Generative AI and Copyright Infringement: Deconstructing Fair Dealing Under Section 52 of the Indian Copyright Act

1. The Conflict Between Algorithmic Ingestion and Authorial Rights

The exponential growth of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models rests upon massive computational scraping of literary, artistic, and musical works. While US courts grapple with *New York Times v. OpenAI* and *Andersen v. Stability AI*, Indian courts face unique statutory constraints under the **Copyright Act, 1957**.

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2. The Narrow Scope of Indian Fair Dealing

Unlike Section 107 of the US Copyright Act—which provides an open-ended 4-factor test—Section 52 of the Indian Copyright Act is a **closed-list statutory exemption** (*exhaustively defined*).

Under Section 52(1)(a), fair dealing is only permitted for: 1. Private or personal use, including research; 2. Criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work; 3. The reporting of current events and current affairs.

Commercial machine learning training datasets do **not** neatly qualify as private research or review. Therefore, without a legislative Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception, commercial LLM scraping without licensing creates prima facie copyright infringement exposure under Section 51.