India: Copyright

Generative AI can now reproduce a person's face, voice and mannerisms with a fidelity that the average viewer cannot tell apart from reality. What began as novelty content—face-swapped videos, synthetic voice clips circulated for entertainment—has, since 2023, become a live commercial and reputational threat.

Discovering that someone has copied your photograph, article, video, artwork, music or other original work and published it without permission can raise an immediate question: what is copyright violation, and what can you actually do about it?

Generative AI can now assist with campaign concepts, generate images and videos, alter backgrounds and styling, create advertising copy, and produce market-specific versions of a campaign at remarkable speed. For fashion brands operating across multiple markets, the commercial attraction is obvious: more content, faster production and greater localization

When a generative tool can produce a product's shape, packaging, or interface in seconds, the older assumptions behind design law start to strain. This piece asks who counts as the author or applicant when a human prompt and a machine's output are combined, what that combination does to novelty searches and disclosure risk, how ownership is actually allocated in AI platform contracts, and why a design registration is refused, or granted, in ways that copyright and patent protection are not.

When an artificial intelligence system is trained on copyrighted news content, and later answers a user’s question using what it learned, has the law been broken? On 24th July 2026, the Delhi High Court answered that question, at least for now. In ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC, Justice Amit Bansal declined to grant an interim injunction against OpenAI, holding, on a prima facie, interim stage view, that the company’s use of ANI’s news content to train its large language models (“LLMs”) falls within the fair dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957

Indian courts have, in recent times, increasingly been confronted with novel legal questions arising from the intersection of AI-generated outputs and the rights that may subsist in, or be affected by, such outputs.

In ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC, CS(COMM) 1028/2024, the Delhi High Court delivered a significant judgment on the intersection of copyright law and Generative Artificial Intelligence. Deciding an application for interim injunction, the Court examined questions concerning the use of copyrighted works for training Large Language Models (LLMs), the scope of copyright infringement arising from AI-generated outputs, the applicability of the fair dealing exception under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957, and the territorial jurisdiction of Indian courts over AI developers operating through servers located overseas.

In Aroha Labs Pte Ltd. v. Prem Dharmani1, the Karnataka High Court considered whether an Indian court could grant interim reliefs under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (the "Arbitration Act") in respect of an arbitration governed by Singapore law and seated in Singapore.

The Supreme Court of Japan recently rejected copyright protection to a children’s chair while laying down the test of “configurations essential for Function”. This blog critically examines the Judgement and expounds on its impact on the existing consumer brands and design houses.