India court orders quick AI‑authorship ruling
The Delhi high court has told India’s Copyright Office to decide within eight weeks whether an AI system can claim sole authorship of an artwork, continuing Stephen Thaler’s global push over AI authorship rights. The case touches a practical business question: if AI outputs lack settled authorship, downstream rights for branding or marketing assets become legally uncertain across jurisdictions. That legal limbo could reduce the commercial value of AI‑generated creative work despite cost savings. (indianexpress.com) (hindustantimes.com)
A judge in Delhi has told India’s Copyright Office to stop sitting on a test case and rule within eight weeks on whether an image made by an artificial intelligence system can get copyright registration. The hearing is now set for April 27, 2026, and the office was told to finish the matter quickly after that date. (barandbench.com) The artwork is called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” and the applicant is Stephen Thaler, a United States researcher who says his system made it without direct human creativity. He wants the machine, not himself, treated as the sole author. (thehindu.com) That sounds abstract until you picture a company trying to use an artificial intelligence image as a logo, package design, or ad campaign. If nobody can say who the legal author is, the asset can look cheap to make and still be risky to own. (indianexpress.com) India’s copyright law already has a line for “computer-generated” works. Section 2(d)(vi) says the author is “the person who causes the work to be created,” which fits old software tools more neatly than modern systems that can spit out finished images on their own. (indiankanoon.org) That is the knot in this case. Thaler says the image was generated autonomously by his system, while examiners have objected that only a natural person can be recognized as an author. (newindianexpress.com) Thaler has been running this argument around the world for years with the same machine, which he calls DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. In court in Delhi, his lawyer said he has taken similar claims to 16 jurisdictions. (indianexpress.com) He has not had much luck in the United States. On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal after lower courts backed the United States Copyright Office’s view that copyright law requires a human author. (supremecourt.gov) The United States appeals court put the point plainly in March 2025. It said Thaler listed the machine as the sole author and never claimed any human authorship in the image, which left the court with a narrow question and an easy answer under current law. (media.cadc.uscourts.gov) India’s case could still land differently because its statute uses the phrase “person who causes the work to be created,” and that wording gives lawyers a place to argue. The Copyright Office now has a deadline to say whether that “person” must be a human creator, can be the owner of the system, or cannot cover a fully autonomous machine output at all. (indiankanoon.org) Whatever the office decides, this will not stay limited to one surreal image. It will shape how Indian law treats artificial intelligence-made illustrations, marketing art, and other commercial creative work at the exact moment companies are trying to use those outputs at scale. (business-standard.com)
