ABSTRACT
“Artificial Intelligence isn’t a novelty anymore, it’s something writers, designers, musicians and businesses across India now use every day to generate content in seconds. But this convenience has exposed a real gap in our copyright law: when a machine does the creating instead of a human being, who actually owns the result? This article looks at how the Copyright Act, 1957 currently treats computer-generated works, with particular attention to Section 2(d)(vi) and its definition of “author,” and at the still-unresolved question of whether an AI system can be recognised as an author or co-author under Indian law. It also discusses the Ankit Sahni matter pending before the Delhi High Court, the Copyright Office’s shifting stance on the issue, and how the UK and US have approached the same problem, so as to give creators and businesses a practical sense of where things currently stand.”
KEYWORDS: Artificial Intelligence, Copyright Act 1957, Computer-Generated Works, Authorship, Section 2(d)(vi), Ankit Sahni Case, Intellectual Property.
INTRODUCTION
Picture a graphic designer who types a few lines into an AI image tool and, within seconds, has a finished illustration ready to send to a client. Or a student who asks a chatbot to draft an essay outline, tidies it up a little, and submits it as their own work. Both of these were unthinkable a few years ago. Today they’re just Tuesday. AI tools have made creating content faster, cheaper, and honestly more accessible to people who could never previously afford a designer or a copywriter. The trouble is that copyright law wasn’t built with any of this in mind. At its core, copyright exists to reward human creativity and original thought. It assumes, quite reasonably until recently, that a human is doing the actual creation. So when a song, a painting, or a piece of writing comes largely or entirely out of an algorithm, working out who owns it stops being a simple question and becomes a genuinely tricky one. This article tries to unpack what Indian law currently says on the subject, where it falls short, and how one particular case winding through the Delhi High Court might end up settling a lot of this.
THE STATUTORY STARTING POINT: SECTION 2(d) OF THE COPYRIGHT ACT
Copyright in India is governed by the Copyright Act, 1957, and Section 2(d) of that Act sets out who counts as an “author” depending on what kind of work is involved the writer of a literary work, the composer of a musical piece, the artist behind a painting, and so on. What’s interesting, and arguably ahead of its time, is Section 2(d)(vi), which specifically addresses computer-generated works. It says that for any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work “which is computer-generated,” the author is “the person who causes the work to be created.”
Notice what this provision does not require: it doesn’t ask for a human hand to have physically written or painted anything. It only asks that a human set the process in motion. Read literally, this should mean someone who prompts an AI tool to produce a poem, image or piece of music can still claim authorship, because they’re the one who caused the work to exist in the first place. Where things get murky is in the details Indian courts haven’t yet worked through: how much human input is enough before a work stops being purely “AI-generated” and becomes “AI-assisted” instead, and whether the AI tool itself or the company that built it could ever claim any competing stake in what comes out the other end.
THE ANKIT SAHNI CASE: INDIA’S FIRST REAL TEST
The clearest example of just how unsettled this area is comes from artist Ankit Sahni, who used an AI application called RAGHAV to create a painting called “Suryast.” Sahni applied to the Copyright Office and listed both himself and the AI tool as co-authors. For a while, it looked like the registration would simply go through and it did, briefly making news as India’s first case of an AI programme being formally credited on a copyright certificate. Not long after, the Copyright Office reversed course and issued a notice seeking to withdraw the registration, apparently on the reasoning that an AI programme isn’t a legal person and can’t hold rights or be held liable, so it can’t stand alongside a human as a joint author.
Sahni pushed back against the withdrawal, and the case is now sitting before the Delhi High Court, still unresolved at the time of writing. What the court eventually decides will matter well beyond one painting of a sunset. If the judges accept that an AI tool can be named a co-author so long as a human is also on record and remains legally answerable for the work that would put India in genuinely novel territory compared to most other countries. If instead the court holds that copyright can only belong to a human, or to a legal entity capable of bearing rights and duties, India would end up closer to the more cautious position other jurisdictions have taken. Either way, until this is decided, the legal status of AI-assisted work in India is, for lack of a better word, up in the air.
OWNERSHIP, EMPLOYMENT, AND COMMISSIONED WORK
Separate from who counts as an “author” is the question of who owns the copyright, which Section 17 of the Act deals with. As a general rule the author is also the first owner, but there are exceptions where a work is made by an employee during the course of their job, or commissioned for payment under certain categories the Act specifically lists, ownership can shift over to the employer or whoever commissioned the work. This matters a lot for businesses using AI internally to churn out marketing copy, reports, or design assets. If an employee uses the company’s AI subscription to produce something as part of their day-to-day job, that output would probably be treated no differently from any other work product made in the course of employment, meaning ownership would rest with the employer even though an algorithm did most of the actual work. What’s still unclear is how much creative judgment the employee needs to have exercised over that AI output before it even qualifies as original enough to be protected by copyright at all.
A COMPARATIVE GLANCE: THE UK AND US POSITIONS
It’s worth stepping outside India for a moment. The United Kingdom, under Section 9(3) of its Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, takes a fairly similar approach to ours, giving authorship of a computer-generated work to “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.” The United States has gone in a much stricter direction. In the now well-known Thaler v. Perlmutter case, American courts made clear that copyright protection requires actual human authorship, and that anything created autonomously by a machine without meaningful human creative input beyond, say, typing a prompt simply cannot be registered. Practically, that means a purely AI-generated image with no real human authorial contribution would fall straight into the public domain in the US, protected by no one. India hasn’t gone as far as the American courts, but it hasn’t fully adopted the UK’s more permissive stance either. Where the Sahni case eventually lands may end up pulling India closer to one side of that spectrum than the other.
PRACTICAL RISKS FOR CREATORS AND BUSINESSES
So what does all this mean for someone actually using these tools right now? A few things are worth keeping in mind. The more substantial and identifiable a human’s contribution is editing, arranging, selecting, refining the output the stronger that person’s claim to authorship is likely to be, since courts tend to look for real evidence of human judgment rather than just a one-line prompt. Businesses using AI-generated material commercially should also be careful about assuming they automatically own it outright, especially where the AI platform’s own terms of service reserve some rights over what it produces. And until the Delhi High Court actually rules on the Sahni matter, the safer route for registration purposes is probably to list a clearly identified human as the author, rather than naming the AI tool as a co-author alongside them.
CONCLUSION
There’s no getting around it. AI has changed how content gets made in India, and the law hasn’t quite caught up. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act gives us a workable starting point, anchoring authorship to the human who sets the creative process in motion rather than to the machine carrying it out, but it leaves real gaps unaddressed. The Ankit Sahni case will probably be remembered as the moment India’s courts were first forced to properly grapple with this question, and however it’s decided will shape how creators, businesses and lawyers deal with AI-assisted work for a long time to come. Until then, anyone using these tools is probably best served by staying genuinely involved in the creative process, keeping a record of that involvement, and treating AI as something that assists a human author rather than something that replaces one.
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WRITTEN BY: MAHFUZA FATHIMA
