright rules that would offer protection to any model or creation that is entirely generated by AI. It implies that although copyrighted content may be used without the owner's consent under fair use regulations, ongoing legal challenges may upset this equilibrium, casting doubt on the viability of AI model training. Moral rights are important to consider when analyzing the usage of people's works in AI training datasets. These rights include the right to integrity and attribution in particular. AI could use a creator's work in ways that the original author never intended, which is one of the main concerns. An AI might, for instance, take a sacred painting and use it in an unsuitable or unrelated setting, which could harm the artist's reputation. This begs the question of how moral rights may be upheld in the context of AI. In conclusion the amalgamation of artificial intelligence and intellectual property law in India necessitates a more sophisticated structure to tackle ownership, ethical rights, and legal obstacles, guaranteeing safeguarding for discoveries produced by AI.