Exceptions for Courts, Legislatures and Public Life

In one line

The State's own documents, the courts' own records and the legislature's own papers can be reproduced, and so can a public speech reported as news and an article on current affairs.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: clauses (d), (e), (f), (g), (m), (q) and (r) of section 52(1) of the Copyright Act, 1957 take out of infringement the reproduction of a work for a judicial proceeding or a report of one, works prepared by a Secretariat of a Legislature for its members, certified copies made under any law, the reading or recitation in public of reasonable extracts from a published literary or dramatic work, the reproduction of an article on current topics unless the right is reserved, the reproduction or publication of Gazette matter, Acts, committee reports and judgments, and translations into Indian languages of Acts, rules and orders.

Why the law has this at all

Because a citizen must be able to read the law. An Act, a rule, a Gazette notification and a judgment are the terms on which people live, and a copyright that stopped them being reproduced would be intolerable.

Because a court must be able to work. Documents are exhibited, quoted, copied and reported, and none of that can wait for a licence.

And because public speech is public. A lecture delivered in public, a speech in a legislature, an article on current politics: these are made to be heard and discussed.

Courts and legislatures

Clause (d), judicial proceedings. "The reproduction of any work for the purpose of a judicial proceeding or for the purpose of a report of a judicial proceeding."

Two limbs. Reproduction for the proceeding itself, which covers exhibits, pleadings and compilations; and reproduction for a report of it, which covers law reporting and news reporting of cases.

Clause (e), legislatures. "The reproduction or publication of any work prepared by the Secretariat of a Legislature or, where the Legislature consists of two Houses, by the Secretariat of either House of the Legislature, exclusively for the use of the members of that Legislature."

Notice what it protects. Not the legislature's proceedings generally, but works prepared by the Secretariat exclusively for members, that is research notes, briefs and background papers.

Clause (f), certified copies. "The reproduction of any work in a certified copy made or supplied in accordance with any law for the time being in force." A certified copy of a registered document, a court record or a public register is not an infringement of the copyright in whatever it contains.

Public reading and current affairs

Clause (g), recitation. "The reading or recitation in public of reasonable extracts from a published literary or dramatic work."