A Reflection upon the Digital Copyright Laws in India

Abstract

In this digital age, where everything is available at one place, to everyone, at all times, the vulnerability of copyrighted works has increased manifold. With high speed internet, peer-to-peer networks, excellent technologies facilitating rapid reproduction without loss of quality, fast and easy dissemination and high density storage devises, the copyright violation is becoming an effortless task. Though the traditional notion of copyright still remains the same i.e., protection from piracy, however, the mode of operation has and is undergoing a systematic change in the wake of technological development. The performance of rights in typical analogous copyright set-up is extremely different from the performance of such rights at digital platform. Further, ubiquity of internet coupled with various technical obstacles has made it extremely difficult for copyright holder to exactly locate and implicate the infringer/s, which in many cases may be located in different parts of the world. Now with the advent of artificial intelligence, creation of copyright subject matter by machines with very less or no human intervention is potentially raising question as to the authorship of such works. It is clear from the history of copyright laws that it has always responded in affirmation to the technological advancements by amending the existing systems to keep in tune with the changes taking place and to combat the challenges threatening its smooth and effective functioning. In this backdrop, this article presents an analysis of the phenomenal impact of digital technologies over copyright regime, its advantages and disadvantages, the protection of rights of copyright holder and the liabilities of intermediaries etc. Further, this article shall also explore the digital copyright laws available in India to combat the myriad challenges posed by the ever advancing digital technology and to find out their sufficiency.