{"id":150245,"date":"2026-08-03T08:00:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T02:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/?p=150245"},"modified":"2026-08-02T19:00:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T13:30:26","slug":"copyright-act-amendment-dpiit-public-consultation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/copyright-act-amendment-dpiit-public-consultation\/","title":{"rendered":"Copyright Act Amendment: Here&#8217;s What We Know So Far, and What We Don&#8217;t"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>What We&#8217;ve Learned<\/h2>\n<p>A letter addressed to the Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (&#8220;DPIIT&#8221;), which has come to our attention, indicates that DPIIT may be at an advanced stage of preparing an amendment to the Copyright Act, 1957 (&#8220;Copyright Act&#8221;). The letter, dated 23 July 2026, was signed by Prof. N.S. Gopalakrishnan (former MHRD IPR Chair Professor, Cochin University of Science and Technology), Prof. Lawrence Liang (Professor, School of Law, BML Munjal University), and Prof. Arul George Scaria (Professor, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru).<\/p>\n<p>It is worth being precise about what is, and is not, confirmed at this stage. No draft Bill has been made public, and DPIIT has not issued any notification or call for consultations on its website as of the date of this post. The letter itself states only that its signatories understand DPIIT &#8220;is at an advanced stage of finalising an Amendment,&#8221; without setting out the contents of any draft. DPIIT has not, to our knowledge, issued any public statement confirming or denying this. Readers should treat the existence and contents of any amendment as unconfirmed, and this post as reporting on the letter alone, not as a statement of fact about DPIIT&#8217;s plans or intentions.<\/p>\n<h2>What the Letter Asks For<\/h2>\n<p>The letter does not oppose an amendment. It records support for updating the Copyright Act to reflect the technological change since the last amendment in 2012, while asking DPIIT for three things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ol>\n<li>Public disclosure of the draft Bill, sufficiently in advance of its introduction in Parliament, to allow for informed comments;<\/li>\n<li>A structured, open consultation process that specifically invites universities, faculty associations, student bodies, and library and archival professionals, alongside industry associations and rights-holder bodies; and<\/li>\n<li>Adequate time for these stakeholders to respond, proportionate to the scope and complexity of the changes proposed.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The letter&#8217;s stated concern is access to education. It notes that a large share of students now rely on e-books, online databases, and digital classrooms, including government platforms such as SWAYAM and DIKSHA, and that any copyright reform will set the legal terms on which that access continues. The letter frames this as a reason for the education community specifically to be included among the stakeholders consulted, alongside the other constituencies with a stake in copyright reform, such as industry, authors, and publishers.<\/p>\n<h2>Context: The 2012 Amendment<\/h2>\n<p>The letter points to the 2012 amendment as an example of a consultative process, one that ran for several years and included direct engagement with a range of stakeholders. It attributes two of that amendment&#8217;s outcomes, the exceptions permitting reproduction and adaptation of copyrighted works for persons with disabilities, and the non-assignable right of lyricists, composers, and authors of underlying literary and musical works to a share of royalties from their films&#8217; commercial exploitation, to the participation of disability rights organisations and writers&#8217; associations respectively. This is the letter&#8217;s own account of that history, offered in support of its request for a similarly open process this time.<\/p>\n<h2>Our View<\/h2>\n<p>On substance, we hope any amendment does what copyright reform is meant to do: keep the incentive for authors and rights-holders intact while updating the Act for a world of e-books, digital classrooms, and AI, without losing sight of the public&#8217;s interest in access to knowledge along the way. That balance is inherently a matter on which reasonable people, including rights-holders, educators, and technology companies, will weigh in differently, which is precisely why we think it should be worked out in the open rather than behind closed doors. On process, we have a clearer view: this amendment would benefit from being published for public comment well before it is introduced in Parliament, with genuine time and space for industry, authors, publishers, educational institutions, students, and disability rights groups to weigh in. Government departments have real constraints, from inter-ministerial coordination to the technical difficulty of a subject like AI and copyright, and we do not read a measured pace as evidence of anything untoward. But measured and closed are different things, and an amendment of this consequence deserves the more open of the two.<\/p>\n<p>The 2012 amendment is the strongest argument for this, and it happens to be DPIIT&#8217;s own track record: it took years, invited the stakeholders it eventually helped, and produced provisions that have held up well since. We would encourage DPIIT to follow the same path here, not because anything so far suggests it will not, but because it is the surer way to get an amendment that lasts.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Authored by Gaurav Mishra, IP Attroney, BananaIP Counsels<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A letter to the Secretary, DPIIT signals that a Copyright Act amendment may be underway, though no draft Bill has been made public. Academics are urging an open, structured consultation before it reaches Parliament. Here is what is confirmed and what remains unknown about this Copyright Act amendment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":150246,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[13132,2069,3218,13130,3835,6967,13131,5517,13129],"class_list":["post-150245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-intellectual-property","category-copyrights","tag-2012-copyright-amendment","tag-copyright-act-1957","tag-copyright-amendment","tag-digital-access-to-education","tag-dpiit","tag-higher-education","tag-legislative-process","tag-public-consultation","tag-stakeholder-engagement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150247,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150245\/revisions\/150247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}