Chander Lall is an intellectual property lawyer whose three-decade career has tracked India's slow shift from near-total indifference toward IP — a period, he recalls, when researchers at premier institutions did not know what a patent was — toward a more enforcement-conscious present. In conversation with Shweta's Talkies, Lall opens with a claim broader than most creator-economy advice: copyright protection in India is automatic upon creation, a right inherited from the country's 1928 accession to the Berne Convention, nearly two decades before independence. The problem, in his framing, is not a lack of legal protection but a near-total lack of awareness that it already exists. The conversation's most original turn is a national-scale comparison: China's transformation from being characterized internationally as the world's largest IP infringer to a country now filing among the largest volumes of next-generation technology patents. Lall uses that arc to reframe intellectual property as an economic-development choice rather than a purely legal or moral one — a country either builds the enforcement infrastructure to let its creators profit from what they make, or it doesn't, and the difference compounds over decades. The discussion also turns to the newest version of an old fight: whether training AI systems on copyrighted material constitutes infringement, a question now being tested in real time in courts in both the United States and India, including a closely watched Delhi High Court case. Lall's answer is pragmatic rather than alarmist — the protection exists, the tools exist, and the gap is almost always awareness, not law. Recorded as part of Shweta's Talkies' ongoing coverage of how Indian institutions and legal frameworks shape who gets to benefit from what they create.