Ashish, who’s written for us before, is a law graduate from the National University of Juridical Sciences and is the Managing Partner at Offshore Research Partners, a Legal Process Outsourcing firm based in Kolkata. His primary areas of work are litigation support and Intellectual Property Rights. ORP provides services to AmLaw 100 firms and a few of the leading databases in the United States and Europe. He can be reached at [email protected].
Free pdf conversion and lessons for the Copyright Board
Have you ever sent out a document in a portable document format (pdf) that has a banner on the top which says – YOUR COMPLIMENTARY USE PERIOD HAS EXPIRED. THANK YOU FOR USING PDF COMPLETE. Most will react by saying – isn’t pdf conversion free and you have in-built plug-ins for most word processor that do it for you.
Well, it’s true but unfortunately the Copyright Board of India isn’t that tech savvy. Recently, I reached the Copyright Board’s website while discussing one of its recent orders with a colleague. I was looking for the Copyright Board order dated 25th August 2010 on music royalties case.
You can see the copyright board used software called PDF Complete to convert its order into the pdf format. Unfortunately, they were using the trial version which has expired and each and every page of the order now has the image shown on the left which hides the top portion of the page, preventing one from reading the first few words on each page.
How we wish, the Board knew that these conversion tools are freely available on the net and Microsoft now provides a plug-in that allows you to save word documents directly as a pdf. By the time the Board starts making nice pdfs available, lets try and figure out the words of the order that got hidden by the PDF Complete banner. [The version we have up on SpicyIP is a clean one, where you can read the content clearly.]
