Book

Description

Who owns a work made by nobody? Generative AI now produces millions of images, passages of text, and pieces of music every day — output that sits uneasily inside a legal doctrine built for centuries on a single premise: that copyright protects the fruits of a human mind. Beyond Human Authorship is a doctrinal and comparative study of how India, the European Union, and the United States are each answering this question — partially, provisionally, and often in contradiction with one another. Drawing on landmark cases including Thaler v. Perlmutter, the ongoing ANI Media v. OpenAI litigation in the Delhi High Court, Zarya of the Dawn, and the Czech ruling in S.S. v. Taubel Legal — alongside Chinese jurisprudence on the "human-control" standard — this book traces where these three major regimes converge, where they diverge, and where all three fall structurally short. The book identifies five unresolved gaps common to every jurisdiction studied: the absence of a workable threshold for human creativity, the lack of scalable infrastructure for reserving rights over training data, a persistent "value gap" between AI's use of creative works and compensation for their creators, the absence of any protection for fully AI-generated output, and the risk of regulatory arbitrage across borders. In response, it proposes an original five-pillar reform framework — authorship clarity, training-data governance, remuneration, sui generis protection, and international harmonisation — offering a coherent path forward rooted in existing WIPO harmonisation efforts. Rigorous, timely, and grounded in 38 carefully selected sources spanning statute, case law, and policy through mid-2026, Beyond Human Authorship is essential reading for scholars, legal practitioners, policymakers, and technologists grappling with one of intellectual property law's most urgent open questions.