AI and copyright: Need a nuanced approach

he department for promotion of industryand internal trade (DPIIT)'s working paper on generative Artificial Intelgence (AI) and copyright is framed as a careful balancing act — between innovation and creator rights, access and compensation.

- Ameen Jauhar

But its starting premise merits a closer look. The paper assumes that the rapid and ubiquitous deployment of AI systems is not only inevitable, but inherently desirable. Such an approach could end up determining whose interests are treated as foundational and whose are treated as negotiable.

Much of today’s responsible AI discourse begins with a more basic question: Is AT actually necessary to transform every sector and ecosystem? While AI can certainly deliver efficiencies, the DPIIT paper does not engage with this threshold inquiry. Instead, it treats

large-scale AI deployment as a given, and defines regulation’s role to primarily smoothen that path. This is a policy choice, not an objective reality. When regulation is premised on the inherent desirability ofa technology, safeguards tend to emerge as afterthoughts rather than first principles.