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 »
Court: High Court of Delhi at New Delhi (Division Bench) Date of Decision: 1 July 2026 Case Number: FAO(OS)(COMM) 207/2025 & CM APPL. 79554/2025 Bench: Justice C. Hari Shankar and Justice Om Prakash Shukla BACKGROUND The appellant, ITC Limited, is a company engaged in the hospitality business and is the owner of a chain of
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 »
Supreme Court of India | Decided: 14 March 1977 Civil Appeal No. 967 of 1974 Bench: Hon’ble Mr. Justice Jaswant Singh & Hon’ble Mr. Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer Citation: AIR 1977 SC 1443 | (1977) 2 SCC 820 | [1977] 3 SCR 206 Background The Indian Performing Right Society Limited, universally known in the Indian
Indian Performing Right Society Ltd. v. Eastern India Motion Pictures Association & Ors. Read More »
Supreme Court of India | Decided: 18 August 1978 Civil Appeal No. 1031 of 1973 Bench: Hon’ble Mr. Justice Syed Murtaza Fazal Ali, Hon’ble Mr. Justice Jaswant Singh & Hon’ble Mr. Justice R.S. Pathak Citation: 1978 AIR 1613 | 1979 SCR (1) 218 | (1978) 4 SCC 118 Background R.G. Anand was a playwright, dramatist,
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 »