India's AI-music rules: courts protect famous singers' voices while the copyright plan stalls

India now has two answers to AI and music, and they don't meet. In the courts, famous singers can get a fast order against anyone cloning their voice. In policy, the government's plan for AI training would pay rightsholders but take away their right to refuse, and even that plan has stalled. This is not legal advice; it is our reading of where an Indian performer stands today.

The court track: personality rights

In July 2024 the Bombay High Court granted Arijit Singh an ex parte order against Codible Ventures LLP and others. Justice Riyaz Chagla barred them from using his name, voice, vocal style, mannerisms and likeness, and the order expressly covered AI voice models, voice conversion tools and synthesised voices, LiveLaw reported. The court said it was shocked at how vulnerable performers are to unauthorised generative AI content.

On 29 Sep 2025 the same court, through Justice Arif S. Doctor, protected Asha Bhosle against an AI platform that, according to the SCC Online summary, let any user sing any song in her voice. The court took the prima facie view that offering tools to turn any voice into a celebrity's without permission violates that celebrity's personality rights (LiveLaw). Amazon and Flipkart were told to remove listings using her name or likeness within a week, and to disclose seller details on request (Verdictum).

Both are interim orders, not final judgments. And both start from fame. In the Arijit Singh order, establishing celebrity status was described as the primary requirement of a personality-rights suit (LiveLaw).

The policy track: a licence you can't refuse

In December 2025 a DPIIT committee published Part 1 of a working paper on generative AI and copyright, branded "One Nation One License One Payment". Its "hybrid model" has five parts that matter to musicians:

• No opt-out. A mandatory blanket licence would let AI developers train on all lawfully accessed copyrighted works, and rightsholders "will not have the option to withhold" them.
• Revenue share, set by the state. Developers would pay a percentage of gross global revenue from the commercialised AI system, at a rate fixed by a government-appointed committee and reviewed every three years. Payment is due only once the system earns money.
• Retroactive royalties. Developers already earning from models trained without a licence would owe royalties for that past use.
• A new collector. A body called the Copyright Royalties Collective for AI Training (CRCAT) would collect the money and split it between classes of work (music, film, text and so on) in proportion to what developers disclose they trained on. The paper says performers are entitled to a share. Individual creators would have to register their works in a database to be paid.
• No per-work attribution. The paper rejects valuing each work's contribution, citing scholars who say no attribution technique has been shown to work on complex generative models.

Nasscom, which has two members on the committee, dissented. It wanted a text-and-data-mining exception with a machine-readable opt-out instead.

Then the committee went quiet

On 4 Oct 2026 Hindustan Times reported that the committee, set up on 28 Apr 2025, has not met since June, according to three members. The second paper, once promised for February, has not been prepared. One member told the paper "the fizz has gone out" on the government side. Public comments on Part 1 closed on 6 Feb after a one-month extension, and no revised version has appeared.

Part 2 is the half about outputs: who owns AI-generated work, who is liable for it, and whether it can be copyrighted at all. That is where a cloned voice on a new track would fall, and it is the part that stalled.

On 22 Oct MediaNama set the Indian proposal against the US, where a federal judge heard summary-judgment arguments in the music publishers' lyrics case against Anthropic on 21 Oct without ruling. MediaNama could not find Part 2 either. Back home, the live training fight runs through ANI v OpenAI, where Indian Music Industry, T-Series and Saregama are intervenors. HT reports a Delhi High Court single judge held in July that OpenAI's training use was fair dealing and refused an injunction; ANI has appealed.

What it means for artists

If you are Arijit Singh or Asha Bhosle, you have a working remedy: hire counsel, file in the Bombay High Court, and get sweeping takedown orders against clone apps and marketplaces. That is a real win, and worth celebrating.

If you are a session vocalist, a regional playback singer or an independent artist, the picture is thinner:

• Training. Under the DPIIT model your recordings could be used to train a model whether you agree or not. Your money would arrive, if at all, as a slice of a class-wide pool, routed through a copyright society, and only if you registered.
• Output. A model that sounds like you is a personality-rights question, and the case law so far is built on celebrity. Part 1 of the DPIIT paper does not address voice imitation.
• Practice. The tools are already in fans' hands. A thread in r/BollywoodMusic, which we could see only through search indexes, circulates AI voice covers in the voices of Kishore Kumar and Arijit Singh. Covers like these spread as fan content long before anyone asks who consented.

What we think

The two tracks reward the wrong things. Courts reward fame: the bigger your name, the stronger your claim that a clone trades on it. The DPIIT model rewards registration and membership: money flows to classes of work and the societies that represent them. Neither rewards the thing a cloned voice actually takes, which is a specific person's sound.

The no-opt-out design is the bigger risk for working musicians. It turns consent into a rate, set by a committee, paid on a revenue line artists can't see. The paper's own admission that per-work attribution doesn't work yet means the share for any one singer will be an average, and averages favour big catalogues.

The stall is an opening, not just a failure. Before Part 2 resumes, we think India should add two things: a statutory voice and likeness right for every performer, not only celebrities, with simple takedowns that don't need a High Court suit; and an opt-out from training for individual creators, backed by the disclosure form the paper already proposes. Until then, Indian artists should register their works wherever registries exist, keep proof of their recordings, and read any contract for clauses about voice models.