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…
A few months ago, I had written about a judgment of the Delhi High Court dismissing a PIL filed against the change in Whatsapp privacy policy. As I had commented at this time, the PIL was absolutely frivolous and should have been dismissed. Yet, it is now being heard by a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court – a rare event these days. How did this PIL transform from being frivolous to ending up before a Constitutional Bench of 5…
We are happy to bring to you another guest post by our Fellowship applicant Shubhi Sharma. Shubhi is a 4th year student at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab. This is her second submission for the Fellowship. Who Can Be A Celebrity: A Christopher Porco Story Shubhi Sharma In 2013 Lifetime Entertainment Services (LES) decided to broadcast a film titled “Romeo Killer: The Christopher Porco Story”. LES later found itself engaged in a legal spat of civil rights action suit with…
We are happy to bring to you a guest post on a recent order by the Madras High Court directing Google and You Tube to disclose the identity and IP address of the user who uploaded an allegedly defamatory video about Lebara Foundation. The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous. YouTube: The Bi-Polar Behemoth Anonymous Recently on Spicy IP, Rahul wrote an excellent post describing YouTube’s most recent over-zealous efforts to police content on their website. In short, YouTube’s…
A few weeks ago, two millennial babalog filed a public interest litigation (PIL) before the Delhi High Court against Whatsapp’s new privacy policy which informed users that their data would now be shared with Facebook unless users opted out. Facebook had acquired Whatsapp for $19 billion dollars two years ago and it was only a matter of time before the company began to harvest the goldmine of data with Whatsapp. Rather than dismiss the PIL in limine the Court admitted…
Inika Charles, our Spicy IP Fellowship applicant brings us this interesting tidbit on Whatspp’s new end to end encryption. This is her fourth submission for the fellowship. In wake of the Apple v. FBI controversy, WhatsApp has announced that all messages, photographs, videos, files and calls sent and received on WhatsApp software released after March 31, 2016 will be encrypted end-to-end. What this essentially entails is that, by a default setting, only the people sending or receiving the messages will…
Disguised censorship isn’t a new theme on this blog – we’ve tracked instances over the last few years both in India and abroad where parties have tried to use shields such as defamation (no stranger to this blog, by the way) and copyright as swords to suppress content. The latest episode in this disturbing trend features Airtel, an Israel-based software company called Flash Networks, and blogger-activist Thejesh GN. Background Medianama’s Riddhi Mukherjee tells the story: “Last week, Bangalore-based Thejesh GN had noticed…
The issue regarding liability of internet intermediaries has garnered much interest post Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Under Indian law, the normal course of action to be followed by an intermediary when unlawful content (such as content violating copyright laws) has been posted online is to remove the impugned content from the website; in certain jurisdictions, in addition to “take-down provisions” we have what is known as the “three strikes” rule, a draconian legislation aimed at pressurizing Internet Service…
It has been almost a year since the European Court of Justice ruled that Google must respond to take-down requests by users alleging that search results on Google violate their right to privacy, a case popularly known as the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) case. The case is one of the many instances where the European Court has upheld the right to privacy of an individual, and while the ruling is an important win for individual rights, the judgment raises…
Thanks to the social media turn of more and more academics, I recently came across a new essay by Prof Mark Lemley, one of the most prolific IP personalities around today, focusing specifically on an issue we’ve noted as problematic for years on the blog now – the conflict between “Faith” and “Fact” based IP. From World IP Day in 2008 (“Faith based IP to Fact based IP“), to a post just a couple of months ago (“Dodgy IP Dogma“) –…