The DPDP Juggernaut Rolls On Without a Driver, While Delhi HC Drops an AI Copyright Bombshell

A Perilous Momentum for Tech and IP Lawyers in 2026

If you are advising tech companies, media houses, or data fiduciaries in 2026, the regulatory ground beneath your feet is fracturing. The Supreme Court has officially begun hearing a slew of constitutional and statutory challenges to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and the newly notified DPDP Rules, 2025. Yet, the apex court has drawn a hard line: there will be no interim stay on the law’s operation.

For practicing lawyers, this refusal to hit pause is the single most important takeaway. The compliance clock is ticking loudly, forcing corporate counsel to allocate massive budgets for a regime that is simultaneously under constitutional scrutiny and structurally headless.

The RTI Paradox and Section 44(3) Litigation

The core of the Supreme Court’s current headache—and the reason it has referred petitions to a larger bench—is the DPDP Act's surgical strike on the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Through Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, the legislature amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. Previously, personal information could be disclosed under the RTI Act if a Public Information Officer deemed it in the "larger public interest." The DPDP Act entirely strips away this public interest exemption, effectively creating a blanket ban on the disclosure of personal data by public authorities. Petitions from The Reporters’ Collective and others rightly argue this severely cripples journalistic and activist access to government records.

"The Supreme Court’s refusal to grant interim relief against the masking or deletion of already available data means that public authorities are currently operating behind an impenetrable, data-protection-justified shield. For litigators, this means traditional discovery and information-gathering via RTI is dead in the water until the larger bench rules."

But here is the absurd reality of practice in mid-2026: while the Supreme Court refuses to stay the law, the Data Protection Board (DPB)—the very teeth of the DPDP Act—remains headless. It is established in law, but lacks an appointed Chairperson or Members. We are advising clients to strictly comply with a law that currently has no active enforcer. With Consent Manager obligations under Rule 4 scheduled to become operational in November 2026, data fiduciaries must build out technical architecture for a regulator that exists only on paper.

The AI Blindspot: Section 8(5) and Employee Use

While the constitutional battles rage, a massive blindspot is emerging for corporate compliance teams regarding Artificial Intelligence. Under Section 8(5) of the DPDP Act, a Data Fiduciary must protect personal data in its possession by taking reasonable security safeguards to prevent data breaches.

However, employees are routinely feeding proprietary and personal client data into public Large Language Models (LLMs) to draft emails, summarize documents, or write code. If an employee inputs a client's personal data into an external AI tool, it is unequivocally a data breach under the DPDP Act. Practicing lawyers must stop treating AI as purely an IT issue and start treating it as a critical DPDP liability. If you haven't drafted a watertight, highly restrictive internal AI Acceptable Use Policy for your clients, you are leaving them exposed to massive future penalties.

Delhi High Court’s AI Copyright Bombshell

If the DPDP landscape is chaotic, the IP landscape has just been hit by a seismic shock. In a parallel 2026 development that every IP practitioner needs to scrutinize, the Delhi High Court expressed a prima facie view in the highly watched OpenAI v. ANI matter that is bound to cause sleepless nights for publishers and content creators.

The Court suggested that training an LLM on copyrighted literary works might fall within the ambit of Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957, which permits fair dealing for private or personal use, including research.

Let’s be direct: equating the mass, systematic scraping of proprietary data to train a multi-billion-dollar commercial AI model with "private research" stretches the legislative intent of Section 52(1)(a) to its absolute breaking point.

If this interpretation crystallizes into binding precedent, the implications are staggering:

• For AI Developers: India instantly becomes a global safe haven for AI training, shielded by a broad interpretation of fair dealing.
• For Media/Publishers: Copyright infringement suits against AI companies will fail at the threshold. IP lawyers will have to pivot away from traditional copyright litigation and instead focus on contract law (Terms of Service violations) or deploying Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) to block scrapers.

The Bottom Line for Practitioners

The convergence of a non-stayed DPDP Act, a headless regulatory board, and courts stretching century-old IP concepts to accommodate GenAI means that waiting for legal clarity is no longer a viable strategy.

Lawyers must adopt a dual-track approach: aggressively implement DPDP compliance structures (especially regarding Consent Managers and internal AI data-flow) assuming the law will survive intact, while simultaneously advising content-heavy clients to erect technical and contractual paywalls to protect their IP, because the Copyright Act may no longer save them from the AI machine.