Prashant analysed the challenges highlighted by a recent report released by the Indian Music Industry (IMI) and Deloitte: (i) Music Piracy:  He states that it is not very relevant in a day and age where everyone has free access to music if s/he has access to the internet. (ii) Value-gap: He agrees with the report’s stance on the issue of value-gap due to legislative measures such as: (1) Section 31D of the Copyright Act, which allows the radio and television industry to…

This week, Divij Joshi wrote on the TikTok and ShareChat dispute, where TikTok served the latter with takedown notices, claiming it had ‘exclusivity’ over the content. Subsequently, ShareChat wrote to the Government, asking it to clarify whether TikTok is an intermediary, under Section 79 of the IT Act. To this effect, Divij asks a pertinent question—‘whether TikTok’s claims of ownership or ‘exclusivity’ over certain content on its platform change its status as an intermediary qualified for the exemptions under Section…

Last week, Rishabh Mohnot had reported that the IPAB’s website (ipabindia.org) was malfunctioning. This week, Rishabh wrote a report on the reasons for this. In his report, he states that the domain name was voluntarily auctioned to a private party on 2nd May this year! Further, the domain name, ending with ‘org’ has flouted the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW) 2018, under which a Government website must possess the secondary domain name ‘gov’. Thus, he suggests that the auction…

This month, we received the tragic news of the passing away of our Founder and Chief Mentor, Prof. (Dr.) Shamnad Basheer. He touched the lives of all of us here at SpicyIP in innumerable ways and always encouraged us with our work at the blog on a day-to-day basis. His loss cannot be put into words, but we hope to honour his legacy by continuing the good work he started with SpicyIP. See the tribute penned for our blog by…

This week, we had a guest post by Eashan Ghosh on Suzuki Motor v. Suzuki India, a Delhi HC ruling dealing with the trademark infringement of the trade mark ‘SUZUKI’. After giving a brief overview of the case, he then delves into how portions of the judgment have been copied word to word from The Timken Company v. Timken Services, a 2013 Delhi HC judgment. He further delves into the Court’s 3 different renditions of delay and the problem in applying…