LLM Group 3 Law of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Copyrights Law and other related rights 2025-26 - Set 2 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: two limbs, and the second is where the marks are. Define infringement from SECTION 51 itself, distinguishing primary from secondary infringement, because a candidate who only says "copying without permission" has not used the Act. Then take substantial similarity properly: it exists because copyright protects expression and not idea, so the court must decide how much expression has been taken. Work R.G. Anand in full, because it is the governing Indian authority and its seven propositions are the answer. Add the film cases, the modern software approach, and finish on what artificial intelligence has done to the test, using the July 2026 ruling.

What infringement is, under the Act

Section 51 of the Copyright Act, 1957 defines infringement and divides it in two.

Two features follow. Primary infringement is a STRICT LIABILITY wrong: intention, motive and knowledge are irrelevant to the civil claim, though they matter to remedies and to the offence under section 63. Secondary infringement, by contrast, is built on knowledge, which is why section 51(a)(ii) has its own defence of absence of reasonable ground for belief.

Why substantial similarity exists at all

Copyright does not protect ideas. It protects the expression in which an idea is clothed. Article 9(2) of the TRIPS Agreement states the rule for the trading system: copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such. Section 13 of the Indian Act says copyright subsists in WORKS, and section 14 defines the rights by reference to the work.

The consequence is that a defendant who takes the idea takes nothing actionable, and a defendant who reproduces the work verbatim plainly infringes. Every real case is between the two, and the question the court must answer is whether what was taken is a SUBSTANTIAL PART of the expression. Substantiality is assessed qualitatively rather than by counting: a short but central passage can be substantial where a long but banal one is not.

2. Where the same idea is being developed in a different manner, similarities are bound to occur; the court must determine whether the similarities are on fundamental or substantial aspects of the mode of expression.
3. The surest and safest test is to see whether the reader, spectator or viewer, after having read or seen both works, is clearly of the opinion and gets an unmistakable impression that the subsequent work appears to be a copy of the original.
4. Where the theme is the same but is presented and treated differently, the subsequent work becomes a completely new work and there is no infringement.
5. Where apart from the similarities there are material and broad dissimilarities which negative the intention to copy, and the coincidences are clearly incidental, no infringement comes into existence.
6. As violation of copyright amounts to an act of piracy, it must be proved by clear and cogent evidence after applying the tests above.
7. Where the question is of infringement of the copyright in a play by a film, the task is more difficult, because a film has a much broader perspective, a wider field and a bigger background, and infringement arises only where the film is a SUBSTANTIAL AND MATERIAL COPY of the play.

The Delhi High Court departed from that in MRF Limited v. Metro Tyres Limited, 2019 SCC OnLine Del 8973, judgment of 1 May 2019, on a complaint that the defendant's advertisement copied the plaintiff's. The Court held that a cinematograph film must itself be ORIGINAL to attract copyright under section 13(3)(a), that the expression "to make a copy of the film" in section 14(d)(i) is not confined to making a physical copy, and that the test of SUBSTANTIAL SIMILARITY applies to films as it does to other works, so a film may infringe another film if it is substantially, fundamentally, essentially and materially similar. That is now the better view and the one to state.

The test applied to software and compilations

Where the work is functional, the difficulty is that expression and idea merge. The technique developed in the United States in Computer Associates International Inc v. Altai Inc, 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992), and used in India in argument, is ABSTRACTION, FILTRATION AND COMPARISON: break the program into levels of abstraction, filter out at each level what is dictated by efficiency, by external factors or taken from the public domain, and compare only the protectable core that remains.

What is not infringement, and why it matters to the test

A finding of substantial similarity does not end the case, because section 52 removes a long list of acts from infringement altogether. The most important are section 52(1)(a), fair dealing with any work other than a computer programme for private or personal use including research, criticism or review, and the reporting of current events; section 52(1)(i), reproduction by a teacher or pupil in the course of instruction; and section 52(1)(zb), reproduction in an accessible format for persons with disability.

The reach of section 52(1)(i) was settled by the Division Bench of the Delhi High Court in The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Services, judgment of 9 December 2016. Three publishers sued a photocopy shop and Delhi University over course packs of extracts compiled for students. The Court held that the preparation of course packs falls within section 52(1)(i) and requires no licence, because reproduction by a teacher in the course of instruction is not confined to the physical classroom, and it remitted for trial only the factual question whether the particular inclusions were necessary for the purpose of instruction.

Three holdings matter for substantial similarity. First, the Court accepted that storing copyright works for the purpose of training falls within the scope of copyright, so the activity is not outside the Act; it must be tested against the exceptions. Second, it held that the training here was FAIR DEALING under section 52(1)(a), being an internal research process, limited in its use, not a substitute for ANI's works, with no demonstrated harm to market share, and with a public interest in technological innovation weighing in the balance. Third, on the outputs, it applied the idea and expression distinction directly: copyright protects only the original expression and not the underlying FACTS, and since ANI's articles postdated the completion of training, the responses complained of were more likely generated by retrieval augmented generation than reproduced from memorised data.

The order is INTERIM. The merits go to trial, and an answer that presents it as settled law is overstating it. What it establishes for now is that the machine's ingestion of a work is tested under section 52 rather than treated as automatic infringement, and that an output which conveys the same facts in different words is not a substantial reproduction of expression.

Conclusion. Copyright infringement under section 51 is of two kinds: doing without authority any act reserved to the owner by section 14, which is strict, and dealing in infringing copies or permitting a place to be used for infringing communication, which turns on knowledge. Because the Act protects expression and not idea, the operative question in almost every contested case is whether a SUBSTANTIAL part of the expression was taken, and the governing test is the seven propositions of R.G. Anand, of which the third, the unmistakable impression of a copy formed by the reader, spectator or viewer, is the one the courts apply. The test now reaches films on the same footing as other works after MRF v. Metro Tyres in 2019, and it is measured against the protectable additions alone after Eastern Book Company. Even substantial similarity yields to section 52, as the course pack litigation showed in December 2016. And since 24 July 2026 the same two questions, is this expression and is it fairly dealt with, are being asked of a machine.