The Fiction of Reproduction: Artificial Intelligence, Fair Dealing and the Judicial Reinvention of Copyright in Ani Media V. OpenAI

In this article, the authors attempt to analyse the Delhi High Court's recent 24th July 2026 judgement in the case of ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI Inc ., which is one of the first major Indian judicial rulings on copyright and generative AI. The decision stands out for its close engagement with both the technical workings of large language models as well as the language of the Copyright Act, further laying important doctrinal groundwork for future AI‐copyright disputes by insisting that established copyright concepts are to be read against the backdrop of LLM architecture. Even so, it leaves a significant question open, on how storage, machine learning, and reproduction relate to one another. The article argues that the Court's three‐factor fairness test draws on Berne Convention language to fashion a text‐and‐data‐mining exception, which is absent from Section 52's exhaustive list, while its fair‐dealing reasoning imports American transformative‐use doctrine into a statute built on different foundations. It lastly concludes by placing ANI within India's broader AI‐copyright reform efforts, including DPIIT's ongoing policy work, and flags the doctrinal and legislative gaps that the ruling leaves unaddressed.