"Delhi High Court extends copyright fair dealing protections to AI training activities"
Fair Dealing (Section 52, Copyright Act 1957)
statutory exceptions to copyright infringement for research, study, criticism, and review
Technological Neutrality
principle that an activity's legal status should not change merely because technology alters the means of its execution
India's Copyright Act, 1957, as amended in 2012, is the foundational statute governing authorship, reproduction rights, and permissible uses of creative works. Its Section 52 enumerates categories of 'fair dealing' — research, private study, criticism, review, and news reporting — that do not constitute infringement. These provisions were designed to balance the exclusive rights of creators against the broader social interest in the free flow of knowledge and culture. The 2012 amendment modernised several provisions for the digital environment, but it could not have anticipated the emergence of large-scale generative AI systems that ingest vast corpora of copyrighted text, images, and code during the training process.
The question of whether AI training constitutes reproduction under copyright law — 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 grappled with analogous questions, producing divergent outcomes. India, as a major AI-adopting economy with a large creative sector, faces the same structural tension between incentivising technological innovation and protecting the livelihoods of 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', proposing a mandatory blanket licensing regime for AI training on copyrighted works — a proposal that assumed such training constituted infringement and sought to create a statutory payment mechanism.
The ANI v. OpenAI case before the Delhi High Court presented a direct collision between these competing interests. The news agency ANI alleged that OpenAI's use of its copyrighted content to train large language models constituted infringement. OpenAI contended that its activities qualified as 'research' — a category explicitly protected under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 — and therefore did not require a licence or compensation. ANI's counter-argument effectively restricted the research exception to activities undertaken by human beings, arguing that machine-mediated processes could not claim the same statutory shelter.
The court rejected this human-centric restriction by invoking the doctrine of 'updating construction' — a principle of statutory interpretation holding that legislation should be read in light of contemporary technological realities rather than frozen at the moment of enactment. …
With reference to Indian judiciary, consider the following statements:
1.Any retired judge of the Supreme Court of India can be called back to sit and act as a Supreme Court judge by the Chief Justice of India with prior permission of the President of India.
2.In India, any High Court has the power to review its own judgement as the Supreme Court does.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
With reference to the Copyright Act, 1957, consider the following statements:
1.Section 52 enumerates categories of use that do not constitute copyright infringement, including research and private study.
2.The 2012 amendment to the Copyright Act introduced the concept of fair dealing for the first time.
3.The doctrine of 'updating construction' requires courts to interpret statutes in light of contemporary technological realities.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
The principle of 'technological neutrality' in the context of copyright law implies that:
Consider the following statements regarding the DPIIT Working Paper on copyright and AI training:
1.It proposed a voluntary licensing regime under which AI developers could choose whether to compensate rights-holders.
2.It was titled 'One Nation, One Licence, One Payment: Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright'.
3.Its foundational premise — that AI training constitutes copyright infringement — has been questioned by the Delhi High Court's interim ruling in ANI v. OpenAI.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Assertion (A): The Delhi High Court's interim ruling in ANI v. OpenAI held that AI training on copyrighted content may qualify as fair dealing under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957.
Reason (R): The court applied the doctrine of 'updating construction' to extend statutory protections designed for human actors to machine-mediated processes.
Which of the following is correct?
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