AI can create original work but can’t be its author: India’s copyright ruling explained
The law, it said, “distinguishes between the technological mechanism through which the output is generated and the legally recognised person to whom authorship is attributed”.
The decision comes months after the Delhi High Court in April had directed the Office to decide on whether an AI system can claim sole authorship over a work created using the system.
The artwork was generated by DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, an AI system developed by Thaler. The authorship, in the application, was solely attributed to DABUS.
Thaler, through his advocate Ankit Sahni, had argued that once DABUS was configured and trained through visual and linguistic inputs, the final artwork was generated through the AI’s internal operational process without real-time human intervention and any text prompt.
Thaler argued that he wanted DABUS to be attributed as the sole author, not to give the AI system legal personality or independent enforceable rights, but to accurately record how the artwork was created.
Rejecting Thaler’s application, it said, “The fact that a system operates autonomously after being configured does not alter the identity of the person responsible for bringing the work into existence. Autonomy in execution is not synonymous with conception of a work.”
“A system may independently execute computational processes after activation, yet those processes continue to operate within the architecture, objectives, parameters, training methodology and operational rules established by the person who conceived and configured the system.
“It will have a huge impact on all creative sectors – media, entertainment, music, publishing, broadcasting, games etc., — as almost all large entities are using AI extensively to produce content,” he said.
In other countries such as the United Kingdom and Ireland, authorship is clearly associated with the human persona, or with the person who made the necessary arrangements for a computer-generated work.
In 2019, a Chinese court ruled in favour of Tencent’s ownership over content written by its AI-writing assistant Dreamwriter.
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