Published on 12th July 2025
Authored By: K. Saitarun
VIT Chennai
ABSTARCT
In an era when digital content is everywhere, copyright violation is both more common and more sophisticated. This piece is a detailed examination of how the legal system in India deals with copyright violations during the digital era. It starts with a tracing of the history of Indian copyright law from the Copyright Act, 1957[1] through amendments responding to technological advancement. It then discusses the new types of infringement that are arising with the use of the internet, social media, streaming services, and advanced technologies such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Indian case law from MySpace and YouTube platform disputes to recent online piracy enforcement developments is highlighted to see how the courts are struggling with these matters. The paper provides an overview of the legal recourse available to copyright owners under Indian law, including civil proceedings, criminal prosecution, and administrative actions like takedown notices, and also points out practical enforcement issues such as jurisdiction, anonymity of online perpetrators, and cross-border issues. The position of intermediaries (like internet platforms) and India’s “safe harbor” provisions in the Information Technology Act, 2000[2] are examined in depth. Lastly, the article discusses suggested reforms and proposals by legislators and academics – from legislatively adjusting laws to AI and NFT truths, to bolstering systems in accordance with international agreements[3] – and concludes with musings on how to balance innovation with safeguarding creators’ rights in India’s digital age.
INTRODUCTION
The dawn of the digital age has transformed the manner in which creative content is created, transmitted, and accessed. In India – like everywhere else – there are millions of users with access to music, movies, books, art, and software around the clock via the internet. This unparalleled connectivity has given rise to an avalanche of user-created content on websites such as YouTube, Instagram, and hundreds of streaming platforms. While the same technologies that make sharing information easy have also facilitated copying, distribution, and commodification of copyrighted material without authorization, pirated movies being shared on torrent sites to unauthorized songs on video-sharing platforms, copyright infringement cases have increased exponentially in the digital era. The economic cost is high: worldwide losses from internet piracy are in tens of billions of dollars, and India loses an estimated $2.8 billion a year to internet copyright piracy Aside from financial loss, such piracy undercuts the incentive for authors and creators to create new works and challenges the rule of law. Indian legislators, judges, and business leaders, in turn, have been forced to remake long-standing legal traditions in response to this new situation. Indian copyright law seeks to balance support for creative creativity with protection for creators’ interests. But the digital environment puts this equilibrium to the test:
How is it possible to guard authors, composers, filmmakers, and other creators when material that infringes on their rights can be uploaded anonymously and disseminated instantly around the world? What are the remedies when copyrighted work is being exploited on social media or new technologies such as blockchain and AI? This article provides context to these questions first by examining the history of Indian copyright law and then looking at the particular legal remedies and challenges that have appeared in the digital era. The article discusses a number of major legislative developments and cases related to legislation, and the enforcement challenges as well as the controversy over reforms. While narrowing the focus to the Indian legal system’s response – including with respect to compliance with international standards – the article provides some insights into how India is dealing with the complex tension between intellectual property protection and the openness of the internet.
NEW FORMS OF DIGITAL COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT
The age of the Internet brought qualitatively new types of copyright infringement unthinkable when the 1957 Act was originally enacted. Copyright violations traditionally consisted of physical media – e.g., illegal copying of books or pirating of CDs and DVDs. Nowadays, infringement is possible through the simple click of a button, with no physical object involved at all. The internet facilitates copying and sharing in a global and unauthorized manner, commonly with anonymity and low cost. This has led to various phenomena of infringement in the online environment: Internet and Social Media Piracy: One of the widespread types of digital infringement is copying copyrighted material in an unauthorized manner on websites and social media sites. Video-sharing and social networking websites occasionally observe their users upload music songs, movie segments, or entire movies without authorization.
In India, a significant early case was the one surrounding YouTube in the late 2000s – music company T-Series sued YouTube for user-shared videos featuring its songs. The Delhi High Court issued an interim ruling in T-Series’ favor, which ultimately resulted in an out-of-court settlement and a license deal
Now, big sites typically have copyright protection systems and comply with takedown requests, but violations still exist, ranging from unauthorized tunes in the soundtrack of user-uploaded videos to live sports channels being bootlegged online. Outside social media, independent pirate sites and torrent groups enable bulk dissemination of movies, software, and books.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Blockchain:
Over the past several years, the arrival of NFTs – special digital tokens frequently employed to market art, music, and other media on blockchain-based websites – has opened a new frontier in copyright law. An NFT is a digital token of ownership for a piece of property (which may be a work of digital art, an audio track, etc.). Whereas NFTs themselves are a piece of code on a blockchain, they typically reference or signify an underlying creative work. The question then arises: what happens if someone mints an NFT over a work that they don’t own?
