Events

Speaker:
Prof. Lawrence Liang, Professor of Law, and Founding Dean, School of Legal and Socio-Political Studies, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Delhi

Moderator:
Dr. Namita Wahi, Senior Fellow, CPR & Founding Director, Land Rights Initiative

This is the tenth in a series of talks on “Legal History” as part of the Land Rights Initiative Speaker Series. This series is part of the Land Rights Initiative’s 10 year anniversary celebrations. 

This event will be held in hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room (Dharma Marg, New Delhi) and online over Zoom. Please register below to attend either in person or via Zoom. Refreshments will be served.

About the talk:
Every technological development disrupts existing power structures and compels a rethinking of authorship, originality, and human expression. The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has created unprecedented challenges for copyright law, particularly in relation to authorship and the legal status of machine-generated works. There is considerable ambivalence globally about whether AI-generated content should be granted copyright protection, and these debates take on unique contours in the Indian context. Recent developments, such as the Indian Copyright Office’s decision to grant joint authorship to an AI-generated work and increasing instances of plagiarism in student assignments created by AI, have brought these questions into sharp focus. Furthermore, the 161st report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee has recommended creating a separate category of rights for AI-generated works and inventions.

This talk situates these developments within the trajectory of Indian copyright law, which has evolved in response to international obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) but with a distinct orientation. The last three decades have been characterized by an expansionist tendency in intellectual property globally. Intellectual property law in India, however, has charted a slightly different path. Using flexibilities within the TRIPS Agreement, lawmakers have retained considerably wide exceptions and limitations within national IP legislation, and courts in India — for instance, in the landmark Delhi University photocopy case — have departed from global jurisprudence to foreground the question of public interest in copyright interpretation.

Through a historical reconstruction of the relationship between copyright and technology in India, this talk will explore how contemporary AI-driven challenges can be understood in light of India’s distinctive copyright philosophy. It will also engage with the deeper philosophical conundrums of authorship, arguing that copyright has been a critical, though often overlooked site, from which to interrogate what it means to be human.

About the speaker:
Dr. Lawrence Liang is Professor of Law, and the Founding Dean of the School of Legal and Socio-Political Studies at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. Prior to this, he was one of the founders of the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, where he worked for fifteen years. His work lies at the intersection of law, culture and technology. Through his academic, policy, advisory, and advocacy work, Professor Liang has profoundly shaped the field of copyright law in India.

Professor Liang has taught, and been a research scholar at several academic institutions including Yale University, Columbia University, Michigan University, and National Law School of India University, Bengaluru (NLSIU). He has written widely on intellectual property, media laws, and has also served as a board member of the International Creative Commons. He is a co-founder of two prominent digital archives pad.ma and indiancine.ma.

In 2017, Professor Liang received the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in recognition of his creative scholarship on law and society. He has also been a recipient of the New India Foundation fellowship (2009). Professor Liang has co-authored Sex, Laws and Videotape: The Public is Watching (with Mayur Suresh and Namita Avriti Malhotra), published by Public Service Broadcasting Trust, and has authored Guide to Open Content Licenses, published by the Piet Zwart Institute in 2004.

Professor Liang holds B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) degrees from NLSIU. He also holds an LL.M. degree from the University of Warwick where he was a Chevening scholar and “Best Outgoing Student”. He obtained his doctorate in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2017.