This is in continuation of Part 1 which dealt with the pre-independence history of Library Deposits and its Coupling/De-Coupling with Copyright!
The scheme matured after independence. At a literacy rate near twelve per cent and in what the economist Malcolm Adiseshiah called a book famine, India enacted the Delivery of Books (Public Libraries) Act of 1954, Act 27 of 1954, for the promotion of public libraries and the encouragement of scholarship. Section 3 requires the publisher of every book published in India to deliver, free of charge and within thirty days, one copy to the National Library at Calcutta and one each to three other libraries, notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, and the definition of a book carries forward the colonial one, reaching journals, pamphlets, music and maps.
The Lok Sabha debate of 24 April 1954 records the legislators reasoning about deposit as the means by which a poor country would build the documentary basis of its learning. The Bill was moved by Dr. M. M. Das, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Education, on behalf of the Minister of Education, who set its object as securing four free copies of every publication for the National Library and three libraries to be notified. Shri S. S. More of Sholapur opposed it, on the constitutional ground that libraries fell within the State List and on the merits as a burden on a publishing trade that ran at a loss, which he called robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Law Minister, Shri Biswas, answered the constitutional point by reference to entry 62 of the Union List, which named the National Library, and observed that the Bill bound publishers rather than regulating libraries. The Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, said the way to build national libraries was by such legislation as had built the Bodleian, the University Library at Cambridge and the Edinburgh library through the right to call in published books, that there was no other way of building them up, and that the publicity served the publisher as much as the library. Asked to name the libraries, Nehru told the House that the four centres were Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Madras. Shri Joachim Alva recalled that Marx had written his famous book in the reading room of the British Museum, and that Indian students had gone there for books unavailable at home.
Two exchanges fixed the reach of the Act. A member moved to delete the words “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”, and the mover explained that without them a publisher could contract with the author that no copy be given away and so escape the duty, on which the amendment was withdrawn. Shri S. S. More then asked whether “published” reached a book printed in the United Kingdom or America but put on sale in India, and the Law Minister answered that the word was “published”, not “printed”, so that a book published in India fell within the Act even though it was also published abroad. A new clause applied the Act to books published by Government, save those for official use only, and the Bill was passed the same day.
The same Act severed the coupling it had inherited. Independent India placed deposit in a separate library statute unconnected to copyright, and the Copyright Act of 1957 made registration permissive, ending the constitutive role registration had held under the Act of 1847, so that copyright subsists and is enforced without regard to whether the public has received its copy. Section 5 set the fine for default at fifty rupees and the value of the book, the figure of the 1867 Act carried unrevised across 1947. Section 6 permits a court to take cognizance of a default only on the complaint of an officer the Central Government empowers, so that the libraries cannot prosecute and enforcement depends on an official without an incentive to act. The National Library, lacking the power to compel, requests publishers on its website to comply. A private member’s Bill of 2008 proposed to remove the cap of four libraries, raise the fine, and let any library user complain. It did not pass.
The Consequences of the Lapse
The decay of deposit displaced the access problem onto the fair-dealing exception of the 1957 Act, which the courts have read with breadth, holding in the Delhi University photocopy case that copyright exists to increase, and not to impede, the harvest of knowledge. The exception does little for a reader facing a journal behind a paywall, which is out of reach before fair dealing is in question. Indian research has moved to the shadow libraries, and the resulting litigation has continued for years. The 2025 block rested on a breached undertaking, and the fair-dealing defence was not adjudicated. The dispute over the legality of digital libraries addresses the same gap, which deposit would close from the other direction, because a copy held in a library survives the lapse of a subscription and the blocking of a site. How does a person entitled to use the research exemption use it without the deposit provisions being complied or being linked to the copyright regime? The foundation of the research exemption has been shaken as the premise itself is now rendered unworkable!
The structure repeats the colonial arrangement. Colonial deposit sent India’s books abroad and supplied the imperial archive with a permanent record without charge. The subscription sends India’s expenditure abroad and leaves India no permanent record.
The Reconstruction
The history points to the reform, which restores a coupling Indian law once held. Deposit should be recoupled to copyright in the form the Berne Convention permits. Berne prohibits making a formality a condition of the existence of copyright. It does not prohibit a formality as a condition of enforcement, provided the author retains a basic remedy, which is the basis on which the United States conditions statutory damages on registration without breach of the Convention. On that model copyright arises on creation, the author of an undeposited work retains the ordinary remedy against infringement, and the stronger remedies, the injunction, the account of profits and enhanced damages, depend on deposit of the public copy. Enforcement no longer waits on a complaint that is not made, because the publisher seeking those remedies has reason to deposit.
The obligation should reach works offered for sale to readers in India as well as works printed there, so that an article supplied to an Indian university through a foreign platform falls within it, the reading the Law Minister gave in 1954. The deposited work should be consultable in digital form at secure terminals within the libraries, one reader to one copy, without download, on the model operated by the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. Such a collection is the asset the existing digital-library schemes do not provide, because the National Digital Library of India links to content held elsewhere and holds no part of the in-copyright record. Legal deposit is an institution India enacted in 1954 and has not enforced. While it remains unused, the State proposes to spend six thousand crore rupees on access that a single enforced obligation would require publishers to provide. The copy is the public’s consideration for the grant of copyright, and the means of collecting it are within the existing law. They merely need to be enforced, albeit in a workable and thought manner.
Link to the Delivery of Books Public Libraries Bill – here
Link to the Delivery of Books Public Libraries Act – here
Link to the Parliamentary Debates concerning the enactment of the DB PL Act in 1953 – here
