Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing at a fast pace, and across industries. The creative and intellectual potential offered by AI is endless.

An important aspect surrounding AI is the evolving Intellectual Property jurisprudence. The existing statutes do not exhaustively cover the legal issues surrounding newer technologies which leaves room for ambiguity in their interpretation.

COPYRIGHT AND AI

The Indian Copyright Act protects only those works that involve some degree of creativity. Further, as per the Act, an author for computer generated works is the person who causes the work to be created.

While creation of work through AI may require some degree of human intervention, what needs to be determined is whether the same is sufficient to term him/ her as the author of the work. Needless to say, the position becomes even more complex if the work created through AI is completely autonomous.

As the jurisprudence on copyrights will take some time to evolve, the ambiguity surrounding the ownership may have severe consequences for a party seeking to monetize the works created through AI.

PATENTS AND AI

 According to the WIPO Technology trend report of 2019, “India is emerging as a new target for patent filing in the field of AI and was ranked eighth for first filings in 2015”.

AI involving software are difficult to patent. The Indian Patent Office follows Computerrelated Inventions (CRIs) guidelines that prohibit computer programmes or algorithms from being patented. The same guidelines apply to technologies based on AI. Thus to obtain protection in an AI based software in India, it may be advisable to describe the hardware components along with the AI algorithms and claim working method of the device that used the AI.

LIABILITY

As AI is able to create independently, there are certain liabilities associated with such creation. AI that analyses a company’s investment strategies, numbers or personalizes customer data for advertisement, might be subject to claims of infringement of copyright, trade secrets, or even data privacy.

CONCLUSION

IP protection of AI brings with it several issues which need immediate attention. Therefore, it is important to create an innovation friendly framework for AI inventions and at the same time determine that such hi–tech inventions do not impact future human innovation and lead to atrophy of human intelligence.