On 30 September 2026, Justice Bhambhani of the Delhi High Court dismissed Amazon's Article 227 petition. Amazon had asked to be removed as a defendant in author Vasundhara Prakash's copyright suit over an unauthorised Kindle edition of her book Fragments: You and I. According to MediaNama's report on the order, the court held that the "nature, extent and scope" of Amazon's role would require evidence. It also held that the trial court's description of Amazon as a "direct infringer" cannot be treated as conclusive. The ruling is narrow. It is also a useful reminder of what safe harbour in India does and does not do.
The case for keeping Amazon in
The strongest argument for the author is simple. A platform that merely hosts a file uploaded by a stranger is one thing. A platform that supplies the tools to convert a manuscript into its proprietary Kindle format, lists it, sells it and collects a share of the revenue looks more like a publisher. Section 79 of the IT Act, 2000 protects intermediaries from liability for third-party content. But under Section 79(2), that protection applies only where the intermediary's role is confined to providing access to a communication system. The intermediary must also not initiate the transmission, select the receiver, or select or modify the information, and it must observe due diligence. Section 79(3) removes the protection if the intermediary conspired, abetted, aided or induced the unlawful act. It also removes it if the intermediary fails to act promptly after gaining actual knowledge.
The author's claim is that Amazon's Kindle tooling and its handling of the listing go beyond passive hosting. MediaNama reports that she alleges the book stayed listed after Amazon assured her it would be removed, and that it was converted and sold on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Amazon denies this. Whether those tools amount to "selecting or modifying" information is a question of fact. A court cannot answer it from pleadings alone.
What the court actually decided
The High Court did not hold that Amazon infringed. It did not hold that Amazon lacks safe harbour either. It held that this question cannot be resolved on a deletion application at the threshold. It also found parts of the trial court's reasoning from 28 November 2023 "misconceived and misplaced", according to MediaNama's account. The most significant correction is to the label "direct infringer", which the trial court had attached to Amazon on the basis of its alleged role in converting and selling the book. Branding a defendant a direct infringer before any evidence is led pre-judges the very question the trial exists to answer.
This was also not the first time the case went up. According to MediaNama, in February 2020 Justice Prathiba M. Singh set aside the earlier deletion of Amazon from the suit, finding the trial court had approached the matter piecemeal. The 2026 order is therefore the second time a High Court bench has said that the intermediary question needs a full record.
Why this is still a problem for innovation
The legal outcome is defensible. The cost of it is not. The Kindle edition at the centre of the dispute was available for about 12 days, from 21 May to 2 June 2018. Amazon says estimated royalties were roughly Rs 6.17. The book is no longer listed. Yet in October 2026, eight years after the listing, the suit has not yet reached evidence on the central question.
That gap matters because safe harbour exists to give platforms predictability. If every fact-sensitive dispute over a platform's role takes most of a decade to resolve, the protection offers little to a smaller marketplace or publishing platform without Amazon's litigation budget. Such a company has little choice but to over-remove listings or demand heavy upfront verification from creators. Both outcomes hurt the self-published authors that tools like Kindle were built to serve.
The ruling also sits alongside the Supreme Court's reading of Section 79 in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015). As SFLC.in summarises, the Court read down Section 79 so that "actual knowledge" means a court order or a government notification, not a private complaint. That reading protects platforms from being forced to adjudicate every takedown demand. But it answers only the Section 79(3)(b) knowledge question. It does nothing for the threshold question of whether a platform qualifies as a passive intermediary at all. The Kindle case turns on that second question, and a platform that actively shapes the product can lose protection regardless of how quickly it responds to notices.
A proportionate way forward
None of this calls for stripping protection from marketplaces or for blanket immunity. A more proportionate approach has three parts:
- Early, structured fact-finding. Courts can order a preliminary trial limited to the intermediary-status issue, with defined discovery on the platform's tools, workflow and revenue handling, rather than leaving the question to ride along with the whole suit.
- Clear statutory language on hybrid platforms. Services that host user uploads but also provide conversion, formatting or distribution tools sit in a grey zone. Rule-making or guidance should say which functions are consistent with Section 79(2) and which are not.
- Preserving the court-order standard for notices. The answer to slow litigation should not be to push private takedown demands back onto platforms, which would reverse the free-speech gains of Shreya Singhal.
Copyright holders have a legitimate interest in fast remedies. An author whose work is sold without permission should not wait years for clarity. The way to serve them is faster, narrower adjudication of the intermediary question, not a wider liability net that makes every host a guarantor of what users upload.
What to watch
The District Commercial Court in South Delhi will now take evidence on Amazon's role. Its findings will matter beyond this book. They may help set out which marketplace functions look like hosting and which look like publishing. Until then, Amazon is a defendant, and its Section 79 defence is an argument to be proved rather than a shield that ends the case early.