Copyright Literacy and Compliance in Pakistan's Digital Knowledge Economy: AI Authorship, Institutional Gaps, and the Case for Legal Reform

Abstract

The rapid expansion of digital technology has transformed how knowledge is created, shared, and accessed, and generative artificial intelligence has now added a further layer of legal uncertainty to a copyright system many jurisdictions had only just begun adapting to the internet era. This article examines copyright literacy and legal compliance in Pakistan's digital knowledge economy through a doctrinal and comparative lens, updating an earlier qualitative content-analysis account of the field with the most consequential recent case law and institutional developments. It shows that two 2025 decisions the D.C. Circuit's ruling in Thaler v Perlmutter, holding that copyright authorship requires a human being, and the District of Delaware's ruling in Thomson Reuters v Ross Intelligence, the first US decision to reject a fair-use defence for AI training on copyrighted material have begun to answer questions that Pakistani law has not yet even framed in statutory terms. Pakistan's Copyright Ordinance 1962, last substantively amended in 2000, retains a closed, word-count-based fair-dealing test that cannot meaningfully evaluate AI training or AI-assisted authorship, while the Higher Education Commission's 2024 Journals and Publications Policy imposes numerical similarity thresholds without any corresponding standard for AI-generated or AI-assisted text, and IPO-Pakistan's inter-agency enforcement committees contain no institution with an explicit mandate over AI-related content. Drawing on Pakistan's existing empirical literature on copyright literacy among librarians, students, and academic staff, the article argues that this legal and institutional vacuum compounds, rather than merely coexists with, Pakistan's documented literacy deficit, and proposes a sequenced reform agenda addressing statutory amendment, institutional guidance, and copyright-literacy infrastructure together.