Law Matters | IN Content Law

Particularly in relation to music, without looking closely at authorisation for adaptation: Copyright owners have the right to adapt substantial parts of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works they own per Section 14(a)(vi) and, per Section 14(a)(vii), to exercise the rights in the copyright bundle described in Sections 14(a)(i) to (vi) in respect of such adaptations while those who own the copyright in sound recordings have the right to make other sound recordings embodying substantial parts of those they own per Section 14(e)(i) of the 1957 Indian Copyright Act. Leaving aside debates relating to the legitimacy of using protected content to train AI for the moment, subject to contextual demands to the contrary, the 1957 Copyright Act defines an adaptation of a musical work as being ‘any arrangement or transcription of the work’ per Section 2(a)(iv) and as ‘any use of such work involving its rearrangement or alteration’ per Section 2(a)(v). The former provision applies specific...

I had a few conversations about the best books on the Constitution. FWIW, for me, the gold standard is still Seervai. It's a three-volume set, a bit on the pricey side, but worth every penny.  (It also has other uses; a chap who wondered why I was getting so many deliveries at one point — I buy books — once decided to check what I was buying and trudged three floors up with a sealed Seervai commentary after appropriating the box it came in when I was not around. He opened it up, found the three volumes inside, utterly boring to him, and lost all interest in my shopping forever after. That evening, his wife told me that he thought the box was hers. I hope it gave him a backache. 🤷) Anyway. Seervai aside, Gautam Bhatia has, of course, been writing consistently in recent years. Personally, though I've not read it all, I find Gautam's writing less accessible (and more dense) than Seervai but definitely think it's worth engaging with.  As a very quick overview of the Consti...

"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...