Copyright Infringement In India: Evaluating The Role Of Fair Use And The Urgent Need For Legal Reform
- IJLLR Journal
- Nov 4
- 2 min read
Tusshar Sharma, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University
I. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Defining Copyright Infringement in India
The infringement of copyright is the unauthorized use of any of the exclusive rights that a copyright holder has in accordance with It includes the acts of reproduction, communication to the public, adapting and commercial exploitation of the works which are protected without the legal authorization. There are both primary infringement in which an infringer performs the restricted acts directly and secondary infringement in which infringing acts involve importing, distributing and possessing infringing copies with commercial intent. Jurisprudence underlines the fact that infringement should not be evaluated only in quantitative terms but also in qualitative terms, that is, whether a significant and material part of the work is used.
1.2 The Doctrine of Fair Dealing: Structure and Contemporary Challenges
The doctrine of fair dealing is enshrouded in the Act under section 52, as a statutory defence, to legitimise the right owner to some uses of the copyrighted material without the authorisation of the rights holder. As opposed to the open-ended fair use test used in America, the Indian test uses a closed-list of allowable uses, namely, under private or personal use, under research, under criticism, under review, and under reporting of current events, therefore the legal certainty over the orthodox variability. This limits the ability of the law to keep up with new manifestation of creativity and technological invention. The digital revolution has altered the process of content creation, distribution and consumption to making the conventional paradigms more and more obsolete. The streaming, the social media, and user-created content disrupt the traditional ideas of authorship and originality. Further, generative artificial intelligence raises some very fundamental questions concerning the copyrightability of AI- generated output, whether it is permissible to use copyrighted content to train machine-learning models and whether the fair-dealing exceptions can be applied to algorithmic work. These tensions are described in the Delhi High Court case pitting ANI Media and OpenAI where courts struggle to figure out whether the consumption of copyrighted news content submitted into AI training would be regarded as infringement or transformative fair use. Lastly, digital content enables one to see the constraint of locally confined regimes owing to its borderless nature thereby necessitating applicable coordination to international norms without sacrificing the domestic policy goals.
