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Particularly in relation to music, without looking closely at authorisation for adaptation: <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Copyright owners have the right to adapt substantial parts of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works they own per Section 14(a)(vi) and, per Section 14(a)(vii), to exercise the rights in the copyright bundle described in Sections 14(a)(i) to (vi) in respect of such adaptations while those who own the copyright in sound recordings have the right to make other sound recordings embodying substantial parts of those they own per Section 14(e)(i) of the 1957 Indian Copyright Act. Leaving aside debates relating to the legitimacy of using protected content to train AI for the moment, subject to contextual demands to the contrary, the 1957 Copyright Act defines an adaptation of a musical work as being \u2018any arrangement or transcription of the work\u2019 per Section 2(a)(iv) and as \u2018any use of such work involving its rearrangement or alteration\u2019 per Section 2(a)(v). The former provision applies specifically to musical works while the latter, introduced to the statute in 1994, applies to all works. A plain reading of the provisions seems to indicate that Section 2(a)(iv) contemplates adaptations as artifacts while Section 2(a)(v) imagines them as processes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n Bill No. 105 of 1992 explains the rationale underlying the introduction of the then-proposed provision which was to become Section 2(a)(v) through an amendment made to the 1957 Act in 1994: it was intended to \u2018better ensure full protection of the author’s exclusive right of authorising arrangements and other alterations of his works as envisaged by article 12 of the Berne Convention\u2019 which states that the authors of \u2018literary or artistic works shall enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n The statute, however, did not come to define the musicological terms it borrowed and, to date, there is no established body of case law which can be relied on to define statutory terms although academic attempts have been made to do so such as in \u2018Towards Developing Non-Conventional Forensic Musicology<\/a>\u2019, 2026, an essay written by Vidita Hilda Govindachari and Parvathi Menon during a research internship which a colleague and I supervised.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n This 1994 amendment to the 1957 Act is interesting in that it explicitly aimed to decolonise Indian law in relation to musical works. The 1992 Bill which underlies it stated that one of its aims was \u2018to extend effective copyright protection to the composers of Indian music, which is not available to them under the existing law which presupposes a system of notation as used in Western music\u2019. This was achieved by amending the definition of a \u2018musical work\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n Further, a separate stated aim of the 1992 Bill was \u2018to extend protection to all performers by means of a special right, to be known as the “performer’s right”, in respect of the making of sound recordings or visual recordings of their live performances, and of certain related acts\u2019. While not directly linked to musical works alone, this proposal which made its way into the statute in due course as a new right has proven to be particularly sensitive to Indian classical music which is distinguished by oral transmission and iterative improvisation during performance, blurring the line between composer and performer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n Alongside these musicological shifts, the 1992 Bill also sought to address rapid technological changes. The 1992 Bill intended \u2018to make adequate provision for the special nature of computer programmes as literary works and for the protection of computer-generated works\u2019 having then been \u2018under comprehensive review of the Government for some time, taking into account the difficulties expressed by different groups of copyright owners and others, the experience gained from the administration of the existing law and the situation created by various technological developments that have taken place\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n The text of the then-existing Section 2(d)(vi) of the 1957 Act was substituted in 1994: since then, the person who causes any computer-generated literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work to be created has come to be its author; the statute does not specify that the person must be a natural person and it establishes a causal link between creation and authorship in relation to computer-generated works as opposed to a clear sponsorship link which is seen in the case of sound recordings and cinematograph films in Section 2(d)(v) of the statute although the sponsorship link is not dependent on finances alone: Section 2(uu) defines a ‘producer’ as ‘in relation to a cinematograph film or sound recording’ as the ‘person who takes the initiative <\/span>and responsibility for making the work’. (Per Section 3(42) of the 1897 General Clauses Act, a person includes ‘any company or association or body of individuals, whether <\/span>incorporated or not’.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n The 1957 Act does not lay down a hierarchical relationship between Sections 2(d)(v) and (vi), with the result that it does not provide clear guidance on who would be considered the author should these two provisions, the former dealing with sound recordings and cinematograph films and the latter with computer-generated LDMA works, collide. Notably, the former is widely considered to recognise corporate authorship i.e. the producers of sound recordings and cinematograph films.\u00a0(To take one example, if an AI model is used by a user to generate a notated sound recording, it isn’t clear if the ‘author’ would be the AI user who prompted and thereby caused the score to be created per Section 2(d)(vi) of the 1957 Act or the platform\/producer who financed the generation of the sound recording Section 2(d)(v) assuming the AI model was free to use or how the two works would interact with each other in copyright terms. Factor in that the calculus could change if a subscription fee were charged of the user, which could arguably make the user the producer of the sound recording, and that the copyright threshold for sound recordings refers to non-infringement rather than to originality in Section 13 although originality is necessary for the score to be copyrightable.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n There appears to be no reason to believe that statutory alignment with technological progress which came into being in the 1990s had GenAI in mind. However, it would appear that the provisions which are now in place in the 1957 Act are not incompatible with GenAI (as I\u2019d suggested in Part 3 of <\/span>\u2018Artificial Intelligence: An Opportunity to Recast Copyright Law\u2019<\/span><\/a>, 2025).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n The 1994 amendment targetted software and digital recordings, it referred to computer-generated works and its underlying philosophical shift could be transposed to AI; there appears to be no jurisprudential barrier to this application particularly when a user’s specific prompting realises a clear legal intent to command a distinct, non-fungible output despite the technical unpredictability inherent in the AI’s generation process.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n Although aligning the statute with GenAI requires constructive interpretation, it is not only provisions which explicitly refer to computer-generated works which support the hypothesis that the 1957 Act is not incompatible with new technologies. Looping back to the overarching, residuary definition of \u2018adaptation\u2019 proposal which was to become Section 2(a)(v) of the statute, the acknowledgement of adaptation as process rather than as mere artifact arguably anticipates the creation of works using GenAI whether that creativity is compositional (and human-centric) or merely generative (and \u2018machine\u2019-centric). This is supported by the causal authorship link seen in Section 2(d)(vi) which does focus on certain computer-generated works.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n <\/p>\n As such, it appears that the statute provides an opportunity to assess modes of authorship and the consequent legitimacy of potential or actual copyright protection by applying a process-based understanding of adaptations and, for that matter, creation per se<\/i> linked to the process-driven causality of the creation of works rather than one which is merely linked to a superficial view of the tools used for creation. <\/p>\n\n
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