Law Matters

Granted that this may have confused no-one else but I've never really understood why the definition of a dramatic work in §2(h) of the Indian Copyright Act includes: "the scenic arrangement or acting form of which is fixed in writing or otherwise but does not include a cinematograph film". Having (obviously) only watched contemporary stage performances (as opposed to historical performances), I'm used to scenic arrangements usually being fairly minimalist artistic works. However, I've recently been learning about Renaissance theatre, and have come to realise that historical scenic arrangements for staged performances were anything but simple or straightforward: they seem to have been analogous to full-fledged sets with special effects in contemporary blockbuster films, often requiring a multitude of trained professionals to put them in place and get them to work. It wasn't just someone hanging a pretty picture in the background.  I imagine it's unlikely th...

. Draft: 14 MAY 2025 This piece considers the interaction of Indian copyright law and artificial intelligence, explores how the law could be amended to make it more compatible with AI, and suggests that AI has simply highlighted age-old concerns which the law has given rise to rather than created a series of novel challenges. * An early draft of this piece was originally published here as ' Artificial Intelligence: The Making or Breaking of Copyright Law ' on April 8, 2025.     Contents 1        Assisted Creativity and Copyrightability . 2 2        Privileged Creators and Trade . 4 3        The Statutory Anticipation of AI . 5 4        Acknowledged Authorship . 8 5        The Data underlying Computational Creativity 6        Rethinking the Scope of Protection . 15     1    ...

The garden, closed off though it generally is, reflects the world to which it belongs. This piece, written from a place of disenchantment, considers the structure of gardens, and attempts to explore, through law and literature, the manner in which the law has a tendency to prioritise the protection of that which is attributable to the socially privileged. v1.2 9 MARCH 2025 The garden is often an escape into a liminal world between the quotidian and the fantastic, the ornamental and the productive. It is a world in which it is difficult not to find beauty but in which beauty, even when it is naught but artifice, is not necessarily considered to be art in any sense that copyright law would recognise despite the fact that, to be a garden, the space in which it exists must have been influenced by human skill, creativity, and vision.  The Remains of the Past The gardens of our imaginations stretch the spectrum from luxuriant, barely contained wildness to nature severely constrained. Whi...