I was not really expecting any comments on the short note I posted last week on § 79 of the IT Act and Pawan Duggal’s comment regarding YouTube’s liability. However, I did get an interesting observation by email from Mathew Chacko, an intellectual property lawyer in Delhi. I quote from his email: “You Tube’s liabilities are probably going to originate in copyright law and a theory of network service provider liability under copyright law will probably be based on theories…

YouTube was recently reported as having removed world cup cricket video clips after the ICC accused it of copyright infringement. In the brief report, Pavan Duggal was reported as having said that “under Section 79, IT Act, network service providers (like Google, You Tube) shall be liable for all third party data or information made available.” The statement may be a mis-quote or a mistake of law. In either event, section 79 of the IT Act actually states the exact…

The conflict (or apparent conflict) between patent rights and public health once again came into the limelight with the Thai government granting compulsory licenses to three patented drugs. On November 29 last year, the Thai government made its first strike with the announcement that it was granting a compulsory license to the Government Pharmaceutical Organization of Thailand (Click Here) for production of Merck’s patent on Efavirenz (an AIDS drug sold as Stocrin). Following closely in line was the compulsory license…

Just came across Adam Liptak’s interesting piece titled “When Rendering Decisions, Judges Are Finding Law Reviews Irrelevant” in the New York Times. Liptak captures an interesting judicial perspective on how relevant US law review articles really are. Very important lessons here, particularly for Indian academics that seek to make impact on the judiciary. Particularly relevant in the context of intellectual property, where we are bound to see a large number of cases in the post pharma patent environment. Unfortunately, the…