ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AUTHORSHIP AND COPYRIGHT OWNERSHIP IN INDIA: REASSESSING HUMAN CREATIVITY IN THE AGE OF GENERATIVE TOOLS

Artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of generating text, images, music, software and other expressive outputs that appear original, valuable and commercially usable. This development has created a fundamental copyright question: can artificial intelligence itself be treated as an author or owner of intellectual property under existing copyright law? This paper examines the issue with particular reference to Indian copyright law, comparative judicial developments and the human authorship requirement. It argues that, under the present legal framework, artificial intelligence cannot be granted copyright ownership because it lacks legal personality, volition and statutory recognition as an author. However, the paper also recognises that AI-generated and AI assisted works may qualify for protection where sufficient human creative contribution is present. The study analyses the Copyright Act, 1957, the treatment of computer-generated works, the idea-expression distinction, originality, fixation, moral rights, and leading cases on non-human authorship and machine-generated outputs. It further proposes a “significant human input” standard to distinguish protectable human- guided outputs from autonomous machine-generated works. The paper concludes that India does not presently require recognition of AI as an author, but it urgently requires clearer statutory guidance on ownership, disclosure, attribution, licensing and liability in AI-generated content.