In-depth analytical articles on Indian Copyright law including prosecution,enforcement, statutory interpretation and case developments.
Every copyright must, at the moment it comes into existence, vest in someone. The question of who that person is who holds the copyright from the instant the work is created, before any assignment, any licensing arrangement or any commercial transaction has taken place is the question of first ownership. It is a question of
First Ownership of Copyright in India – Section 17 and Its Exceptions Read More »
Copyright is infringed by copying, and copying is rarely admitted. A plaintiff who finds that a film, a serial, a song or a book resembles his own work must prove, without the benefit of a confession, that the resemblance is the product of borrowing and that what was borrowed is something the law protects. The
Substantial Similarity in Indian Copyright Law: The Test for Determining Infringement Read More »
Every copyright dispute in India eventually returns to a single question: what exactly did the plaintiff own, and what did the defendant take? The answer almost never lies in the whole work. It lies in the line the law draws between an idea, which anyone may use, and the particular way an author has expressed
Idea-Expression Dichotomy in Indian Copyright Law: What Is Protected and What Is Not? Read More »
Copyright in architectural works occupies a distinctive and doctrinally unusual position within Indian intellectual property law a position shaped as much by the physical permanence of buildings and their entanglement with property rights, urban development and public function, as by the ordinary principles of authorial protection that govern paintings, sculptures and literary works. A building
Copyright in Architectural works under Indian law Read More »
The digital transformation of education represents one of the most significant shifts in the organization of knowledge transmission that human society has undergone since the invention of the printing press. Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs delivered through platforms like Coursera, edX, NPTEL, Swayam and their many competitors, have made it possible for a student in
Copyright in E-Learning, MOOCs and Online Education Content in India Read More »
The commercialization of photographic content through stock photography libraries and image licensing platforms represents one of the most mature and commercially sophisticated applications of copyright licensing in the creative economy. What began as physical libraries of transparencies and prints, laboriously cataloged and licensed through analogue processes, has evolved into a global digital industry worth billions
Copyright in Stock Photography and Image-Licensing Platforms in India Read More »
Fashion sits at an uncomfortable intersection in intellectual property law. It is simultaneously one of the most creative and culturally significant industries in the global economy and one of the least comprehensively protected by the traditional frameworks of intellectual property. The tension is well known and widely debated: fashion design combines artistic expression with functional
Copyright Protection for Fashion and Textile Design in India Read More »
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence as a practical tool for creative production has forced copyright law to confront a question it was never designed to answer: at what point does a work cease to be the product of human creative expression and become the output of a machine? This question matters enormously, for the
AI-Assisted vs. Fully AI-Generated Works – Where Indian Copyright Law Draws the Line Read More »
Few questions in intellectual property law generate as much commercial consequence and as little settled doctrine as the protection of fictional characters. A memorable character the hero of a beloved video game franchise, the protagonist of a globally distributed film series, the mascot of a decades-old animated property may be worth billions of dollars in
Copyright Protection for Video Game Characters and Fictional Personas in India Read More »
A poem written by ChatGPT. A painting produced by Midjourney from a two-line prompt. A news article drafted by a large language model trained on millions of copyrighted sources. A film score composed entirely by an algorithmic system without a human composer touching an instrument. These are not hypothetical scenarios from a speculative future; they
AI-Generated Content and Copyright in India – Who Is the Author? Read More »