INTRODUCTION
The Rampant contemporary growth of generative artificial intelligence has raised several dilemmas surrounding copyright violations and interpretation of copyright laws in light of this development. The most prevalent argument that copyright owners contend in litigation across jurisdictions, be it the United States or India, is that AI’s use of copyrighted works to train its generative software amounts to infringement of their legal rights and therefore must fall within the ‘fair use’ or ‘fair dealing’ exceptions envisaged within the law in order to be valid. This very contention is the assumption that is shaping the current jurisprudence around generative AI and copyright violation.
This blog insists that this argument is fundamentally disconcerted, especially in the Indian context. We need not begin with the presumption that use of copyrighted works by generative AI models for training purposes is infringement per se, rather the provisions of the Indian legislation are very much determinative of the scope of the protection it grants. Section 14, of the copyright Act 1957, does not confer a general right over all uses of a work. It specifically grants certain exclusionary rights in terms of reproduction, adaptation, economic exploitation of the work etc. to the copyright owner. Hence, if a use neither reproduces the expression, nor seeks to adapt the work substantially, it falls outside the very domain of copyright protection.
Therefore, use of copyrighted works by generative AI platforms for training their models by extracting statistical patterns rather than copying the ‘expression’ of a copyrighted work, falls outside the scope of s.14. By treating this act as infringement, current debates fail to recognise the explicit distinction between ‘expression’ and ‘information’. This poses a significant risk by expanding the domain of copyright beyond its intended limits. A more cohesive approach would be to adjust this debate in light of idea-expression dichotomy and the statutory limits of s.14, rather than relying on external defences to call this act infringement.