Subject to contextual demands to the contrary, the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, defines an adaptation of a musical work as being ‘any arrangement or transcription of the work’ per Section 2(a)(iv) and as ‘any use of such work involving its rearrangement or alteration’ 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.
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 ‘better 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’ which states that the authors of ‘literary or artistic works shall enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works’.
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 ‘Towards Developing Non-Conventional Forensic Musicology’, 2026, an essay written by Vidita Hilda Govindachari and Parvathi Menon during a research internship which a colleague and I supervised.
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 ‘to 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’. This was achieved by amending the definition of a ‘musical work’.
Further, a separate stated aim of the 1992 Bill was ‘to 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’. 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.
The 1992 Bill intended ‘to make adequate provision for the special nature of computer programmes as literary works and for the protection of computer-generated works’ having then been ‘under 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’.
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).
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.
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’d suggested in Part 3 of ‘Artificial Intelligence: An Opportunity to Recast Copyright Law’, 2025).
The 1994 amendment targeted 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 legal reason not to do so.
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 ‘adaptation’ 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 ‘machine’-centric). This is supported by the causal authorship link seen in Section 2(d)(vi) which does focus on certain computer-generated works.
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 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.