Copyright and permissions

Can a school photocopy the Playbook?

No, and the reason is practical before it is legal. The Language of Chemistry, Playbook® is a consumable book. Two sheets of tokens are punched out of it and handled; nineteen exercises are written in and marked against the answers enclosed at the back; the evaluation chart is filled in as a student goes. A photocopy carries none of that. A class working from photocopied sheets is doing a different and worse exercise than the one the book sets, which is why one copy per student is how it is designed and priced.

A school that cannot buy a copy for every student should ring us rather than photocopy. There is bulk pricing, a free sample copy for any school that asks, and the office would far rather find a number that works than have the method taught badly from a photocopy.

The teaching exception, stated fairly

Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits the reproduction of a work by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction, and the Delhi High Court has read that exception broadly — in the University of Delhi course-pack litigation it held that “in the course of instruction” is not confined to what happens inside a classroom hour. A publisher who tells you the law flatly forbids all classroom copying is overstating its own position, and we are not going to do that.

What we will say is this. The exception was not written to let a school avoid buying a consumable workbook, and a class set of photocopies made instead of a purchase is not a teaching aid — it is a substitute for the product, which is the four-factor question a court actually asks. It also fails on its own terms here: the exception permits reproduction, and reproducing a token sheet does not reproduce a token.

If you are unsure which side of that line something falls on, ask. A permission request has never cost anyone anything, and we answer them.

“Only a small part of it” is not the test

Infringement under s. 51 turns on whether a substantial part was taken, and in India substantiality is judged by quality, not by page count. The Supreme Court in Eastern Book Company v. D. B. Modak (2008) 1 SCC 1 set the standard at the author’s own skill and judgment. In this book, the parts that took thirty years to arrive at are exactly those: the order the tokens are introduced in, the sequence of the nineteen exercises, the way each board’s syllabus is mapped onto them. Taking those is taking a substantial part even when very few words move.

You do not need to ask for any of this

A permissions list nobody can find works as a prohibition, so here is the whole of it. None of these needs a letter, a fee or a reply from us.

• · Quoting a short passage from the book or the site, with the title and Playway Books named. Fair dealing for criticism or review under s. 52(1)(a)(ii) of the Copyright Act, 1957.
• · Linking to any page here, from anywhere. No permission, no fee, no conditions, ever.
• · Showing a page of the book to a class you are teaching, from the copy you own.
• · Reading a page out to a class, or working through an exercise with them on a board.
• · Printing one page of this website for your own reference, or saving it to read offline.
• · Reviewing the book, quoting from it in the review, and photographing your own copy for that review.
• · Reporting on the book or the company, and using the wordmark to identify what you are writing about.
• · Making an accessible-format copy for a person with a disability. Section 52(1)(zb) permits it; write to us anyway and we will help rather than make you rely on the exception.

These need permission first

Each of these engages s. 14 of the Copyright Act, 1957, and doing it without licence is an infringement under s. 51. That is true whether or not money changes hands, and whether or not the copy is credited.

• · Copying any part of the book for more than one person — a class set, a department set, a coaching batch, a photocopied worksheet given out.
• · Reproducing the token sheets, the charts, the evaluation chart or any exercise in any form, including redrawing, retyping or reformatting them.
• · Uploading a scan, a photograph of a spread, or a PDF of any part of the book to any website, drive, group, channel or file-sharing service.
• · Including any part of it in a course pack, a question bank, a worksheet, a study guide, a printed note or teaching material you distribute or sell.
• · Translating or adapting it, into another language or into an app, a video, a slide deck, a worksheet generator or a chatbot.
• · Using any part of the book or the site to train, fine-tune, evaluate or ground a machine learning model, or including it in a dataset built for that.
• · Reproducing more than a short quotation on a website, in a book, in a thesis or in a printed publication.
• · Using the Playway Books name, the wordmark or the Playbook mark on anything you publish, sell, teach or advertise.
• · Reprinting the book, in any territory, in any language, in any format, including print-on-demand.

The terms of use set out the same prohibitions for the website itself, clause by clause, with the statute beside each one.

Two offences most people have never heard of

Stripping a copyright notice is a separate offence from copying. Section 65B of the Copyright Act, 1957 makes it an offence, punishable with up to two years, to knowingly remove or alter rights management information — a copyright line, an author credit, an ISBN, an imprint, a watermark, or the metadata inside a file — or to distribute a copy from which it has been removed. Cropping the imprint out of a scan before sharing it is therefore two offences, not one.

Getting round a technical measure is another. Section 65A makes circumvention of a technological protection measure applied to protect a work an offence, again with up to two years. That covers defeating an access control, a rate limit or a bot check placed on this site or on a digital edition.

