Authorship is not Enough: Reassessing Copyright Protection for AI-Generated Works Under Indian Law

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has complicated traditional understandings of authorship and originality in copyright law. Systems such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E can produce text, images, music, and code with minimal user input, raising difficult questions about whether such outputs qualify for copyright protection and, if they do, who should own them. This article argues that Indian copyright law should neither recognise AI systems as authors nor automatically confer copyright upon every user of a generative AI tool. Instead, copyright protection should depend upon the extent of human creative involvement in producing the final work. A central focus of the article is Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957, which identifies the author of a computer-generated work as “the person who causes the work to be created.” While this provision is often treated as a complete answer to the problem of AI-generated works, such an interpretation overlooks the separate requirement of originality. Drawing upon the Supreme Court’s decision in Eastern Book Company v D.B. Modak, the article argues that identifying an author under Section 2(d)(vi) does not automatically establish copyright ownership. The claimant must still demonstrate the exercise of skill and judgment sufficient to satisfy the originality threshold under Indian law. The article proposes a meaningful human contribution test that focuses on the extent to which a claimant directed, selected, modified, and refined the final work. Such an approach preserves the human-centred foundations of copyright law while allowing existing doctrine to accommodate emerging forms of AI-assisted creation.