Delhi HC sets 8‑week AI copyright deadline

India’s copyright office now has a court-set clock on one of the strangest questions in modern law: if a machine makes a picture, who gets to be called the author. On April 9, 2026, Justice Tushar Rao Gedela of the Delhi High Court told the Registrar of Copyrights to decide Stephen Thaler’s application within eight weeks of a hearing fixed for April 27, 2026. (thehindu.com) The work at the center of the fight is an image called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Thaler says it was generated autonomously by his artificial intelligence system DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. (indianexpress.com) Thaler filed the Indian copyright application in 2022, and the Copyright Office raised the basic objection most copyright systems start with: an author is usually understood to be a human being. His court petition asked the office to stop sitting on the file and make a decision. (newindianexpress.com) India’s law has one line that makes this case harder than it would be in many countries. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 says that for a “computer-generated” literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work, the author is “the person who causes the work to be created.” (indiankanoon.org) That sentence was written long before image generators became consumer tools, and it reads like a rule for a camera timer or an automated design program. Thaler’s argument is that this clause can cover work made by an artificial intelligence system even if no human hand drew the final image. (livemint.com) His harder problem is that he has often framed these cases to say the machine itself is the real creator. In the United States, courts rejected that approach, and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled on March 18, 2025 that the Copyright Act requires human authorship for a work to be registered. (media.cadc.uscourts.gov) That American fight effectively ended on March 2, 2026, when the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear Thaler’s appeal. The Delhi case is different because India’s statute explicitly mentions “computer-generated” works, which gives Thaler a line of text he never had in the United States. (hklaw.com) The immediate question before the Indian authorities is narrower than “can artificial intelligence own copyright.” The office can still decide that even if the image was machine-generated, the legally recognized author must be the human who set the process in motion, not DABUS itself. (barandbench.com) That distinction sounds technical until money enters the room. If the office says the operator “caused the work to be created,” companies using generated images will have a clearer path to licensing, assignments, and infringement claims, but they will also need records showing who chose the system, the inputs, and the final output. (anandandanand.com) If the office says no copyright exists when human creative control is too thin, that lands in a different place. It would mean some machine-made images in India may be usable by others without the exclusive rights that usually come with a registered artistic work. (indianexpress.com) The court did not answer any of that on April 9. It did something more practical: it forced a bureaucracy to stop treating a test case like a file that can wait another year. (business-standard.com) By late June 2026, if the eight-week clock runs from the April 27 hearing, India should have its first real administrative answer on whether a machine-made artwork fits inside a copyright law written in 1957 and amended for a much earlier computer age. Whatever the Copyright Office says next will likely be read far beyond one surreal image and one inventor’s long-running legal experiment. (thehindu.com)