Large-scale web scraping for AI and advertising raises questions of copyright, privacy and competition. Discuss whether India's existing legal framework is adequate.

Web scraping means software bots pulling content from websites automatically. It now supplies the data for generative AI and targeted advertising. Meta's revised Commercial Terms, effective 30 October 2026, let its crawlers enter any website "associated with" a business account. Consent comes from a click-through contract with no opt-out [1]. India's laws cover parts of this problem but leave large gaps.

Copyright: Copyright Act, 1957

• Strength: Section 52 sets out acts that do not infringe copyright, including fair dealing. Section 51 defines infringement [2].
• Gap: In ANI v OpenAI (interim order, 2026), the Delhi High Court held prima facie that storing news content to train a model was fair dealing [3]. The law has no text-and-data-mining rule and no machine-readable opt-out. Publishers cannot stop bulk scraping in advance.

Privacy: DPDP Act, 2023 and Article 21

• Strength: The Act rests on consent and purpose limitation, and it is now in force through the 2025 Rules [4]. It builds on the right to privacy upheld in Puttaswamy (2017).
• Gap: Section 3(c)(ii) excludes personal data that a person has made public [4]. Scraped public profiles therefore fall largely outside the Act. robots.txt, the file websites use to tell bots what they may read, has no legal force. Meta says it respects robots.txt, but its terms do not promise this [1].

Competition: Competition Act, 2002

• Strength: In 2024 the CCI fined Meta ₹213.14 crore under Section 4 (abuse of dominance). It held that WhatsApp's 2021 privacy update, which users had to accept with no opt-out, was abuse of dominance [5].
• Gap: That case began in 2021 and was decided only in 2024. Penalties after the harm come too late. Meta's crawler terms bind more than 200 million businesses through bundled consent: buying ads also means accepting crawling [1].

Overall assessment

• The three laws work separately. No single law covers crawler consent, payment for publishers' content or the position of dominant platforms that control data.
• The Committee on Digital Competition Law (2024) proposed ex-ante rules (rules set before harm occurs) for Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises, but the draft Bill is still pending [6].

India's framework has the right basic principles but does not yet fit large-scale scraping. Four steps would close the gaps:

• a statutory text-and-data-mining opt-out with fair payment to content owners;
• narrowing the DPDP exemption for public data;
• giving robots.txt preferences legal force;
• enacting the Digital Competition Bill.

Together these would protect privacy under Article 21 and fair competition while still leaving room for AI innovation under the IndiaAI Mission.