---
archive-url: "https://web.archive.org/web/20260219003518/https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/indias-moment-to-restoring-balance-to-copyright/article70648693.ece"
author:
- Pranesh Prakash
authors:
- Pranesh Prakash
categories:
- IPR
- Access to Knowledge
- AI
citation:
  abstract: Rigid copyright laws are undermining access, creativity and
    technological progress.
  archive: "https://web.archive.org/web/20260219003518/https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/indias-moment-to-restoring-balance-to-copyright/article70648693.ece"
  author: Pranesh Prakash
  available-date:
    date-parts:
    - - 2026
      - 2
      - 19
    iso-8601: 2026-02-19
    literal: 2026-02-19
    raw: 2026-02-19
  container-title: The Hindu
  issued:
    date-parts:
    - - 2026
      - 2
      - 19
    iso-8601: 2026-02-19
    literal: 2026-02-19
    raw: 2026-02-19
  title: India's moment to restoring balance to copyright
  type: article-newspaper
  URL: "https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/indias-moment-to-restoring-balance-to-copyright/article70648693.ece"
comments:
  hypothesis:
    theme: clean
date: 2026-02-19
description: Rigid copyright laws are undermining access, creativity and
  technological progress.
engines:
- path: /opt/quarto/share/extension-subtrees/julia-engine/\_extensions/julia-engine/julia-engine.js
license:
  text: CC BY-NC 4.0
  type: creative-commons
  url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
listing-page: ../press.html
original-url: "https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/indias-moment-to-restoring-balance-to-copyright/article70648693.ece"
publication: The Hindu
title: India's moment to restoring balance to copyright
title-block-categories: true
toc-title: Table of contents
---

The India-AI Impact Summit 2026 is on in New Delhi and I am reminded of
a story. A former colleague, Nirmita, who is visually impaired, once
found herself in an absurd legal position. She could not legally
purchase a book from the United States in a disability-friendly format
called DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System), even though I, as
a sighted reader, was able to purchase any print or e-books I wished.
This was because of the vagaries of copyright law.

To address this issue, our non-governmental organisation, together with
international coalitions of disability rights organisations, engaged in
years of advocacy at the international level. These efforts ultimately
led to the creation of the Marrakesh Treaty, which enables the
cross-border exchange of accessible-format books as well as national
exceptions for visually impaired persons to use technology to convert
books into accessible formats when publishers do not make them
available. The copyright industry --- from book publishers to the movie
industry --- strongly opposed the treaty, which sought to establish a
'right to read' for visually impaired persons as any exception to
copyright law was viewed as fundamentally unacceptable, even if it was
at the expense of denying access to the visually impaired.

## It is now copyright maximalism

The struggle of visually impaired persons against overly rigid copyright
laws highlights a fundamental problem: copyright has expanded far beyond
its original purpose, and copyright maximalism now actively obstructs
the creation of and access to knowledge. This debate has taken on a
renewed vigour thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, many of
which turn out to be useful only when they have large quantities of
training data (which, for language models, inevitably means copyrighted
works). But before looking at AI, copyright needs to be understood in a
historical perspective.

We have had art for far longer than we have had copyright. The Statute
of Anne, widely seen as the first copyright law, was passed in Britain
in 1710, after the era of Shakespeare and Milton. The British brought
copyright law to India in 1847. The current Copyright Act is from 1957.
In 1710, the law granted authors a limited monopoly of 14 years, with
the possibility of one renewal. The monopoly right would only vest if it
was specifically registered and multiple copies of the book deposited
for distribution among libraries and universities.

Under the current law, the monopoly right goes well beyond the act of
publishing, vests automatically the moment 'a work' is created, and
lasts for the author's entire lifetime plus 70 years posthumously. So,
the thousands of random Instagram posts and notebook doodles that you
have made are all protected under copyright law for centuries. While the
public domain was once the default, now a nearly-perpetual copyright
monopoly is the default, regardless of the commercial potential of the
work or ambitions of the creator. This fundamental change in the nature
of the law has deleterious consequences.

