Who owns an AI-generated film? Kerala's CM wants the law rewritten to answer it
Kerala's chief minister asked for piracy and deepfake laws, not an AI ownership rule. India's Registrar of Copyrights has already named the human who causes an AI work as its author, though that order covers one artwork, not a film.
Who owns an AI-generated film in India? Headlines pinned that question on Kerala's new Chief Minister, V D Satheesan, but his 11 September speech in Kochi asked for something else: tougher laws on film piracy and on AI deepfakes, prompted partly by a viral fake of him dancing. Copyright is a Union subject anyway, so no state government can rewrite the 1957 Act that decides ownership.
The more useful answer came on 31 August, when India's Registrar of Copyrights rejected Stephen Thaler's bid to name his AI system DABUS as the author of an image. The Registrar still found the image original, and held that the author of a computer-generated work is the person who causes it to be created. For films, the Act already names the producer, the person who takes the initiative and the responsibility, as author. On our reading, that is friendlier to AI-assisted work than the US, where Thaler lost for good in March and prompts alone are generally not enough.
The limits matter. The order covers one artwork, not a film, it can still be challenged, and the government committee paper on AI authorship has not been published. In practice, keep a paper trail on every AI-assisted project: a human-written script, a shot log of what was generated, with which tool and why, your edit decisions, and each tool's terms as they stood on the day you used them.
Source: PTI; India's Registrar of Copyrights order, 31 Aug 2026.
