This post has been co-authored with Charan Ashok. Charan is a fifth-year B.A., LL.B (Hons) student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
The Delivery of Books Act, 1956 (“DB Act”), one of India’s most forgotten statutes, has been amended via the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act 2026. The said Amendment Act was notified in the e-Gazette on 8th April, 2026 and has come into force. The amendments modify the penalty provisions of the DB Act and substitute them with an ISBN-based penalty for non-compliance. DB Act mandates the deposit of any publication made in India with four national libraries, this partly ensures that the creative production which the Copyright Act enables is also publicly available for readers, at least in these four libraries. Thus, this Act plays an important role in terms of facilitating access to knowledge. Akshat Agrawal has traced history and made some important proposals regarding the DB Act here and here. Also refer to Swaraj and Amisha’s post here.
In this post, Charan and I examine the recent amendments, assess their effectiveness, and argue for a broader reconceptualization of legal deposit within the copyright framework.
What are the Amendments?
Previously, Section 5 imposed a fine of up to ₹50 for non-compliance, along with a fine equivalent to the value of the book where the contravention concerned a book.
This penalty has been the same since the DB Act’s inception in 1954. A 2008 Bill sought to amend the penalty provisions to “five thousand rupees or hundred times the value of the book, whichever is more”, however it never went forward. The 2008 Bill, in its statement of objects and reasons had noted the following: “The enhanced penalty will ensure compliance of the law intended to extend financial support out of commercial establishments earnings in discharge of the social obligation …”. Deposit under the DB Act must not merely be understood as a social obligation, but as the other end of the bargain underlying copyright protection [read more here – Akshat Agrawal (Part 1 and Part 2)].
The Amendment now completely does away with financial penalties and also omits the provision on cognizance of offences, which enabled an empowered officer to initiate a complaint in Court. The new penalty is now linked to the International Standard Book Number (“ISBN”). Under the new provision a publisher is first given 30 days’ notice and an opportunity to cure the contravention. If the contravention persists, the publisher’s ISBN registration is suspended and it is debarred from obtaining an ISBN for up to one year, or until the required books are deposited, whichever is earlier. Continued non-compliance ultimately results in permanent cancellation of ISBN registration and permanent debarment from obtaining an ISBN.
The provision is reproduced below (alt-text for accessibility linked here, PDF page 23):
Is it effective?
ISBN is a unique number that is meant for monograph publications. An ISBN is essentially a product identifier used by publishers, booksellers, libraries, internet retailers, and other supply chain participants for ordering, listing, sales records, and stock control purposes. While having an ISBN is not legally required, it is commercially essential given its functions. Thus, framing the consequence of non-compliance in terms of stripping the ISBN or barring registration seems to be an effective solution to induce compliance, given that publishers would face a lot of hurdles in terms of distribution and logistics without an ISBN.
But here is the major problem: any publisher who fails to comply with the DB Act “shall be given an opportunity to fulfil the conditions of the Act or to remedy the contravention within thirty days on the service of a notice informing them of the contravention”. The ISBN-linked penalties apply only if the publisher continues non-compliance post those 30 days. This creates two major issues:
- Shifting the incentive away from compliance!
The publishers do not have any incentive to make a legal deposit themselves. They can always wait for the notice to be issued, which provides them 30 days to make the deposit and move on. At the first instance, the onus here is not on the publishers at all, given that they have a strong safeguard built into the penalty provision. In effect, the provision does not punish non-compliance; it punishes only non-compliance after detection. This directly renders otiose the mandate under Section 3 to deposit a publication “within thirty days from the date of its publication”. Why are publishers being given this safeguard? What happened to ignorance of law not being an excuse? If barring ISBN issuance is considered an extreme measure at the first instance, a more proportionate mechanism would be to impose a monetary penalty for non-compliance, while allowing a 30-day period to remedy the contravention. If non-compliance persists beyond this period, ISBN-related penalties could then apply.
