Law Matters | IN Content Law

This post focusses on what the judgment could mean for intermediaries. Personally though, my fav parts are Para. 40 which reiterates the limits of various free speech restraints, and the fabulously-crafted Paras. 14 to 19 which point out that free speech in the US is not absolute and, in effect, say: 'By all means, consider the First Amendment to the US Constitution when you talk of FoE in India but don't go gaga about it.'  On March 24, 2015, the Supreme Court issued a judgment relating to batch of writ petitions which challenged the constitutionality of Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, along with that of Sections 69A and 79 of the same statute and their subordinate legislation, as well as of Section 118 of the Kerala Police Act. Section 66A of the Information Technology Act was held to be unconstitutional for substantive reasons as was Section 118 of the Kerala Police Act (which criminalised the causing of ‘annoyance to any person in an indecent manner’...

A post about the programme 'India's Daughter' which has been published at Legally India: "Regardless of how one approaches the programme ‘India’s Daughter’, which purports to tell the story of the woman who was gangraped and fatally wounded in a Delhi bus in 2012, it appears to be flawed. Its content is questionable, the manner in which it is has been filmed is questionable, the grounds on which it has enraged many people are questionable, and the attempts to suppress it are questionable." [ Read more... ]

Indian copyright law does not appear to have been subjected to critical post-colonial or feminist readings. It does, however, appear to be a colonial and sexist relic which is now so deeply entrenched in the country’s corpus juris that it would be virtually impossible to overhaul the structure of the law to better suit India’s own requirements even if there was the will to do so. There is no credible argument to be made to the effect that artist-authors of works should not be remunerated for their effort or that their rights, both economic and moral, should not be protected. Whether copyright in its current form is the best way in which Indian artist-authors could be protected is, however, questionable. If one were to look at the kinds of works protected by copyright, it would emerge that at inception, it was books which were protected, and later, works which were primarily created by men that were accorded protection. The supposedly distinctly feminine arts such as, to a large e...

Quick Note: I stumbled across a reference to a case this morning which apparently says that an unskilled reproduction of an artist’s work could be defamatory, and am fascinated by the thought of being able to tag an additional claim on to the arguably banal 'copyright infringement' when protected works are not only reproduced without authorisation but also reproduced badly. After all, our copyright statute doesn't explicitly recognise misattribution; it only recognises non-attribution, and there's a bit of a lacuna there, to put it mildly. Flippancy aside, I'm reminded of papers I've been seeing recently which argue that a viable way to counter revenge porn under US law (since nothing else seems to work) is via copyright law. And the general idea of using laws for 'unapproved' purposes is growing on me... if only as an academic exercise. ( Krishnappa v Akhanda Nanda, (1938) 42 CWN 1045  is the case, incidentally. CWN is Calcutta Weekly Notes...

(Unedited first draft with some nuance being sacrificed for brevity and, hopefully, clarity. This is based on the understanding that no licences are obtained from either broadcasters or other copyright owners for the employment of the Aereoesque business model.) The decision of the US Supreme Court in the case of American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc. decided on June 25, 2014, (i.e. the ‘Aereo case’) appears to have been causing considerable anguish in India for fear of the implications the decision could have in India, and the possibly devastating effect it could have on businesses dealing with cloud computing technology. Without getting into the merits of the decision with reference to US law at all, this post attempts to consider how a case with a similar factual matrix would likely unfold in India exclusively from the point of view of Indian copyright law. In doing so, it relies on the description of Aereo’s product/service provided on the first and second pages of th...

At a recent lecture at the National Museum, a friend and I talked about how absurd it is that so much of what should ideally be our common cultural heritage is locked up behind closed doors, inaccessible to the public. This museum though does better than many others: it allows visitors to take photographs of its exhibits. Indian copyright law isn’t absolutely clear about the copyrightability of published photographs of public domain works especially when the photographs focus on the works (as opposed to, for example, their being incidentally in the background) and the works are in private hands. The question is: Does copyright subsist in such photographs at all, or would they effectively be in the public domain by reason of copyright doctrines such as those of scènes à faire or merger ? These two doctrines complement each other: the scènes à faire doctrine states, in essence, that if a particular device is so common to a particular genre of works that it is unavoidab...

It's all but unarguable that 140 characters —Twitter’s character limit per tweet— doesn’t exactly lend itself to nuance. That doesn’t explain why so much of our discourse in favour of free speech both on and off Twitter seems to have turned itself into sloganeering though. ‘Don’t criminalise stupidity!’ never mind that no one has criminalised stupidity per se or said that they plan to. ‘295A may next pulp the Constitution!’ regardless of the fact that absolutely nothing in the text of 295A, IPC, supports that outcome. ‘Anything after ‘but’ in ‘I support free speech BUT...’ doesn’t matter!’ unmindful that absolute free speech isn’t ideal or (it would seem) accepted anywhere. Free speech is critical to human rights, to life as we know it, to our democracy — that, too, is all but unarguable. Sloganeering almost to the exclusion of all else though, at a time when free speech seems increasingly under threat courtesy, in large part, laws restricting it and people invoking those laws...

I’ve been looking for the first Indian Copyright Act for a while, and finally found it today in a massive compilation of ‘The Legislative Acts of the Governor General in Council from 1834 to the End of 1867’ compiled by William Theobald, Esq., and published in 1868. I spent a large fraction of the day attempting to transcribe the Copyright Act (along with Mr. Theobald's notes on it) and have made the resulting document available here: [ pdf ] It’s quite an interesting document, and appears to reveal copyright in its essence: barely an author’s right, it comes across as a publisher’s right. There are hints of the compulsory licensing regime to come, and there are also, in it, facets of copyright law which though no longer exist under the Indian statutory regime seem to remain in US law — the work-for-hire doctrine, specifically. There is a reversionary right and, of course, the term of copyright itself is much shorter than what it is today. Not to mention that it focuses on boo...

Publishers’ decisions relating to the publication, non-publication and withdrawal of books have, in recent months, come increasingly under the scanner, with almost everyone but — it would seem — publishers airing detailed opinions of what publication decisions are based on and whether decisions which have come to be considered controversial in the public eye have been ethically acceptable. Most comments on the issue have seemingly been made without context as comprehensive sets of internal documents relating to publication decisions have never been released into the public domain, and the result has been that many of these comments have been virtually indistinguishable from wild speculation sometimes attributing disreputable motive to publishers. Considering the lack of comprehensive information in the public domain, it appears unproductive to speculate on any individual book or publisher. And although it does not appear to be in question that publishers have (as a general rule) the ...

Issues beyond Copyright Indian law treats parodies as curious creatures, to say the least, with their legality being quite ambiguous. Broadly speaking, the concerns relating to parodies could relate to copyright (in cases where existing works are parodied) or could relate to content law concerns other than copyright such as defamation (where, possibly, the target of the parody feels defamed) or could relate to some combination of the two. The issues relating to copyright are not particularly straightforward but, in essence, the legality of a parody of a copyrighted work depends on how (much) of the original work (being parodied) has been used in the parody itself. When it comes to concerns other than copyright though, the waters become considerably less straightforward than they are in relation to copyright alone. Defamation (as a civil or criminal issue) is, of course, the obvious concern when it comes to parodies. There is no statutory exception under Indian law which states t...