INSIGHTS

Introduction : Generative AI has made it possible to copy an artistic style in seconds. When a person enters ‘Warli-style painting’ into an image generator they get an image of a white-line scene of a village set against a terracotta background, with no one checking with the Warli community or paying them for the use of their style. Can Indian law be of any help in this respect? The answer is no, at least for now. To intensify the problem, we have two newly developed events.

Introduction : Consider a Company that brings in a photographer and videographer for its yearly conference, has a licensed band play in the evening and later uses the footage for a recruitment video, regional advertisement and investor presentation. Each step seems to be a habit. But each raises a question that is rarely answered in writing at the time: who owns the content, who let the music in, who agreed to the later uses ? Rarely is the answer a single one. The content o

Introduction : Corporate training materials, such as training videos, employee manuals, e-learning modules, and interactive simulations, require a substantial investment of time, money, and intellectual resources. As organisations continue to convert their training systems into digital formats and use materials in decentralized office locations and online learning management systems, it becomes important to identify who owns the rights to such activities. The complexity arise

Introduction : Imagine a brand commissions a photographer for a weekend to shoot its new product range. The images are further uploaded to the brand’s website. Six months later, the same photographs eventually appear on third-party e-commerce platforms, in paid Instagram advertisements, in a distributor’s brochure and in a new agency’s pitch deck. No one appears to have checked whether the original arrangement permitted any of these uses. In e-commerce, a photograph rarely r

Introduction : Imagine a company that wants to bring back a TV advertisement that it ran ten years ago. However, the public still remembers that the agency finished its work long ago and the original video is sitting safely in the company’s archive. On the face of it nothing could be easier than putting it back on air. But a closer look at the ad shows the problem. The song was licensed only for a fixed period, and that period may have ended years ago. The model signed a rele

Introduction : The rapid growth of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) has raised an important copyright question: can copyrighted works be used for training AI models without obtaining permission from their owners? The Delhi High Court recently dealt with this issue in ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC. ANI alleged that OpenAI had used its copyrighted news content for training the Large Language Models (“LLMs”) underlying ChatGPT without authorisation. At the int

Introduction : Digital Content has become an important commercial asset that can be copied, reposted, and monetized by others very easily. Businesses use photographs, promotional videos, website articles, and advertisements to establish their identity and attract customers. Copyright owners therefore rely on takedown notices to seek removal of infringing content. Conversely, businesses whose content is removed may need to establish that their use was authorised or legally per

Introduction : Over the past ten years, India's digital music market has grown exponentially thanks to the quick development of streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. While these platforms have changed music access and made it possible for Indian content to be released globally, they have also brought up a basic legal issue: can India's current copyright structure sufficiently guarantee artists in the streaming economy get fair compensation?The India

Introduction : Imagine that you receive a new client who seeks to bring an action for copyright infringement. As you learn more about the case, you realise that your client is ‘morally’ aggrieved or rather, ‘algorithmically disappointed’ and legally injured because a work it created after hours of painstaking neural-network processes involving training, association formation, perturbation, monitoring, stabilisation, and output generation has been infringed. Sounds absurd? Per

Introduction : Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly reliant on vast amounts of human generated content. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on data sets of books, articles and other written materials. This allows the AI to learn patterns of information and create responses, but it raises important copyright issues. When the AI learns from a copyrighted work, is that unlawful copying? This question was considered by the United States District Court for the Norther

Introduction : The concept of “Convenience" is too often mistaken for Compliance”. In fact, it is because of rapid development in information technology that we see the digital world filled with great opportunities ranging from creation of highly realistic content to various processes of content manipulation. The mere fact of having access to the digital content does not mean that it is legally okay to use it or commercially exploit it. As a result, the fast-forward movement

Introduction : A decade back, turning a rough sketch into a set of designs that looked real usually took weeks. One person would draw and then the group would debate the options. After that, a maker or a renderer would turn the chosen idea into a form a client could actually review and now the clock has changed and the Generative tools can cut that wait fast as With one text prompt, an AI aided CAD add on, a parametric system, or an image generator may spit out many possible

Introduction : Digital access has transformed the relationship between copyright and public knowledge. Academic articles, books, films, music and software can be distributed globally at minimal cost through online platforms. The same infrastructure can also enable systematic reproduction and dissemination of copyrighted works without authorisation. The legal difficulty is most acute where a platform presents itself as a public-access project but is built around the unauthoris

Introduction : Online platforms frequently make content available without storing the relevant file on their own servers. A website may embed a video hosted elsewhere, display an image through an external URL, provide a hyperlink to an infringing page or redirect users to a third-party site. These technical arrangements complicate copyright liability because the platform may facilitate access without making a conventional copy of the work. The legal issue is whether such faci

Introduction : Software is often described as a technical product, but copyright law approaches it through its expressive form. A computer programme is made up of instructions written in source code, translated into object code and executed by a computer to produce a result. The fact that code performs a functional operation does not remove it from copyright protection. The legal question is whether the code constitutes an original expression fixed in a legally recognisable f

Introduction : YouTube was the main platform for content creation in India before the COVID-19 blackout. However, the extended quarantine period caused widespread boredom among some segments of the populace, which led many to embrace content creation on new social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, turning what had previously been a recreational activity into a feasible part-time or full-time career. The Copyright Act of 1957 must be immediately amended to protect the

Introduction : On AO3 right now, there are thousands of stories being built around Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, and half the Marvel roster, written by fans who own none of the source material. On Wattpad, Indian readers do the same thing with Chulbul Pandey from Dabangg, Bajirao from Bajirao Mastani, and the extended universe of Yash Raj Films. Both sets of writers are doing something identical: borrowing a character someone else invented and taking it som

Introduction : Imagine that there is a theft of your watch which cost you a fortune, so what will one do, he can go to police to register an FIR. Here the word theft is only used for tangible assets. So what will happen to the assets which are intangible? Suppose you made a very beautiful painting using your thought process, investing your time and money and someone took out a photo of that painting and recreated it in the same way and sold it without your consent. Basically,

Introduction : A prominent debate among the legal circles today is the recognition of AI-authorship and copyright infringements, especially in the context of artworks. The use of ChatGPT to create Ghibli-style images has fueled these concerns, with many people questioning the legal and ethical consequences. The intersection of AI and copyright policies and the corresponding ownership titles helps us reflect on the fundamental roots of the present legislative framework and the

Introduction : What if you could witness the famous Indian victory over the ‘unbeatable’ West Indies in the 1983 World Cup final in a completely different way? Ultra-High-Definition streaming quality, multi-angle synthetic replays, virtual camera movements that never existed, and commentary from your favourite modern-day commentators. Surely an exciting prospect, right? Synthetic Broadcast Replays, a technological extension of ‘synthetic broadcasts’ originated in Australia in