## Findings from a study

As part of a research project by LIRNEasia, a Sri Lankan think tank, we
studied the data governance regimes of seven countries in South and
Southeast Asia. With respect to copyright, we found that in four out of
seven, the law made web search engines and AI training illegal. Web
search engines need to copy as much of the Web as they can (a process
called 'crawling'), effectively creating a mirror copy of all that is
reachable on the web through links, but permissionless copying is
prohibited by copyright law. Except in the Philippines and Sri Lanka
(which have a flexible 'fair use' exception) and India (which, in 2012,
introduced a specific exception for 'the transient or incidental
storage' for 'providing electronic links, access or integration'), no
other country in our study provided an exception, meaning AI training is
effectively illegal in most countries we surveyed.

This does not make sense. Web search engines and AI models do not view
copyrighted materials as scribblings or poems or art the way humans do;
for programs, it is merely 'data' for statistical purposes. Recognising
this, many jurisdictions such as the European Union, Japan and Singapore
have adopted 'text and data mining' exceptions in their copyright
regimes, while others such as Hong Kong and South Korea are in the
process of doing so. Japan's law allows for an exemption for
"Exploitations not for enjoying the ideas or emotions expressed in a
work" (i.e., use by machines), and permits "using the work in data
analysis". This is sensible: copyright was never meant to cover
mechanistic uses.

By not allowing for a broad text and data-mining exception, India has
created a pall of legal uncertainty over the collection of the training
data for many forms of AI. And by not having a flexible, general and
open-ended exception (as countries such as Singapore and the United
States do), India ensures that copyright law will always hamper
technological developments.

There are separate concerns around the outputs of generative AI
substituting creative labour. But copyright is meant to be about
encouraging creativity, not about protecting jobs. Further, copyright
law has never prohibited learning from examples and imitating --- every
artist studies predecessors, and every writer reads widely. Technology
has always displaced jobs --- we have far fewer rickshaw pullers,
telegraphists, pankhaawallahs, stenographers, lift operators, bank
tellers, typesetters, darkroom technicians and draughtsmen --- yet, it
has created new jobs as well. The advent of photography reduced the
demand for portraitists, but enabled new forms of creativity and access
to knowledge. We do not know what the impact of generative AI will be:
we might, in the future, need greater government grants for arts and
culture, or to strengthen the cooperative movement, potentially funded
by taxes from large AI companies. But these ought not be dealt with in
copyright law.

## Creativity, access should be promoted

What copyright law should protect, however, are contributions to the
commons. Open-licensed AI models and datasets exemplify this ---
developers and researchers absorbing massive computational costs to
create what enables others to be creative. These models add to the
common heritage of mankind rather than subtracting from it. Copyright
law should encourage such contributions, not hinder them with the same
restrictions designed to prevent commercial exploitation. Governments
are also uniquely positioned to curate high-quality locally-relevant
datasets for public benefit, they should establish safe harbour
provisions that protect such datasets from copyright claims, at least
when used for training open-source models.

We have seen copyright law repeatedly being weaponised to block
beneficial technologies under the guise of protecting creators. The
Authors Guild in the U.S. used copyright to block Amazon Kindle's "Read
Aloud" function, despite it being assistive technology that enabled
visually impaired persons to listen to books they had legally purchased.
Current copyright law blocks technologies that could democratise access
to knowledge, unleash creativity, and drive innovation --- the very
things that copyright was meant to foster. India's hosting of the AI
Summit is the moment to act: it must lead efforts for all nations to
adopt flexible exceptions that serve creators and the public, rather
than the copyright industry. We need to bring copyright law into the
21st century by returning to its roots.

*Pranesh Prakash is a tech law and policy consultant, working with think
tanks, tech companies and universities. This article is based on
research funded by LIRNEasia, based on a grant from IDRC, a Canadian
taxpayer-funded research donor. The views expressed are personal*