Law Matters | IN Content Law

. an overview of personality rights law in India weaving together thoughts on law, technology, culture and enforcement mechanisms Draft 1.1 (12 September 2025) (A demonstration of the dulcimer player, an 18th century automaton, said to feature Marie Antoinette; Source: https://youtu.be/nITEU4fsqCU ) The Inanimate and the Fantastic Sometimes anthropomorphic, at other times, decidedly not, automata have long been a source of unease to humans: they have straddled the line between the animate and the inanimate, between human beings and machines, never quite one or the other in myth, in history which may as well be myth, and increasingly, in what we believe to be ‘real’ life not so much through the mechanical automata of yore but through what could be considered to be their contemporary digital counterparts: deepfakes, intangible and deceptive. Automata were as gifts to the powerful not least during the Enlightenment, perhaps reminding recipients that those who presented them possessed cons...

grand plans (not always well thought through), not enough by way of inclusivity, the prioritisation of industry, and a disturbing lack of attention to the risks posed by AI (10 points quickly jotted down based on a copy of the recently-released Draft National Telecom Policy shared with me; the draft policy is available online too ) 1. Although one wouldn't expect this to be in the policy, it's remarkable that one rarely hears talk of basic literacy without which access to digital anything is difficult. There's also no specific mention of enhancing access to the digital world, so to speak, for people with disabilities. 2. The policy seems to cobble together terms which aren't necessarily meaningful in conjunction with the words near it but which sound as though they're at the cutting edge of technology; the oft referenced ‘quantum’ seems to be a favourite. e.g. the aim to "Strengthen the security by adopting quantum resistant cryptography" — what's bein...

Granted that this may have confused no-one else but I've never really understood why the definition of a dramatic work in §2(h) of the Indian Copyright Act includes: "the scenic arrangement or acting form of which is fixed in writing or otherwise but does not include a cinematograph film". Having (obviously) only watched contemporary stage performances (as opposed to historical performances), I'm used to scenic arrangements usually being fairly minimalist artistic works. However, I've recently been learning about Renaissance theatre, and have come to realise that historical scenic arrangements for staged performances were anything but simple or straightforward: they seem to have been analogous to full-fledged sets with special effects in contemporary blockbuster films, often requiring a multitude of trained professionals to put them in place and get them to work. It wasn't just someone hanging a pretty picture in the background.  I imagine it's unlikely th...

. Draft: 14 MAY 2025 This piece considers the interaction of Indian copyright law and artificial intelligence, explores how the law could be amended to make it more compatible with AI, and suggests that AI has simply highlighted age-old concerns which the law has given rise to rather than created a series of novel challenges. * An early draft of this piece was originally published here as ' Artificial Intelligence: The Making or Breaking of Copyright Law ' on April 8, 2025.     Contents 1        Assisted Creativity and Copyrightability . 2 2        Privileged Creators and Trade . 4 3        The Statutory Anticipation of AI . 5 4        Acknowledged Authorship . 8 5        The Data underlying Computational Creativity 6        Rethinking the Scope of Protection . 15     1    ...