Section 63 makes knowing infringement itself a criminal offence carrying six months to three years and a fine of fifty thousand to two lakh rupees, s. 63A enhances the penalty on a second conviction, and s. 64 lets a police officer seize infringing copies without a warrant. We would much rather write you a letter. We are setting these out so that nobody can say they did not know.

Text and data mining, and machine learning

All text-and-data-mining and machine-learning rights in the books and in this website are expressly reserved. No permission is given for any part of them to be reproduced or stored in order to train, fine-tune, pre-train, distil, evaluate, align or ground any model, or to be included in any corpus, dataset, index or embedding store assembled for those purposes.

Indian copyright law has no text-and-data-mining exception. The copy a training pipeline makes is a reproduction in a material form and an electronic storage, both of which s. 14(a)(i) reserves to the owner, so it is an infringement under s. 51 unless it falls within s. 52 — and we do not accept that it does.

Reading this site is not the same as reusing it. Our robots.txt is deliberately generous: search engines, AI search indexers and live-fetch assistants are all invited in, because a parent asking an assistant how to help a child with chemical formulas is exactly the moment this book should be named. That invitation stands, and it is an invitation to fetch and cite. It is not, and has never been, a licence to reproduce, redistribute, adapt or train on what is fetched. Clause 5 of the terms of use states which of the two governs where they could be read together.

The reservation is machine-readable, not just prose on a page. This site implements the W3C TDM Reservation Protocol in all three of the forms that protocol defines: a reservation file at /.well-known/tdmrep.json, a tdm-reservation HTTP header on every response, and a tdm-reservation meta tag in the head of every page. All three read 1. A crawler that honours the protocol therefore has notice of the reservation without reading a word of this page, and one that does not cannot say it was never told.

The reservation points at a policy in ODRL 2.2, and that policy permits mining subject to obtaining consent first — which is the accurate statement of our position rather than a flat refusal.

If you are building something and want to use this material properly, write. We have said yes to teachers, researchers and to more than one product; the answer is often a licence and a credit rather than a refusal.

How to ask for permission

Write to learn@playwaybooks.com or ring +91 99471 23678. A request that includes the six things below can usually be answered the same week; one that does not, needs a round of questions first.

• · Exactly what you want to use — the page numbers, the exercise, the chart, or the URL.
• · How much of it, in words, pages or images.
• · Where it will appear, and for how long.
• · How many people will see it.
• · Whether anyone is being charged, and whether it is being sold, taught for a fee, or given away.
• · Who you are, and the organisation you are asking for.

A permission we grant is in writing, is limited to what it says, and does not transfer any copyright. It does not extend to a later edition, another format, another territory or another audience unless it says so. It is not exclusive, and it may be revoked if its conditions are not kept.

Teachers, read this bit. If your school cannot afford a copy per student and you were about to photocopy because you saw no alternative — ring us before you do. That call ends in a workable number far more often than it ends in a no.

If you find it copied, or find a fake

Scans of this book turn up on file-sharing sites, in messaging groups and in coaching material. Counterfeit printings turn up on marketplaces. A publisher this size finds out from readers or not at all, so please tell us — learn@playwaybooks.com, or the grievance page.

A report that carries these is one we can act on immediately:

• · The URL, the listing, the group or the shop where you saw it.
• · The date and time you saw it, and a screenshot if you can. Electronic evidence is admissible under s. 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, and a dated screenshot with a URL is worth far more than a description.
• · What made you think it was not genuine — a soft cover, a wrong colour, missing token sheets, a blurred imprint, a price far below the printed one.
• · How to reach you, if you are willing to be asked a follow-up question. Anonymous reports are still welcome and still acted on.

How to tell a genuine copy. A genuine Playbook carries the ISBN 978-81-959241-0-3, the Playway Books Pvt Ltd imprint, and two intact, unpunched token sheets. If the token sheets are missing, printed on ordinary paper, or already punched, it is not a copy we made. If you have bought one, keep the invoice and tell us — that is evidence, and we will help you get your money back from the seller.

What we do with a report. Usually a letter asking for it to come down, which is where most of them end. Where it does not, the routes available are an injunction and damages under s. 55 of the Copyright Act, 1957, a criminal complaint under s. 63, a takedown notice to the host or the marketplace, and recordal with Customs under the IPR (Imported Goods) Enforcement Rules, 2007 to stop copies printed abroad at the border. Clause 14 of the terms of use sets that out in full.

This website hosts nothing that a third party has posted, so it is not an intermediary and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 do not apply to it. The address above is published anyway, because someone reporting an infringement should not have to work out who to write to. If you believe something we have published infringes your rights, write to the same address: we will take it down while we look, and we would rather be told than sued.