SC Refuses DPDP Stay While MeitY Dumps AI Governance on Existing IP Laws: Why Tech Lawyers Can't Hit Snooze

The End of the "Wait and Watch" Era for Data Privacy

For corporate lawyers and tech policy teams who were secretly hoping for judicial intervention to delay India’s new data privacy regime, the Supreme Court just delivered a harsh reality check. While referring multiple constitutional challenges against the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 and the DPDP Rules, 2025 to a five-judge Constitution Bench, the apex court explicitly declined to stay the law’s operation. Simultaneously, the Centre has notified the administrative rules, setting the stage for a phased compliance rollout stretching into 2027.

The message from the bench is unmistakable: the constitutional validity of the Act will be debated in due course, but compliance starts now. For practicing lawyers, advising Data Fiduciaries to delay their privacy audits pending the Constitution Bench's verdict is no longer just risky; it is bordering on professional negligence.

The RTI Crisis: Pitting Article 19(1)(a) Against Article 21

The most legally explosive aspect of the current litigation—and the primary reason for the Constitution Bench referral—is the existential threat the DPDP Act poses to the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. Petitioners have rightly targeted Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, which brazenly amends Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act.

Prior to this amendment, Section 8(1)(j) protected personal information from RTI disclosure unless the Public Information Officer (PIO) was satisfied that a larger public interest justified the disclosure. It was a statutory embodiment of the proportionality test. The DPDP Act obliterates this balance. It mandates a blanket exemption for all "personal information," stripping the PIO of any discretion to weigh public interest.

"By removing the public interest carve-out in Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, the legislature has weaponized privacy to shield the administrative state from transparency. This is a fundamental misreading of K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, which held that privacy is not absolute and must be balanced against competing rights, including the right to know under Article 19(1)(a)."

If the Constitution Bench upholds this amendment, investigative journalism, civil society audits, and even routine legal fact-finding against state instrumentalities will hit a massive roadblock. Litigation strategy for writ petitions seeking mandamus for information disclosure will now have to heavily bypass the RTI Act and rely directly on constitutional remedies.

MeitY’s AI Cop-Out: Forcing Square Pegs into Round IP Holes

While the privacy battle heads to the highest court, an equally consequential development is quietly unfolding in the technology law space. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has signaled a stark departure from the global trend of bespoke AI regulation. Instead of drafting a localized equivalent of the EU AI Act, the government intends to shoehorn AI governance into existing frameworks—specifically, the DPDP Act and current Intellectual Property laws.

From a practice perspective, this is a dangerous gamble that dumps the heavy lifting of AI regulation onto an already overburdened and archaic IP framework. The Copyright Act, 1957 was simply not drafted with Large Language Models (LLMs) or generative AI in mind.

If the government refuses to amend the law, IP litigators are going to be fighting frontier technological battles using mid-20th-century legal tools. Consider the issue of AI training data scraping. Is scraping copyrighted literary or artistic works to train a commercial AI model an infringement under Section 14, or does it fall under the "fair dealing" exception for research under Section 52(1)(a)?

Without statutory clarification, we are looking at years of fractured jurisprudence from various High Courts. IP lawyers representing artists and publishers should aggressively pursue injunctions against AI developers, capitalizing on the lack of a specific "text and data mining" (TDM) exception in Indian copyright law. Conversely, tech counsels will be forced to stretch the interpretation of "transformative use" to its absolute breaking point to defend their clients.

Takeaways for the Modern Practitioner

The convergence of these developments dictates a major shift in how tech and IP practices must operate over the next 12 to 24 months:

1. Stop Waiting for the SC: The refusal of interim relief on the DPDP Act means the notified administrative rules are the law of the land. General Counsels must immediately map existing data flows, overhaul consent architectures (especially regarding verifiable parental consent for users under 18), and prepare for the 2027 compliance cliff.

2. Prepare for a Spate of IP Litigation: MeitY’s reliance on existing IP laws for AI governance means the courtroom, not the parliament, will dictate India's AI policy. Lawyers should prepare for high-stakes copyright infringement suits regarding data scraping, and trademark disputes over AI-generated deepfakes.

3. The RTI Workaround: For litigators reliant on the RTI Act for evidence gathering, the immediate future looks bleak. Until the five-judge bench resolves the challenge to Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, expect PIOs to aggressively deny requests under the guise of "personal information." Lawyers must get creative, utilizing discovery procedures under the CPC or specific statutory disclosure mandates rather than relying on the RTI route.

The Indian tech law landscape is currently defined by legislative aggression on privacy and legislative apathy on AI. For the sharp practitioner, navigating this chaos is where the true value lies.