- Shifting the burden onto under-resourced, complacent libraries
Second, this effectively shifts the onus to monitor compliance with the legal deposit mandate from publishers to the recipient libraries. The libraries will have to bear considerable costs to monitor compliance given the breadth of the task while they lack the administrative capacity and resources to do so. One of the key problems for the failure of legal deposit in India has been the complacency of these recipient libraries (acknowledged by one of the recipient libraries themselves here – “Unfortunately over the years this commitment to discharge their obligations weakened on the part of many publishers, a process unfortunately assisted by our failure to remind and urge them to keep to the law.”). Thus, the onus is now on recipient libraries – the very institutions whose lack of administrative capacity caused the old regime to fail.
Here are some recent numbers from the National Library of India located in Kolkata (one of the recipient libraries under the DB Act, which further buttress our argument that recipient libraries have been complacent and that publishers continue to remain non-compliant in the absence of both a carrot and a stick.:
| Number of books received under the DB Act | Estimated number of monographs published in India (based on ISBN, accessed from a recent study) | |
| 2024-25 – 26,644 | 2025 – 6,29,206 | |
| 2023-24 – 24,171 | 2024 – 5,05,073 | |
The gap is striking: against 5.05 lakh ISBNs issued in 2024 and 6.29 lakh in 2025, the National Library received only 24,171 and 26,644 deposits respectively, roughly 4.5% of the corresponding ISBN issuances.
Towards a Stronger Legal Deposit Regime
The Library of Congress in the US receives a large number of items under its legal deposit obligation – about 15,000 items per working day! What has worked well there? Subhas Biswas argues that, in the US, because legal deposit is embedded within copyright law, “that legal deposit provision is more effective and acceptable to authors and publishers of this country.” We agree with Biswas: linking legal deposit to copyright protection and enforcement could provide a much stronger incentive for compliance.
Akshat argues for recoupling deposit to copyright in a manner permitted by the Berne Convention: copyright would arise on creation, but stronger remedies, such as injunctions, accounts of profits and enhanced damages, would be available only upon deposit. This preserves basic enforcement rights while creating a meaningful incentive for publishers to deposit. Such a mechanism is called, as Christopher Jon Sprigman puts it, “new-style” formalities, and notes that “formalities that operate by expanding or contracting access to remedies based on compliance with some prerequisite are precisely the type of arrangement that article 5(2) permits”.
Other broader structural reforms are necessary to bridge the existing gap:
First, the print-centric regime must be expanded to include digitally published works (Biswas). Digital publications should similarly be deposited (allowed to be stored on the library’s server or deposited physically) to ensure that they remain accessible, given the prevalence of paywalls which inhibit access to such works.
Second, the depository system should be decentralised and interconnected (inspired by comments made by Mr. Madan Muthu and Prof. Arul Scaria at the Roundtable on ‘Copyright in Practice: Perspectives from Archives and Libraries’, National Law School of India University, 28 March 2026). Legal deposit should not result in a centralised archive accessible only to a few; instead, the framework should provide for a larger number of depositories and beneficiary libraries spread across India. These libraries could also digitise deposited works and share them with other recognised libraries, facilitating greater interconnection of library resources and public access.
Finally, legal deposit should be reconceptualised as a facet of user rights, with a constitutional grounding through the horizontal application of Article 19(1)(a). This is consistent with the Delhi High Court’s observation in Wiley Eastern v IIM (1995) that the purpose of Section 52 is to protect freedom of expression under Article 19(1)(a), including research and private study. More recently, in ANI v OpenAI (2026), the Court expressly recognised Section 52 as defining the rights and privileges of users in respect of copyrighted works. This reconceptualization also accords with the K.P. Sinha Committee’s proposal to recognise “the right of every citizen to have free access to educational, scientific and cultural records of the country among his Fundamental Rights”.
Conclusion
The Jan Vishwas Amendment is a step away from the DB Act’s obsolete ₹50 penalty, but an ISBN-based penalty alone cannot fix a system in which non-compliance largely goes undetected. A more effective regime must place meaningful responsibility on publishers, while addressing the administrative limitations of depository libraries. More fundamentally, legal deposit should be understood not merely as a social obligation, but as part of the bargain underlying copyright protection. Reconnecting deposit with copyright remedies, extending it to digital publications, and building a decentralised network of accessible repositories could transform legal deposit from a neglected statutory obligation into a meaningful mechanism for preserving and facilitating access to India’s knowledge commons.
We would like to thank Praharsh Gour for his valuable inputs and for reviewing this post.
