NOW NO MORE FAKE JHAKKAAS AND DHAI KILO KA HATH

 

Whenever you hear Jhakkaas, you are reminded of Anil Kapoor in his 1985 film ‘Yudh’. His name, his voice, his signature dialogue and his image all combine together to constitute his personality rights, his intellectual property. Innumerable mimicry artists have tried to mimic his dialogues to make a living. That was understandable and perfectly legal and acceptable. After all when a radio jockey or a satirist copies a celebrity’s oratory skills, body language, and style the listener / audience knows he is a copy and not the original. The problem arises when this is being done by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Now Anil Kapoor can be seen promoting anything without his knowledge, may it be a paan masala or a gambling site or even a porn site!

 

Similarly Rajesh Khanna’s “Pushpa, I hate tears”, Sunny Deol’s “Dhai kilo ka hath”, Sharukh Khan’s “K K K K Kiran”, Shatrughan Sinha’s “Jali ko Aag kete hain”, Raj Kumar’s “Jani, ham tumhe marenge, zaroor marenge” have all been fodder for mimicry artists and R.Js and the cine-artists have never objected to this or ever claimed royalty. Politicians too have routinely been copied by satirists, whether Laloo Prasad Yadav or Atal Bihari Vajpai or Narendra Modi and they all seem to enjoy and encourage the artists. But, with the entry of AI in the equation the things have taken an ugly turn. Now these popular images and voices are being monetized and misused to harm the reputation of the artist or politician and deliberately harm the fans and confuse the electorate. Imagine what will happen if an AI operator, sitting in China, morphs the image of a politician and shows him in a light that is physically, ideologically or intellectually compromising? It is very easy to make such images viral before the elections, and your entire election process is compromised by well planned foreign intervention!

 

Realizing this malady the Delhi High Court, in a landmark judgment, not only protected the ‘personality rights’ of Anil Kapoor, but also recognized the misuse of AI tools to create deepfakes or even pornographic materials of celebrities and even common citizens. There are unauthorized money lending agencies, mostly Chinese, which lend money online after gaining access to the identification documents and phonebook of the user and if they fail to pay in time then harass them by morphing their image and posting them to their contacts in phonebook. Gullible users, instead of reporting to the police, have even committed suicides after seeing their morphed pornographic images online!

 

Celebrities have iconic attributes like looks, style, voice, singing abilities and mannerisms which are being both misused and monetized by AI. Amitabh Bacchan has always lent his voice and image for important social and national causes like polio eradication, COVID cautions, Swachata Abhiyan, Gujarat Tourism and he instills trust in the mind of listeners and viewers. Now, if this trust is misused by AI by faking his image and his voice to promote a dodgy mobile app, or an illegal lottery then his reputation gets ruined and his gullible fans get cheated!

 

Even the dead celebrities are not spared. AI programmers routinely use late Robin William’s voice for cartoon characters and perhaps some copyright remuneration goes to his family or their chosen charity. But, if his voice is being used without seeking the permission of his family, as Zelda Williams, his daughter fears, then this is again an AI created scam. U.S based software engineer Amarjeet Singh, who goes by the name of DJ MRA has created some AI generated new songs of Sidhu Moosewala and K.K and released them on social media. Both these artists are no more with us and the former’s family was not at all happy. Eventually his videos had to be removed from all platforms. Now this has given rise to a dilemma; is this really a bad idea to recreate the image and voice of a departed singer, if the artist’s family agrees to do so? If the artist passes on his/her celebrity rights to their family or their production house then his voice and image can live forever with his fans and his family too will get some monitory support.   

 

There are today all sorts of apps and websites where the celebrity of choice can wish you ‘Happy Birthday’ or sing a song for you, in exchange of money. Things may not remain all that benign but user may be trapped by using fake celebrity voices into scams. The celebrity certainly does not know about this misuse of his/her personality trait, but the scamster has harmed both the celebrity and his/her fans. Now when time comes to hold someone accountable for the scam, who should be blamed? Is it the AI programme developer or the person who posted it on the social media, or the media platform which hosted it?

 

AI, IP and Copyright

Let me very briefly familiarize you with three terms which you will be hearing a lot in the days to come – AI, IP, and Copyright.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that includes machine learning, natural language processing, speech processing, expert systems, robotics and machine vision. AI tools automate decision making using programming rules and, in some cases, training data sets. AI is a very hot topic right now and raises interesting legal and regulatory issues, many of them relating to Intellectual Property (IP) rights. AI has both the potential to be a threat and an ally to intellectual property rights. While there are concerns about the ability of AI to create content that infringes on IP rights, like a cloned Anil Kapoor or Amitabh Bacchan, there are also opportunities to use AI to monitor and detect potential infringement and improve IP management. Thus AI can also be used to identify potential copyright infringement and track the use of copyrighted material online.

 

Intellectual Property (IP) relates to intangible assets, including inventions, brands, new technologies, source code and artistic works. More specifically, IP pertains to patents, trademarks, copyright and industrial design. For the first time the Indian judiciary has included ‘personality traits’ in this category, thus protecting the artists, and in an extended way, the popular politicians.

 

Copyright relates to new original artistic, literary, dramatic or musical works. This includes computer programme code, compilations of data and graphics. Copyright provides the exclusive legal right to produce, reproduce, publish or perform an original literary, artistic, dramatic or musical work.

 

AI systems involve large data sets which can be protected by copyright as compilations of data. The data can be also audio or audiovisual. These data sets and underlying algorithms are important IP assets for the company. Contractual terms with end users and third parties should clearly specify permitted use. Our courts are rightly trying to make a distinction between the intentions of the end-users, whether a genuine satirist or a conman and fraudster.