Authorless and Unprotected: The Case for a Sui Generis Copyright Framework for Ai-Generated Journalistic Content in India

Artificial intelligence is no longer merely a tool that assists journalists - it is, in a growing number of newsrooms, the journalist itself. Automated systems now produce financial summaries, election results, sports reports and weather bulletins with little to no human intervention. Yet the Copyright Act, 1957, which governs intellectual property protection in India, offers no coherent answer to the question of who owns content generated by a machine. Its authorship framework, built on the foundational assumption of human creativity, collapses when confronted with outputs that have no identifiable human author in the traditional sense. This article argues that the existing statutory framework is structurally incapable of accommodating AI-generated journalistic content, and that neither judicial interpretation nor piecemeal amendment of section 2(d) can adequately resolve the problem. Drawing on comparative analysis of the United Kingdom’s computer-generated works doctrine under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the evolving position of the United States Copyright Office, this article makes the case for a sui generis protection regime - a purpose-built legal framework that vests ownership in the deploying news organisation, mandates disclosure of AI origin, limits the term of protection, and defaults to the public domain upon expiry.