INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND CYBERSECURITY IN INDIA’S DIGITAL MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LEGISLATIVE CONVERGENCE
AUTHOR – POTTA V N VAMSI KRISHNA, STUDENT AT CHRIST (DEEMED TO BE UNIVERSITY) LAVASA, PUNE
BEST CITATION – POTTA V N VAMSI KRISHNA, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND CYBERSECURITY IN INDIA’S DIGITAL MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LEGISLATIVE CONVERGENCE, INDIAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL REVIEW (IJLR), 6 (8) OF 2026, PG. 797-806, APIS – 3920 – 0001 & ISSN – 2583-2344.
Abstract
India’s digital media and entertainment industry, valued at approximately USD thirty billion and growing at ten to twelve percent annually, confronts a convergent regulatory crisis: intellectual property violations and cybersecurity breaches are no longer separable phenomena. Digital piracy, ransomware attacks on production infrastructure, pre-release content leaks, and AI-generated deepfakes impose estimated annual losses of USD 2.8 to 3.5 billion. India’s regulatory response—anchored in the Copyright Act, 1957 and the Information Technology Act, 2000—operates in structural isolation, without coordinated enforcement mechanisms, a statutory notice-and-takedown regime, mandatory cybersecurity standards, or legislative provisions addressing synthetic media. This article undertakes a doctrinal and comparative analysis of India’s legal architecture benchmarked against the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, the EU AI Act, and the WIPO Internet Treaties. Five structural legislative gaps are identified: absent anti-trafficking provisions in anti-circumvention law, no statutory notice-and-takedown mechanism, inadequate mandatory cybersecurity obligations, insufficient platform filtering liability, and a regulatory void on AI-generated content and deepfakes. A targeted five-point reform agenda is proposed.
Keywords: intellectual property; cybersecurity; Copyright Act 1957; DMCA; DSM Directive; deepfakes; intermediary liability; digital piracy; India