Who Owns Creativity in the Age of AI? A Conversation with Gungun Agrawal
Who owns an idea when technology can imitate creativity?
As artificial intelligence reshapes the way we create, consume, and protect creative work, the questions facing intellectual property law have never been more complex. Behind every film, brand, song, or design lies an invisible legal framework that determines who gets credit, who gets compensated, and where innovation meets accountability.
Our next guest has chosen to explore that intersection. A final-year law student specializing in Intellectual Property and Media & Entertainment Law, she has gained hands-on experience in trademark prosecution, entertainment contracts, chain-of-title analysis, and legal research on emerging AI issues through her internships at MB Jain & Partners and King Stubb & Kasiva. Beyond practice, she is equally passionate about making complex legal developments accessible, building a legal content platform that breaks down intellectual property and entertainment law for a wider audience.
Joining us today is Gungun Agrawal, an aspiring IP and Media & Entertainment lawyer whose work sits at the crossroads of law, technology, and creativity. In this conversation, we'll explore intellectual property, artificial intelligence, legal writing, media law, dispute resolution, and what it means to build legal frameworks for a future that's evolving faster than the law itself.
Let's dive in.
Q1. You've chosen to focus on Media & Entertainment Law and Intellectual Property at a time when AI is rapidly changing how creative works are produced. What first convinced you that protecting creativity would become one of the defining legal challenges of this generation?
A. I dont think there was one lightning-bolt moment. It built up through a series of small realizations while actually doing the work, rather than reading about it in the abstract. It was watching, up close, how unprepared our existing legal categories are for questions like "does an AI-generated voice belong to the person it sounds like?" Creativity used to have fairly settled boundaries of who authored something, who owns it, who gets credited. AI is dissolving all three at once, faster than the law can respond. That combination of high stakes, moving fast, and doctrine still being improvised is exactly the kind of legal challenge I want to be working on, not reading about after it's settled.
Q2. During your internship at King Stubb & Kasiva, you worked on artist agreements, chain-of-title analysis, and AI-related research in film production. Which assignment changed the way you understood the commercial side of creative industries?
A. It was the chain-of-title analysis, without question. I was working on remake rights for a Hindi adaptation of a Brazilian film, confirming the client actually held clean rights to remake it. That meant building a chain-of-events table across twelve documents like assignments, licenses, amendments, and tracing whether rights flowed cleanly from the original creator down to the client. They didn't, entirely. I found gaps and inconsistencies that could sit invisible for years until a distributor's lawyer found them at the worst possible moment.
That's when it hit me: in entertainment law, the "creative" product is almost incidental. What you're really underwriting is risk. A film can be fully financed and cast, and still be sitting on a title chain with a hole in it. It changed how I read every agreement since. The commercial side of this industry runs less on creativity than on paperwork holding up under pressure.
Q3. Your research spans copyright, trademarks, patents, mediation, and cross-border disputes. When deciding what to write about, what makes a legal issue worth months of research instead of simply becoming another LinkedIn post?
A. The honest answer is: a LinkedIn post is for something the law has already mostly figured out, and I'm just explaining it. Months of research are for something the law hasn't figured out yet, where the interesting part isn't the outcome, it's the gap.
Right now, I'm writing a case comment on a trademark dispute involving invisible use, essentially, whether using a competitor's mark in ways a consumer never actually sees or perceives should still count as trademark "use" under the law. The court read the relevant provisions broadly, but more or less skipped over whether that use needs to actually impair the mark's function to count as infringement. That omission is the whole essay. It's not a post-worthy fact; it's a structural question about what trademark law is even trying to protect, and answering it properly means sitting with the provisions, the case law they draw from, and the doctrine they're either extending or quietly ignoring, for weeks. So, the filter I use is roughly: if I can explain the "what happened" in three lines and the "why it matters" is obvious, it's a LinkedIn post. If explaining why it matters requires unpacking an assumption the law itself hasn't questioned, that's worth months.
Q4. You've written about piracy, intellectual property, and public access to knowledge. As AI-generated content becomes increasingly common, where do you think copyright law should evolve and where should it resist change?
A. I think copyright law should evolve on attribution and compensation mechanisms, and resist change on the core idea of authorship itself.
