This piece of the article is authored by: Deepak Patel, a student at NLU, Delhi.
Introduction
The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence in legal practice has created a new question for copyright law in India: can courtroom arguments drafted with AI assistance qualify as original literary works? The issue is important because courtroom arguments are often drafted in written form, refined through iterations, and used in professional advocacy before courts and tribunals. Yet, despite their textual form, they are primarily functional legal instruments designed to persuade, not literary compositions created for their own expressive value.
From an Indian perspective, the answer depends on the interaction between the Copyright Act, 1957 and the doctrines of originality, authorship, and idea-expression distinction. Section 13 protects original literary works, while Section 2(o) defines “literary work” broadly enough to include writing in digital or textual form. Section 2(d)(vi) is also relevant because it states that for a computer-generated work, the author is the person who causes the work to be created. However, these provisions do not automatically make AI-generated courtroom arguments copyrightable. The real issue remains whether the final text reflects sufficient human creativity and independent expression to satisfy Indian originality standards.
The starting point is Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957, which provides protection to original literary works. Courtroom arguments, especially written submissions, may initially appear to fall within the broad scope of “literary work” under Section 2(o), since that definition includes works expressed in writing and computer programs. However, protection under the Act is not triggered by form alone. A work must also be original, and the Indian judiciary has consistently insisted that originality is a substantive requirement, not a mere formality.
Section 2(d)(vi) is particularly significant in the AI context because it treats the author of a computer-generated work as the person who causes the work to be created. This provision may seem helpful where a lawyer uses AI to draft a courtroom argument. Yet the statutory wording does not resolve the deeper question of whether the resulting text is sufficiently original or expressive to be protected in the first place. In other words, causation may identify an author, but it does not create copyright where the underlying text is merely functional.[8][5]
Indian law also remains tied to the principle that copyright does not protect ideas, procedures, systems, or methods. This principle becomes highly relevant for legal arguments because advocacy is built upon reasoning, analysis, and application of law. As a result, a courtroom submission that primarily consists of factual narration, statutory interpretation, and legal proposition may not qualify as protectable expression unless it contains substantial original literary drafting.
The most important limitation on copyrightability is originality. The Supreme Court in Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak rejected the old “sweat of the brow” standard and held that copyright protection requires a modicum of creativity, skill, and judgment. This case is central to any discussion of AI-generated legal text in India because it makes clear that effort alone is not enough. A lawyer may spend hours working with AI tools, but if the final courtroom argument is largely derivative, formulaic, or routine, copyright protection will still be doubtful.
Courtroom arguments generated through AI are often drafted to be accurate, persuasive, and efficient. They may contain legal citations, factual summaries, and doctrinal analysis, but these are not enough by themselves to satisfy originality. The lawyer’s role may be limited to selecting prompts, editing machine-generated sentences, and arranging standard legal propositions. That kind of input may show professional effort, but it does not necessarily amount to independent literary creativity.
This is where the limitation becomes especially clear. A written legal argument can be original in a professional sense without being original in the copyright sense. Indian copyright law protects the specific expression of ideas, not the underlying legal reasoning or the simple assembly of authorities. Therefore, if AI is used mainly as a drafting assistant and the lawyer makes only minimal changes, the final document is unlikely to qualify as an original literary work under Section 13.
Human authorship and AI assistance
A second major limitation is the requirement of meaningful human authorship. Under Indian law, the author of a computer-generated work is the person who causes the work to be created, as stated in Section 2(d)(vi). But this does not mean every AI-assisted document automatically becomes protected. The lawyer who prompts the AI may be the causal actor, yet copyright still depends on whether the human contribution is itself expressive and original.
This distinction is particularly important in courtroom advocacy because the role of AI may vary widely. In some cases, AI may only help with research, case organization, or stylistic polishing. In others, it may generate large sections of the final argument with little human intervention. The more autonomous the machine’s contribution, the weaker the claim that the lawyer is the real author of the expression. Indian copyright law is unlikely to stretch authorship so far as to treat a mostly machine-generated legal brief as the fully protected literary work of the human user.
Recent Indian commentary on AI and copyright also suggests that courts and scholars are moving toward a “significant human input” approach, under which protection would attach only where the human being exercised substantial creative control over the final output. That approach fits the current statutory structure better than a blanket rule of ownership. It preserves the possibility of protection for AI-assisted work, but only where the human contribution is sufficiently creative and specific.
Functional nature of courtroom arguments
Courtroom arguments are also limited by their inherently functional nature. Their purpose is not aesthetic; it is persuasive and procedural. They are designed to convince a judge or tribunal, apply law to facts, and support a legal position. Much of the text in a courtroom argument is therefore utilitarian. It may contain headings, legal propositions, quotations from statutes, citations of precedent, and structured reasoning, but these elements are tools of advocacy rather than literary artistry.
This functional character makes courtroom arguments difficult to protect as literary works. Copyright law is not intended to grant exclusive rights over standard legal forms or routine advocacy language. If such texts were freely monopolized, lawyers might end up controlling common arguments, standard phrasing, or frequently used analytical structures. That would be inconsistent with the purpose of copyright, which is to protect expressive creation while leaving methods, ideas, and functional language in the public domain.
The issue becomes sharper when AI is used to generate common forms of legal drafting. Many AI tools can now produce opening statements, case summaries, issue lists, and argument outlines in seconds. Yet these outputs often rely on conventional legal language. If the final text remains close to a template, it is unlikely to possess the literary individuality required for copyright protection. From the Indian standpoint, courtroom arguments generated in this way are better understood as professional work product than as protectable literary works.
The most relevant Indian case remains Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, which established the modern originality standard. The importance of this decision is that it separates legal protection from mechanical effort. In the AI context, that distinction is decisive. A lawyer may use AI to accelerate drafting, but copyright will not arise merely because the process was labor-intensive. There must be identifiable original expression contributed by a human author.
The emerging Indian copyright literature on AI-generated content also emphasizes that the Copyright Act, 1957 lacks a specific provision directly dealing with AI-authored legal texts. This gap creates uncertainty, but it does not mean that all AI-generated courtroom arguments are automatically protected. On the contrary, the existing framework points toward caution. Indian scholars have noted that the originality requirement, the idea-expression divide, and the lack of explicit recognition for AI as an author all limit the copyrightability of machine-assisted works.From a policy perspective, broad protection would be risky. If courtroom arguments generated through AI were easily copyrighted, it could encourage overclaiming and restrict the use of standard legal formulations. That would be undesirable in a profession where consistency, precedential reasoning, and common legal language are essential. Courts and policymakers are therefore likely to prefer a narrow approach, protecting only those AI-assisted arguments that embody genuine human authorship and distinctive textual expression.
In India, the copyrightability of courtroom arguments generated through artificial intelligence is limited by the statutory requirement of originality, the human-authorship framework in Section 2(d)(vi), and the functional nature of legal advocacy. Section 13 and Section 2(o) of the Copyright Act, 1957 may provide a starting point, but they do not protect every AI-assisted legal submission. The controlling authority of Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak makes it clear that copyright demands more than effort or routine drafting; it requires a modicum of creativity.Accordingly, most courtroom arguments generated with AI will not qualify as original literary works unless the lawyer has exercised substantial creative control and contributed original expression beyond standard legal formulation. The safest legal conclusion is that AI may assist in producing courtroom arguments, but it does not by itself create copyrightable subject matter. In the Indian context, the copyrightable element, if any, will lie only in the human-authored expressive choices that remain after AI assistance has been filtered through professional legal judgment.