Article
The Attribution Gap: Section 57, Fabricated Authorship, and the Limits of Moral Rights in the Age of Generative Systems
Generative systems injure authors in two ways that Indian moral rights doctrine treats very differently. Where a system distorts an existing work — misquoting it, misreporting its contents, reversing its meaning — the integrity limb of Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957 is engaged, and the generous construction Indian courts have given to the words other act in relation to the said work accommodates the case without extension. Where a system fabricates material and attributes it to a named author, Section 57 has nothing to operate on: the integrity limb fails for want of a work, and the paternity limb confers a right to claim authorship of what one wrote rather than a right to disclaim authorship of what one did not. This paper argues that the resulting attribution gap is a genuine and unoccupied lacuna in Indian law; that it results from a drafting choice rather than a conceptual difficulty, the Berne Convention requiring no false attribution right and the United Kingdom conferring one; and that the alternative instruments protect the wrong people, defamation requiring a defamatory imputation and the personality rights jurisprudence resting on the commercial value of a persona. It proposes a false attribution right as a new sub-section of Section 57, and addresses the connected question of authorship in machine output.