Author name: Harshavardhan Ganesan

Harsha is a peripatetic lawyer. He finished his law school from ILS Law College, Pune, where he was awarded the Best Student Award for the Class of 2015. He then went on to finish his LLM from the University of California Berkeley, with a specialization in Intellectual Property and Technology Law. A self-described Rawlsian, he has some pretty strong views regarding, inter alia: using Open Access as a weapon of the counter culture (Rage against the Machine!), Art and Cultural Property Law (#GivebacktheKohinoor), TK, James Boyle’s Internet Threat (His book on the Public Domain is a must read), and Robert Merges’ Mid-level Principles (The best Professor to grace Boalt Hall, period.) Dank memes are welcome. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter: @harshgana28.

Char-Surly Tales of Carnatic Music Labels

/ By / Copyright, Others

Disclaimer: I’ve been specifically requested not to use names of those who I am quoting or whose experiences I am highlighting. Hopefully at the end of this article, you can understand why. This is going to be a very different SpicyIP post. First, we are going to deal with copyright in Carnatic Music, a topic we’ve rarely blogged about except here and here. (I would recommend the reader to read both those posts in order to get an understanding of […]

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Mersal: A Trademark Kollywood Masala Movie

/ By / Trademark

   Kollywood is distracted. With questions swirling around the “big-wigs” of Kollywood’s decision to dip their toes into the cesspool of Tamil Nadu politics, some of the lesser demi-gods have been forgotten. Vijay, or Ilayathalapathy (Young Leader) as he’s called by his ardent and occasionally rabid fans, was one of the forgotten few. That is, till he started advertising his latest movie. (NOTE: A part of this article is going to employ a common cinematic device: A story within a

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Content Neutrality of the Self: Criminals Be Warned!

/ By / Privacy

Here at SpicyIP, we’re a bunch of zealous IP nerds and geeks. Think of us as a Comic-con for IP, but running all through the year. One of the topics that has got us into a tizzy recently is that of content neutrality in IP. Just look at our track record this past year: We had one of the most distinguished IP Judges in India, Justice Gautam Patel, write for us on content neutrality in Copyrights. This was followed by

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Now Available on eBay: Trademark Bullying!

/ By / Trademark

Stop me if this tale sounds familiar. A sturdy bully, replete with well-chiseled muscles and a nasty left hook believes he owns every inch of the playground. Every single iota of space. Let’s call the bully, ‘aBhay’, for the sake of this clearly fictional tale. Right from the swing-sets to the see-saws, the merry-go-rounds to the Ferris wheels, aBhay assumes dominion over it all. Note how I said ‘assumes’? The reason being that originally, the bully wasn’t granted the entire

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Heil Good Trademarks! Part- II

/ By / Trademark

In the first part of this post while searching for the mythical good trademark, I gave you an example of a company titled ‘Nirbhaya rods’, engaging in willful perniciousness: the company knew that a rod was the instrument of choice for the rapists, yet made the conscious decision to go ahead and name it as such anyway. What if we alter the facts a little? What if I told you that the company was situated in a rural part of

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Heil Good Trademarks!- Part I

/ By / Trademark

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II.   Sorry Willy, but they didn’t have Trademark Law when you were around (At least in its modern sense. A generic use of a TM as an “indicator of goods” was used by the Japanese: It was codified in the Taihō-ritsuryō as early as 701 A.D. The Egyptians used a source identifying system

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Reveries of a Publicity Right

/ By / Others, Privacy

At the outset, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Professor Shamnad Basheer and the rest of the SpicyIP team, for this opportunity as well as the magnanimous gesture of allowing me to be the first scholar in practice! I am humbled and grateful for this opportunity so a huge thank you once again! As Adam Burish said, “It’s not pressure, it’s excitement”. Reveries of a Publicity Right By now, most of our readers would be familiar with what

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