Author name: Akshat Agrawal

Akshat Agrawal is a practicing lawyer and founder of AASA Chambers. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge.

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

/ By / Copyright, Innovation

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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Wooden ladder leaning against shelves filled with old leather-bound books

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

/ By / Copyright, Innovation

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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The Copyright Reversion Right India Refused

/ By / Copyright

While reading the historical debates leading to the passing of the first post-independence Copyright Act in India, I came across some interesting passages that are relevant to a debate on a theme that seems to have lost its place in Indian Copyright jurisprudence – the Reversionary Right. On 14 May 1957, during the Rajya Sabha’s debate on the Bill that became the Copyright Act, Professor A. R. Wadia recorded his surprise that clause 18 of the Bill as introduced in

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One more shot at Keyword Advertising……. aaaannndd Hit Wicket!

/ By / Trademark

On 22 May 2026 the Delhi High Court held that Google infringes the trademark HINDWARE by letting rival sanitary ware sellers bid on that word as a Google Ads keyword. Arul Murugan’s detailed post summarizing the dispute and holdings is here. This post is more about its critique. In a rare final judgment or decree, the HC moves in three steps – allowing to bid on a keyword is “use” of the mark; that keyword is used by Google and

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Defragmenting the “Work” : A Critique of Ivy Entertainment’s “Hook” Injunction

/ By / Copyright, Innovation

On 15 May 2026, a Single Judge of the Delhi High Court passed an ex parte ad-interim order in Ivy Entertainment v. Rahul Singh restraining the defendants from making any use of one line of lyric, jaane meri janeman bachpan ka pyar bhool nahi jaana re, on the footing that this fragment is the “distinctive hook line” of a song in which the plaintiff, an acquisition vehicle that purchased a portfolio of 1,250 songs in November 2025, claims copyright. The

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Another brick in the wall for the Continuing Rights of Authors

/ By / Copyright, Others

In another articulation of the clear intent and purpose behind the copyright amendments that were brought in 2012, to economically enable intended beneficiaries of the copyright regime, i.e. the authors of the underlying works, the Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court has reaffirmed that irrespective of the musical and the literary works being embedded in a sound recording, at every exploitation of the said sound recording by a user, de hors it being show along with the film it

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