How Generative AI Is Pushing India's Designs Act To Its Breaking Point

Generative AI is exposing critical deficiencies in India’s Designs Act 2000, creating a legal vacuum where AI-generated fashion designs lack protection due to the absence of human authorship and physical manifestation, yet may simultaneously infringe on existing rights through data training. This situation highlights a disconnect between outdated legislation, which assumes manual creation and physical articles, and modern digital practices that produce virtual goods and synthetic patterns without clear ownership structures. The article argues for specific legislative amendments to address these gaps, proposing a hybrid approach to determine proprietorship that combines a "modicum of creativity" test with a causation rule for directing AI use. Additionally, it recommends updating infringement provisions to regulate the mass scraping of protected design databases for training generative models, introducing opt-out mechanisms similar to emerging international standards to prevent unauthorized algorithmic imitation. This discourse is highly relevant to open data because it challenges the fundamental assumptions of how intellectual property rights interact with the large-scale collection and use of visual datasets. As the fashion industry relies on massive open datasets to train AI, the lack of clear rules regarding data scraping and training raises significant questions about the legality of using publicly available or licensed design corpora without explicit consent, mirroring the broader open data controversies seen in copyright litigation.

Source: livelaw.in
Published on 2026-10-19

How Generative AI Is Pushing India's Designs Act To Its Breaking Point

Related news