"Delhi HC Rules AI Training May Qualify as Fair Dealing Under Copyright Law"
Fair Dealing
Closed list of copyright exceptions under Section 52, Copyright Act, 1957, permitting use without consent for research, study, criticism, etc.
Updating Construction
Interpretive doctrine holding that statutory language must serve its original purpose even as technology changes, not be frozen at enactment.
India's Copyright Act, 1957, as amended in 2012, is the primary statute governing authorship, reproduction rights, and permissible uses of creative works. The Act was drafted in an era of analogue and early digital media; its provisions on fair dealing under Section 52 enumerate specific categories of use — research, private study, criticism, review, and reporting — that do not constitute infringement. These provisions were designed to balance the exclusive rights of authors against the broader social interest in the free flow of knowledge and culture.
The emergence of large-scale generative AI systems has placed unprecedented pressure on this framework. Training a large language model or a generative AI system requires ingesting vast corpora of text, images, audio, or code — much of it protected by copyright. The question of whether such ingestion constitutes reproduction, and whether it falls within any permissible exception, has become one of the most contested issues in global intellectual property law. Courts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have all grappled with analogous questions, with divergent outcomes. India, as a major AI-adopting economy with a large creative sector, faces the same structural tension between incentivising innovation and protecting creators.
At the policy level, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) released a Working Paper titled "One Nation, One Licence, One Payment: Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright" in late 2025, proposing a mandatory blanket licensing regime for AI training on copyrighted works. This proposal assumed that such training constituted infringement and sought to create a statutory payment mechanism — a position that the Delhi High Court's subsequent ruling has now materially complicated.
The core legal question in the Delhi High Court case is whether the use of copyrighted material to train an AI model falls within the fair dealing provisions of Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957. Fair dealing is a closed list of exceptions in Indian law — unlike the open-ended "fair use" doctrine in the United States — meaning courts must fit the impugned use within one of the enumerated categories. The court held that AI training could be characterised as research, a recognised category under Section 52, and that the use was private, non-substitutive, and did not cause substantial market harm to the copyright owner.
The judgment introduces the concept of "updating construction" — the interpretive principle that statutory language must be read in light of its underlying purpose rather than frozen in the technological conditions prevailing at enactment. This is a significant jurisprudential move: it allows courts to extend statutory protections designed for human actors to machine processes, provided the functional purpose remains the same. …
Consider the following statements regarding the AI Action Summit held in Grand Palais, Paris in February 2025:
I.Co-chaired with India, the event builds on the advances made at the Bletchley Park Summit held in 2023 and the Seoul Summit held in 2024.
II.Along with other countries, US and UK also signed the declaration on inclusive and sustainable AI.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
With reference to the fair dealing provisions under the Copyright Act, 1957, consider the following statements:
1.Fair dealing in India is a closed list of enumerated exceptions, unlike the open-ended fair use doctrine in the United States.
2.Section 52 of the Act includes research and private study as permissible uses that do not constitute infringement.
3.Any use of copyrighted material for commercial purposes is automatically excluded from fair dealing protection.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
The doctrine of 'updating construction' as applied in the context of AI and copyright law refers to which of the following?
Consider the following statements about the DPIIT Working Paper on generative AI and copyright:
1.It proposed a voluntary licensing scheme allowing AI developers to opt into paying rights-holders.
2.It was titled 'One Nation, One Licence, One Payment: Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright'.
3.It proceeded on the assumption that using copyrighted works for AI training constituted infringement.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Assertion (A): The Delhi High Court's interim ruling on AI training and copyright is likely to have significant influence on Indian copyright law despite being a non-final order.
Reason (R): Indian intellectual property jurisprudence is disproportionately shaped by interim orders because final decisions after full trial are rare.
Select the correct answer:
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