India
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
India's crawling legal landscape is genuinely unsettled. The IT Act 2000 §43 ('access without permission') and §66 (dishonest/fraudulent computer access) have not been definitively applied to public-page scraping, but the 2024 Rajya Sabha parliamentary record indicates the government's view that even public-data scraping may fall within §43's scope. The Copyright Act 1957 §52 fair dealing catalogue is closed-list and includes no TDM provision; the Delhi HC case ANI Media v. OpenAI (pending) may address AI training on copyrighted news content. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (DPDPA), with rules in 2025 and obligations phasing to May 2027, covers public personal data. No data-competition doctrine exists. Overall confidence is low given the lack of judicial precedent and active legislative flux.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | security mechanism bypass |
| Public-page carve-out | unsettled |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | unsettled |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | fair dealing narrow |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | prohibited |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | pending |
| Privacy regime | DPDPA 2023 (phased to 2027) |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-21. Confidence: low. Fast-moving area — verify before relying. Not legal advice.