Law Matters | IN Content Law

Link Going by the National Intellectual Property Rights Policy released a few days ago, it appears that the government considers attire, and not just the kind protected by geographical indications or established trade marks, to be protectable. There are, of course, plenty of questions when it comes to clothes and IP but few concrete answers. Amongst the questions, all tweeted earlier at twitter.com/nsaikia : If you argue 2D to 3D conversion makes for artistic copyright for ltd ed tailored clothes where does that leave drapes? Drapes immediately artistic works? What happens if the art on them is based on a repertoire of trad motifs? Adaptation removes them from PD? If you're talking about handlooms, is it ever possible to chuck artistic copyright and head straight for a design right since pieces differ? How do hybrids work? Screen prints filled in by hand, eg. Do they turn into mechanised pieces or are they handicrafts? How can diffs btw similar pieces to...

The Union Cabinet approved the National IPR Policy on May 12, 2016. Described as a 'vision document' by the Press Information Bureau , the policy seems extraordinary in its almost single-minded focus on the monetisation of intellectual property. Almost every suggestion made in the document seems to be in aid of monetisation to the extent that a précis of it could easily read: Spread IP awareness, increase efficiency, make money. Unfortunately, in its pursuit of monetisation, the policy seems not to deeply consider the public interest: there is little mention of how intellectual property rights could or should be balanced against, for example, the public's right of fair use, or what should be the public's right to access research funded by taxpayers. Intellectual property rights discourse in the country has, of course, not considered the public interest in any depth except perhaps in relation to pharmaceuticals, and this is reflected in the policy which expresses an ...

First thoughts, unedited The Supreme Court's judgment which says that criminal defamation law is constitutional is not difficult to criticise. It appears to represent a worldview which many liberals would likely be unwilling to claim as their own, its prose is so purple that it is almost incomprehensible at some points, it introduces what purport to be legal concepts thus far unknown to the Indian corpus juris , and contains vast amounts of questionably relevant content. Defamation in India is, of course, both a civil wrong and a criminal offence. The so-called ingredients of the two are, however, not identical. In the case of civil law, for example, a dead person cannot be defamed and truth is generally considered to be a defence to allegations of defamation. As opposed to this, under Section 499 of the 1860 Penal Code, a dead person can be defamed, and truth is not automatically a defence to allegations of defamation: it is possible that there would also have to be a 'pu...

First thoughts... Thinking of privacy under Indian content law (which hasn't really changed since this 2012 piece), and am rather curious about how a matter with a factual matrix comparable to that in PJS (now making its way through the UK courts) would play out in India; there, a gag seems to be being sought to restrain celebrity identification in relation to the reportage of sexual conduct considered private (even though identification has already taken place online as well as beyond England and Wales). This bears no relation whatsoever to PJS which merely set this line of thought into motion: In recent years, there has been far more frequent mention of gag orders in India to restrain the publication of explicit content and to prohibit the reportage of sexual conduct. For the most part, though, discussions seem to revolve around defamation, civil and criminal, and not privacy, either civil or criminal. In all likelihood, that being the case is in consonance with cultural ...

There’s plenty in the world that is obscene. It could be argued, however, that the popular and accepted interpretation of obscenity in the Indian Penal Code misses the point entirely: that the understanding of what’s obscene has, or should have, little to do with explicit content presumed to be ‘lascivious’ and to have the tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ those who are exposed to it. On the contrary, it could – and maybe should – be argued that the only obscenity which we should be concerned about is that which relates to human rights violations in whatever form, and, perhaps, far from being illegal to disseminate content reporting or featuring the truly obscene, perhaps it should be illegal not to do so. Of course, that’s an argument which has little solid basis in law. Our understanding of obscenity is what it is, based solidly on Victorian puritanism, and now supported by both freshly-drafted statute and extensive jurisprudence correlating it with the explicit. Nonetheless, even...

(Note: This post contains largely unedited points from an old, rough note lying on my desktop which I've not double-checked before publishing.) There’s been talk of amending the Cinematograph Act for years now. A draft bill was circulated in 2010 (when I first began looking at potential and proposed amendments), following which another Bill was circulated in 2013. In the 2013 Bill, there was very little clarity about precisely what content would require a certificate, and the guidelines to be used to judge content appeared to be as vague as ever they were: whatever else the CBFC Guidelines are, they are not a model of clarity. In addition to this, the 2013 Bill appeared to have no time limits within which the Board, FCAT or Government were actually required do anything worth mentioning, which meant that, in theory, were the provisions of the Bill to become law, they could enable the powers that be to hold decisions in abeyance indefinitely. In terms of specific prov...

TRAI’s regulations on differential tariffs has left me with as many questions as answers. Not least because it doesn't seem to be as clear cut a 'victory for net neutrality' as it's been widely seen as. Has TRAI assumed, going by its definition of discriminatory tariffs for data services , that charging different tariffs is necessarily discriminatory? How does that fit in with its own differential treatment of the internet and a ‘closed electronic communications network’ (CECN)? Also, how does it fit in with its Rule 4 exemption which seems to recognise that there are times when differential tariffs may not be a bad thing? Content  per the regulations is limited to content accessed or transmitted over the internet, not content which could potentially be accessed or transmitted over the internet. So, presumably, it excludes all content either accessed or transmitted over what’s defined as a CECN. The definition of a CECN has no mention of content though; it uses ...

Some interesting issues arise here : the V&A seems to have displayed a jacket made of fabric with a digitally-printed, Ajrakh-inspired design that also includes a skull motif. This hasn't gone down well in all quarters; no surprise really: Ajrakh is laboriously hand-printed and doesn't involve, AFAIK, skulls. It's from Sindh in Pakistan, as well as Gujarat and Rajasthan in India. The V&A has apparently indicated that the design is Ajrakh-inspired, but... "Haqq ki ladai hai," says Asid Shaikh who's brought this up; it's a fight for rights. I've just run a search at the Indian GI database; to the best of my knowledge, Ajrakh does not have GI protection. So, I'm not certain what the legal approach could be especially since, as I understand it, there's been no attempt to pass Ajrakh-inspired design off as the real thing. At the end of the day though, it isn't really about this jacket, or about Ajrakh alone, but about finding mechan...

...explicit content other than porn, that is. Reams have been written about the misadventures of the Central Board of Film Certification or CBFC, popularly called the Censor Board. Eve n focussing on just the last few weeks, the CBFC has been in the news for everything from its attempts to rein in the depiction of sex life of James Bond (which, as many wryly commented at the time, not even British Intelligence has ever attempted to do) to, most recently, its having the images of Hindu Goddesses blurred in the film Angry Indian Goddesses . The frequency with which the CBFC steps in to 'clean up' content in films on a variety of grounds would be astonishing if it were not for the fact that it does so so often that its doing so no longer seems surprising in the least. The problem, if that's how one sees it, has to do with the personal perceptions of the members of the CBFC in regard to what sort of content is acceptable. However, the problem doesn't stop there, and it...

Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957, describes the special rights of authors in the following terms: Section 57. Author’s special rights.   (1) Independently of the author's copyright and even after the assignment either wholly or partially of the said copyright, the author of a work shall have the right: (a) to claim authorship of the work; and (b) to restrain or claim damages in respect of any distortion, mutilation, modification or other act in relation to the said work  if such distortion, mutilation, modification or other act would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation: Provided that the author shall not have any right to restrain or claim damages in respect of any adaptation of a computer programme to which clause (aa) of sub-section (1) of section 52 applies. Explanation. Failure to display a work or to display it to the satisfaction of the author shall not be deemed to be an infringement of the rights conferred by this section. (2)...