Ownership of Copyrighted Material Created by Artificial Intelligence: An Indian Law Perspective

The rationale behind Indian copyright law is utilitarian: writers are given a little monopoly to encourage the creation of unique, expressive works that will benefit society as a whole. In the very near future, this philosophy may need to be applied to non-human, machine writers. As more and more literary, musical, and artistic works are produced by software programmes, it seems that machine-authored works may soon become the norm rather than the exception. The proliferation of computer-generated works creates intriguing and innovative copyrightability issues, but the literature yet ignores a fundamental query: Does granting copyright protection to machine-authored works advance or undermine the goal of copyright law? This Comment adds a number of new insights to the field of copyright law. First, it raises basic concerns about how the current copyright regime would be applied to the numerous contributors to machine-authored works and highlights the difficulties in doing so, especially in determining the true author of the work. Second, it assesses whether the economic incentive theory should be used to determine if the human author of machine-authored works should be given rights. It contends that rigid implementation of copyright law results in a contribution/rights contradiction since the one who made the greatest contribution to the development of the work—its author—is not the person to whom copyright protection should be granted. The Comment concludes by arguing that it would be improper from a social policy viewpoint to extend protection to totally autonomous computer-generated works since copyrights provide nothing in the way of financial incentives to the actors engaged in producing machine-authored works.