Indian jurisprudence has not yet experienced significant litigation in this regard, but the possibility of infringement is obvious. For instance, a dirty player might take a graphic piece of work by an Indian artist and mint it as an NFT on a platform and sell it to purchasers who don’t know that the minter wasn’t actually the author. Due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of blockchain transactions, the initial artist might not be able to determine the infringer, much less pursue them. Furthermore, the international character of blockchain (NFT sites can be hosted anywhere globally) makes jurisdiction more difficult. Legal professionals point out that without explicit rules, an artist whose work is tokenized against their will find it difficult to seek compensation – the NFT could be bought by an unidentified purchaser and sold all over the world, making enforcement of copyright or damage recovery difficult. In effect, current copyright law does apply?
Creating an NFT out of somebody else’s artwork is an unauthorized copying or communication to the public, and so an infringement, but it may be harder to enforce such rights in practice, as the transaction is written on a decentralized ledger and the identity of the infringer may be masked by a wallet address. AI-Generated Works and Machine Learning: Another frontier question is copyright and artificial intelligence.
Computer programs and other AI tools can generate poems, paintings, music, and even computer code by being trained on huge datasets of human-produced works. This presents two big legal issues:
(1) Are works generated by AI themselves eligible for protection under copyright, and if they are, who is the author/owner? And
(2) Is using copyrighted works as training material an infringement? Indian law does not, at the moment, recognize non-humans as authors and therefore purely AI-generated works have no human author to hold a copyright. Recent case in India brought this vagueness to the fore: the Indian Copyright Office initially registered listing an AI program (“RAGHAV”[4]) as a co-author of a painting (along with a human who assisted in its creation), and then took back this designation, effectively returning to the old paradigm that human authorship alone matters In regard to infringement by AI, think about how an AI could “learn” from thousands of copyrighted images or books.
If it reproduces aspects of those works within its output, it can be difficult to decide on infringement – it might not replicate a single work verbatim, but might create something derivative or inspired by numerous sources. Indian law has yet to have such a court case directly address this situation. But all over the world, lawsuits have been initiated (including against the likes of OpenAI) for the use of copyrighted information to train AI models without the owners’ consent. These trends are being followed closely in India. Indeed, a 2021 Parliamentary Standing Committee[5] advised that Indian intellectual property legislations should be updated to consider AI, even calling for the establishment of a special class of IP rights for inventions and works created with the assistance of AI. Until any such developments take place, the legal stance is that an AI output is not covered unless a human’s creative contribution in the creation of it is substantial enough to be copyrighted – and even then, infringement liability (if the AI lifted from training data) would lie with the humans or the companies running the AI, as the AI cannot be sued.
In total, the digital era has introduced new forms of infringing copyright – peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming, to NFTs and AI – that challenge the responsiveness of current law. While the underlying principles of copyright (protecting original expression and punishing unauthorized use) are still the same, their application to these new situations is an ongoing tale. Indian law is slowly dealing with such issues through legislation and case-by-case judgments, as explained in the subsequent sections.
LEGAL REMEDIES AND THE CASE LAWS
Indian law provides a combination of civil, criminal, and administrative relief. Civil relief takes the form of injunctions, damages, and John Doe orders, commonly found in cases of digital piracy. Criminal sanctions under Section 63 provide imprisonment and fines for wilful infringement. Sections 65A and 65B deal with digital circumvention and tampering with rights management information.
Administrative relief takes the form of notice-and-takedown provisions under the IT Act and complaint systems specific to the platform. Courts have been instrumental in driving digital enforcement. In MySpace v. Super Cassettes (2016)[6], the Delhi High Court made clear that intermediaries are not liable for infringement in the absence of specific knowledge of infringement. UTV v. 1337x.to (2019)[7] brought in dynamic injunctions to proactively block sites of piracy and mirror domains. In the Delhi University Photocopy Case (2016)[8], the High Court upheld educational fair dealing exceptions, strengthening the balance between rights and public access. Outside the courts, there are some formal and some informal mechanisms that can contribute to enforcement. One significant route in the online environment is the notice-and-takedown process with intermediaries. Large web platforms (social media, video hosts, e-commerce sites, etc.) have established procedures by which copyright owners may report offending content. Upon such notice, these intermediaries would usually voluntarily take down or disable access to the content in order to preserve their safe harbor immunity (as mandated under the IT Act rules).
