In 2025, on a sultry summer time evening in Tamil Nadu, the cinema lights dimmed on a movie audiences thought they knew by coronary heart — Raanjhanaa, now recast as Ambikapathy, sporting a brand new, AI-assisted ending. Gone was Kundan’s feverish, deadly sacrifice; instead, a flutter of eyelids, buddies’ teary smiles, and the shimmer of a bittersweet second likelihood. If Bollywood is India’s nice emotional theatre, this dramatic rewrite was a high-wire act: daring, divisive, and totally Twenty first-century.
However as applause and outrage traded locations, one query echoed by means of the aisles: Can a machine rewrite the soul of a narrative?
The controversy has raised questions on inventive integrity and inventive possession. By erasing Kundan’s tragic demise — the emotional core of the 2013 traditional — and changing it with a happier, AI-generated finale, the re-release challenges the sanctity of the director’s authentic imaginative and prescient.
Filmmaker Aanand L Rai and actor Dhanush have publicly condemned the transfer, warning it dilutes the movie’s soul and units a harmful precedent for the business. Eros, the manufacturing firm behind the movie, has maintained that it holds full rights to the movie and is inside its authorized bounds to change it.
Past storytelling, this incident exposes authorized and moral dilemmas about who controls a narrative within the AI period — and what’s misplaced when creativity bows to expertise.
Why copyright, privateness legal guidelines want an AI reform
In response to a latest weblog on SpicyIP, certainly one of India’s most credible authorized publications within the discipline of mental property, the actual query that arises from the controversy is whether or not the director or actors on this case, who’re contributors (and will not even qualify as a authors), can legally cease the copyright holder from altering the work in a method that adjustments its that means. “Below Indian copyright legislation, the reply is probably going no. Ethical rights provide no assist right here. Financial rights would possibly, however provided that the director is recognised as a co-author with management over by-product works. He isn’t,” it mentioned.
Ameet Datta, certainly one of India’s main IP litigators, mentioned that below India’s Copyright Act, the time period “writer” for cinematographic movies, is usually the producer. Administrators and actors are usually not counted as authors.
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Datta mentioned that India wanted an overhaul in its copyright legislation, and referred to as for a persona rights legislation. “We’d like it not since you need to profit actors or administrators, however due to the convenience with which AI may be misused for picture rights. Each particular person must have a proper over how their picture is getting used,” he mentioned.
That is the place trademark legislation can have an intersection with the fitting to privateness. In response to a 2019 paper printed by the Nationwide Regulation Faculty of India, Bengaluru, within the landmark 2017 proper to privateness judgement by the Supreme Courtroom, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul had introduced publicity rights below the ambit of proper to privateness. In his judgement, he wrote that “each particular person ought to have a proper to have the ability to train management over his/her personal life and picture as portrayed to the world and to manage business use of his/her identification. This additionally implies that a person could also be permitted to stop others from utilizing his picture, title and different features of his/ her private life and identification for business functions with out his/her consent.”
Nevertheless, Justice Kaul’s opinion, although concurring, was not a part of the main judgement, and in consequence, his remark stays non-binding and solely persuasive in nature, the paper famous.
Right here, Denmark has already set an instance. The nation is proposing a laws that goals to guard its residents from deepfakes by giving them copyright over their very own likeness. If the legislation had been to go, it might imply that anybody might search a elimination of their digitally altered photographs or movies, if it was created with out their consent.
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Worth of an individual’s labour
There are additionally potential overlaps with labour legal guidelines. Datta mentioned that if the creators of the movie bought collectively to reshoot an alternate ending for the movie, it might contain some type of compensation for everybody concerned, not simply the director or actors, however the movie’s total crew, together with these behind the digicam, set designers, and even spot folks, on condition that movies are collaborative items of creativity.
Nevertheless, with AI getting used to create an alternate ending, there isn’t any compensation in anyway for the folks whose photos are getting used, Datta mentioned.
An illustrative instance of that is the decisive victory that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) secured towards their bosses in 2023, following one of many longest labour strikes within the nation’s historical past. One of many key features of the negotiations there was using AI, amid considerations by writers and actors that use of the expertise might pit them towards robots in a battle for human creativity. As a part of the settlement the union secured from manufacturing homes, whereas using AI was not outlawed, it arrange guardrails round its use to make sure that its management stays within the palms of the employees.
These in India’s inventive business don’t take pleasure in such collective bargaining energy, as their counterparts do in the USA.