Law Matters | IN Content Law

"Disability is simultaneously real, tangible, and physical, yet also an imaginative creation whose purpose is to make sense of the diversity of human morphology, capability, and behavior." — Joseph Straus in  ‘Extraordinary Measures’ Currently-abled people are considered to both create and consume content but the Indian copyright statute tends to recognise people with disabilities primarily as people who consume cultural artefacts rather than as those who create them too. Current Indian Law The 2012 amendments to the 1957 Indian Copyright Act introduced provisions for the benefit of people with disabilities into the statute. These provisions took the form of an exception to copyright infringement in Section 52(1)(zb) and a compulsory licence in Section 31B, the latter of which was intended to cover situations to which the former could not apply. Section 52 'prompts the law to turn a blind eye to persons or eligible organisations making accessible copies of protected works...

Three notes previously posted on LinkedIn about drafting policy submissions, the first in response to students asking for advice, the other two following responses to the advice:  Note 1: I had a few students approach me about how to write policy briefs... Some competition, as I understand it. So, just leaving this here in case it's useful to anyone. It isn't authoritative, just an overview of how I see things, FWIW. 1. There is usually no format or template. Do what works for you and your client. The basic intention should be to make life as easy as possible for the reader. So, where you can: tabulate content, use white space, use clear sections; a large block of text is not easy to parse. And maybe consider an executive summary. 2. No-one really has the time to read 15 pages of background history, and, frankly, with the number of people who will put it in anyway, there's zero chance that the final arbiters of the document will be unfamiliar with the subject. So it's b...

.  [ Working Draft: PDF at SSRN ] Abstract: This article explores how sarees, as cultural artefacts, have been failed by conventional intellectual property laws which understand authorship and ownership through Western individualistic paradigms rather than through paths of communal continuity. Weaving together mythology, commercial constraints, and technological implications, it suggests that sarees may be better protected by turning more strongly towards India’s own Constitution and its understanding of the public interest. Note: Inspired by flowlines designed mainly from an economist's point of view once mapped out with D.R. on a scrap of paper, now lingering only at the fringes of memory. Short descriptions of most of the sarees referred to here can be found at sareesearch.blogspot.com. Much of the text in this piece relies not on academic research but on conversations over the years, and therefore lacks citation; where research has been merged with experience, that has been m...