In T-Series and Others v. Video-Sharing Apps (Roposo, etc)[9] Indian record companies have shifted their focus to local apps and services that allow users to share short video clips, many of which are set to chart music. In 2020, T-Series sent legal notices and filed cases against several Indian and international short-video applications (like Roposo, Triller, etc) for using its songs in user-uploaded videos without authorization.
T-Series accused some of the apps even having collections of songs or enabling people to rip music from files on their devices to include in videos.
Last but not least are the remedies under the Copyright Act’s own legislative framework: registration of copyright (though not required for protection) can be used as prima facie evidence in court, and the Indian Copyright Office keeps a register which can help to establish ownership speedily. The Act also establishes a Copyright Board (currently operates mostly assumed by the Intellectual Property Division of High Courts following the abolition of the Board) which traditionally handled compulsory licensing and conflicts such as royalty rates. Although not specifically an infringement remedy, these mechanisms can indirectly facilitate enforcement – e.g., by issuing a statutory license to permit use of a work (thereby pre-empting an infringement action if the user pays royalties determined by the Board).
ENFORCEMENT CHALLENGES
Enforcement of copyright in the digital space is fraught with technical challenges. These encompass jurisdictional obstacles presented by foreign-hosted infringing material, the anonymity of infringers online, and the dizzying scale and pace of digital uploads. Dynamic injunctions and notice-based takedown notices have enhanced responsiveness, but flouting by repeat infringers and platform evasion strategies remain.
At the center of enforcement in the digital world is the position of intermediaries. Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides conditional immunity for intermediaries, insulating them from liability for third-party content if they are merely passive conduits. But this protection is subject to response to takedown notices in a timely manner and non-involvement or inducement in or of infringement. In MySpace v. Super Cassettes, the Delhi High Court held that intermediaries are only liable when they possess actual knowledge of some infringing content and do not act. This settled that a validly issued takedown notice is enough to impose knowledge. The 2021 IT Rules[10] also require intermediaries, particularly influential platforms, to adopt instant grievance redressal mechanisms and, as and when needed, automated content identification mechanisms.
However, the difference between active and passive intermediaries is still of central importance. Sites that host or facilitate infringing content or that incorporate unlicensed media into their functionality are active participants and hence are not safe from liability. As such, intermediary liability is a dynamic concept of law in India, changing with judicial precedent and awaiting regulatory modernization under the pending Digital India Act.
CONCLUSION
India’s copyright legislation is adapting to accommodate technological growth. Future changes under the new Digital India Act can potentially reframe safe harbor provisions, especially for AI and blockchain environments. The parliamentary committee has already called for amendments to cover AI-generated content and more effective enforcement mechanisms. Increasing fair dealing for digital learning and parody, and more cross-border cooperation are also being considered.
In summary, Indian copyright law demonstrates a strong intention to safeguard creators while embracing digital realities. Courts have been creative with remedies such as dynamic injunctions, and legislations are becoming tech-savvy. Nevertheless, effective enforcement and clarity in policies are essential to sustain the balance between innovation and protection. A responsive and inclusive regime of copyright will make India both a digital innovator and an intellectual property rights defender. Indian experience thus far indicates a seesaw balancing act underway. Courts have delivered landmark rulings that establish significant precedents, such as demanding actual knowledge for intermediary liability (thus safeguarding online platforms from excessive burden), but also creating dynamic injunctions to assist rights holders against constantly changing online piracy strategies. The history of copyright in India’s information era is thus one of development, balance, and optimism that technology and law can march together, each supporting the advantages of the other.
REFERENCES
[1] Copyright Act, No. 14 of 1957, INDIA CODE (1957), https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/1367
[2] Information Technology Act, No. 21 of 2000, INDIA CODE (2000), https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/1999/1/A2000-21%20%281%29.pdf.
[3] Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO, Annex 1C, 1869 U.N.T.S. 299.
[4] Indian Copyright Office, Office Order on AI-Generated Work (RAGHAV case), 2020
[5] Standing Comm. on Commerce, Rajya Sabha, 161st Report: Review of the Intellectual Property Rights Regime in India (July 2021), https://rajyasabha.nic.in/rsnew/Committee_site/Committee_File/ReportFile/13/161_2021_9_12.pdf.
[6] MySpace Inc. v. Super Cassettes Indus. Ltd., 2016 SCC OnLine Del 6382
[7] UTV Software Commc’n Ltd. v. 1337x.to & Ors., 2019 SCC OnLine Del 8002
[8] The Chancellor, Masters & Scholars of the Univ. of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Servs., 2016 SCC OnLine Del 4936.
[9] T-Series v. Roposo & Ors., CS(COMM) 395/2020 (Del. HC)
[10] Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, G.S.R. 139(E) (Feb. 25, 2021) (India).