Where it needs to evolve: the current framework assumes a human author sitting at the centre of every work, and AI-generated content breaks that assumption in ways our statutes weren't built for. We need clearer rules on transparency like was a work AI-assisted or AI-generated, and does the audience have a right to know that. We also need better mechanisms for compensating the original creators whose work trained these models in the first place. Right now, that entire layer is invisible, and invisibility is exactly what lets it go uncompensated. Licensing frameworks, not blanket prohibition, are probably the realistic path forward.
Where it should resist change: I don't think copyright should extend authorship or ownership to AI systems themselves, even as tools get more sophisticated. Authorship has always been tied to intention, judgment, and accountability. A system doesn't have these things, no matter how convincing its output is. The moment we start treating an AI as an "author" rather than a tool, we lose the person we're supposed to be able to hold responsible, credit, or pay.
Q5. Your recent moot involved children's privacy, the DPDP Act, copyright, and artificial intelligence. Did preparing for that competition leave you with more confidence in India's existing digital legal framework, or more questions about its future?
A. The problem sat right where children's privacy, the DPDP Act, copyright, and AI overlap, and none of those frameworks were built to meet each other. The DPDP Act assumes fairly conventional consent, given by someone who understands what they're consenting to. A child usually doesn't. Add AI into the data processing layer and the assumptions strain further. If anything, the moot confirmed that our digital legal architecture is being built the way most consequential law gets built: reactively, provision by provision. Not a criticism, just where we are. It left me curious more than reassured.
Q6. You've argued that India's justice system needs stronger trust in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Beyond legal reforms, what cultural or institutional change do you think is necessary before ADR becomes the default rather than the exception?
A. The bigger blocker isn't legal, it's psychological. We're culturally wired to treat a judge's verdict as the only "real" resolution. That mindset is expensive. Litigation drags on for years and drains money and relationships that mediation could have preserved. People need to see a mediator not as a lesser substitute for a judge, but as the faster, cheaper route to an outcome both sides can actually live with.
Institutionally, the strongest lever is making mediation mandatory as a first step for certain disputes like commercial disagreements, matrimonial matters, landlord-tenant, workplace issues. Right now, ADR is opt-in, so only people already inclined to use it, do. Making it a mandatory first stage, with litigation as the fallback rather than the default, would force people to experience it, and I think the cultural resistance softens once people actually see it work.
Q7. Many law students see legal writing as something they do for publications or internships. Your profile suggests you genuinely enjoy writing. How has writing itself shaped the way you think like a lawyer, beyond simply improving your CV?
A. Explaining a judgment or a legal concept to someone with no legal background is a test you can't fake your way past. If I don't actually understand something, the explanation falls apart the moment I try to simplify it. That forced me to chase real understanding instead of the appearance of it. Longer research pieces, like case comments, taught the opposite muscle: patience. You have to sit with a provision and figure out what it's quietly assuming before you can say anything worth saying. That's taught me to slow down generally, to notice when a legal position rests on something unstated. So, beyond the CV line, writing is what's made me notice when I don't understand something, instead of assuming I do.
Q8. Looking ahead, media, technology, branding, and intellectual property are becoming increasingly interconnected. Ten years from now, what kind of legal problem would make you feel you've built exactly the career you hoped for?
A. Ten years from now, I'd want to have researched AI and its regulation so deeply that when the time comes for lawmakers to actually draft a law on it, I'm someone whose inputs are sought and taken seriously. Not as the person writing the statute, but as someone who has spent years thinking through the balance it needs to strike: protecting creators' consent, credit, and compensation, without over-restricting AI as a technology before it's had the chance to mature. That balance is hard to get right, and I want to have done enough research, across cases, doctrine, and how other jurisdictions are approaching it. If ten years from now my research has genuinely shaped how that conversation goes, even in a small way, that's exactly the career I hoped for.
About Conversations by Brains in You
Conversations by Brains in You is a curated interview series featuring students, professionals, entrepreneurs, creators, researchers, and changemakers whose journeys offer meaningful lessons beyond conventional achievements.
Rather than focusing solely on titles or milestones, each conversation explores the decisions, experiences, challenges, and perspectives that shaped the individual behind the profile. The aim is to create a growing repository of practical insights that help students and young professionals navigate their own careers with greater clarity, productivity, integrity, and purpose.
Every featured conversation is thoughtfully selected with the belief that authentic experiences can inspire informed decisions, lifelong learning, and better human development.
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