The Forgotten Half of the Copyright Bargain – Legal Deposit : Part 2

This is in continuation of Part 1 which dealt with the pre-independence history of Library Deposits and its Coupling/De-Coupling with Copyright! The scheme matured after independence. At a literacy rate near twelve per cent and in what the economist Malcolm Adiseshiah called a book famine, India enacted the Delivery of Books (Public Libraries) Act of 1954, Act 27 of 1954, for the promotion of public libraries and the encouragement of scholarship. Section 3 requires the publisher of every book published […]

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The Forgotten Half of the Copyright Bargain – Legal Deposit : Part 1

In 2024 the Union Government approved One Nation One Subscription, a scheme to fund national access to commercial journals at a reported cost of six thousand crore rupees over three years. The scheme funds access for the term of the payment. When the payment ends the public retains no copy of what was read. Praharsh and Shravya have previously examined whether the scheme closes the access gap or extends the dependence that produced it. A prior question concerns the law

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SpicyIP Bells & Whistles: IP Events and Opportunities (02.07.2026)

Welcome back to another week of Bells & Whistles. Before we dive in, we’re delighted to share that the SpicyIP Summer School 2026 has successfully wrapped up! If you’d like to catch a glimpse of the sessions and highlights from the programme, be sure to check out our social media pages, where we’ve shared updates, photographs and moments from the Summer School. Separately, the SpicyIP – jhana BlogPost Writing Competition results are out on the blog, you can check out

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Black-box Medicine and Indian Patent Law: Why India’s Disclosure Framework Struggles with Black-box AI

As machine learning systems increasingly transform healthcare, patent law faces a fundamental challenge: how should it protect inventions whose inner workings even their creators cannot fully explain? Dr. Gunjan Chawla Arora and Nidhi Krishna examine how India’s patent framework grapples with the rise of “black-box” medical AI, and whether existing disclosure requirements are compatible with the realities of modern machine learning. Dr. Arora is an Assistant Professor of Law & Head, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights, Institute of Law, Nirma University, and

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SpicyIP Weekly Review (15 June-28 June)

[This weekly review is authored by Vikram Raj Nanda. Vikram is a third-year student at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, with a keen interest in IP law, Competition Law, and Arbitration. His previous posts can be accessed here.] After wrapping up the second edition of SpicyIP Summer School, we are back with the SpicyIP Weekly Review covering the developments from the last 2 weeks. From a historical reflection on the reversionary right in copyright law and its disappearance from

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Announcing the Results of SpicyIP-jhana Blogpost Writing Competition 2025

The wait is finally over! After carefully reviewing a range of thoughtful and insightful entries from participants across the country, we are delighted to announce the results of the SpicyIP–jhana Blogpost Writing Competition, 2025. The quality of submissions made the evaluation process an especially difficult one, with several entries being extremely closely contested. We were heartened by the enthusiasm, creativity, and analytical rigour displayed by participants, and would like to thank everyone who took the time to contribute to the

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When Reputation Travels but Goods Do Not: The Delhi HC on Transborder Reputation in the ‘Whistler’ Dispute

The Delhi High Court has once again weighed in on the evolving doctrine of transborder reputation, this time in a dispute over the mark ‘Whistler’ between an Irish whiskey producer and an Indian liquor company. In this post, Vikram Raj Nanda examines how the Court reaffirmed the territoriality principle, the evidentiary threshold it set for proving transborder reputation in the digital age, and what this could mean for future trademark disputes. Vikram is a third-year student at National Law School

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How Telegram Imports Copyright Doctrine Into Public Law

The Delhi High Court’s recent decision upholding the temporary nationwide blocking of Telegram may appear to be a public-order case. Yet, beneath the surface, it imports a deeper logic from copyright enforcement jurisprudence: that a platform’s architecture can itself justify expansive regulatory intervention. In this post, Anushka Aggarwal examines the emergence of “architectural liability” and its implications for intermediary regulation. Anushka is a fifth year student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She would like to add

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SpicyIP Summer School 2026 Starts Tomorrow!

We are extremely excited to announce that the 2026 edition of the SpicyIP Summer School begins tomorrow. The programme will start by taking participants through a deep dive into the “Pharma Stack”, where they will be introduced to intellectual property not in subject-centred silos, but as a set of strategic tools wielded by different actors. Building on the analytical approaches and reflexes developed through this deep dive, participants will then explore four other domains through the lens of our theme,

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SpicyIP Tidbit: PPL Registered as a Copyright Society for Sound Recordings

[This post is authored by Nilisa Majumder. Nilisa is a third-year student at The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. She has a keen interest in Intellectual Property Law, Public International Law, and Corporate Law.] On 11 June 2026 the Registrar of Copyrights registered Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) as a copyright society for sound recordings (here). The registration is under Section 33(3) of the Copyright Act, 1957, and comes on a Form X certificate. This development comes after

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