Bonjour,
Happy New Year! Hope you had a nice beginning of the year!
I recently published an article in the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, co-authored with my good friend Luca Schirru. Apart from being a brilliant human being and an exceptionally kind soul (!), Luca is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Citizen Science (INCC), Research Coordinator at the Centre on Knowledge Governance, and a Research Fellow at CiTiP, KU Leuven
Though I must note here that given the rapid pace of AI developments, parts of the piece may already feel dated, and my own understanding of discourse has evolved since we wrote it a few months ago. Nonetheless, the article can provide useful insight into the limitations of contemporary copyright thinking and open up a broader inquiry into what limits our thinking.
Below is the abstract of our piece. Those interested in the piece can check the full piece here. Full Citation: Vyas, Lokesh and Schirru, Luca (2024) “Indian Copyright Law in the Age of GenAI: Knowledge/Power, Patchwork, and Peril,” Indian Journal of Law and Technology: Vol. 20: Iss. 2, Article 2.
DOI: 10.55496/ZGDS8505
Abstract
Isn’t copyright law an analog relic, striving to stay relevant in a digital world and hoping to survive an AI-driven and quantum-coded future? We argue it is. It is a law, born in a world of paper and print, now finding itself (again) patching its foundations to keep pace with generative AI (‘GenAI’). This unruly, still-developing technology not only redefines creative processes but also challenges the very assumptions of authorship, creativity, and copying. While discussions on this technology and copyright law abound, amid all the noise, one question simmers beneath the surface: ‘Is the very way we approach GenAI and copyright already shaped—if not confined—by the limits of discourse, where the language of law now struggles to think beyond itself?’. This question matters because, by the time the AI/copyright debate reached Indian courts, the terrain of legal arguments, policy proposals, and ideological fault lines appears to have been already drawn.
From U.S. lawsuits to European policies, the discourse around GenAI and copyright had crystallised into a vocabulary of ‘fair dealing’, ‘licensing’, and ‘exceptions’, leaving little space to rethink beyond the oft-claimed solutions. We argue this is not merely about finding the correct legal answers anymore. It is about the discourse—the invisible architecture of thought that shapes (and saps) what can be said, imagined, or reformed. In India, one can sense the gravitational pull. Our legal debates echo the voices of distant courtrooms and Brussels backrooms. While the facts may differ, the footnotes may change, the lingo may be localised, the skeleton of arguments remains eerily familiar. There is little space, it appears, left to ask the most fundamental question: ‘What do we want copyright to do for us now?’.
Drawing on Foucault’s ideas of knowledge/power, this paper offers a discourse analysis of the current AI/copyright conversation. We do not aim to critique GenAI reforms per se, but to underscore the discursive boundaries within which such reforms are conceived, debated, and defended. If employing copyright law as the primary tool to deal with Gen-AI-related issues is a trap, the more profound question becomes: ‘Who built it, who benefits from it, and who remains stuck?’. Far from being a jurisprudential vacuum (as the first hearing in ANI v. OpenAI suggested), India’s GenAI debates are already saturated—saturated with inherited ideas, imported frameworks, and invisible hierarchies of thought. This paper is an attempt to lift that lid and let a little fresh air in. After all, it is through the cracks (or perhaps, diagnosing the gap) where the light comes in.
The post is incomplete without acknowledging the many minds that shaped it. We owe a big thank-you to Bharathwaj Ramakrishnan and Aditya Gupta for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts! We are also grateful to Professor Sean Flynn, Director of PIJIP, where both of us have worked (and continue to work) in different capacities. Many of the ideas in the piece were forged, consciously or otherwise, in there. And, as is often the case, several strands of thought in this piece owe their origin to my long conversations with Swaraj Barooah and other members of the SpicyIP family. And of course, a big shout-out to the IJLT team for their useful feedback and much-needed patience! The usual disclaimer applies: any errors, infelicities, or excesses of enthusiasm are entirely ours. After all, as some wise soul once said, mistakes are what make us human.)
Cool. À bientôt!
IP Musings 