The current version of this post with footnotes in PDF is available here: [GoogleDocs] WORKING DRAFT v1, August 2023 Anomalies and Ambiguities A Reading of India’s 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Law NANDITA SAIKIA Contents Introduction 1. Digital Personal Data 2. Data Principals 3. Data Processing and Data Breaches 4. The Location of Processing 5. Those who Process Personal Data 6. Permissible Processing at Will 7. Managing Consent for Processing 8. Withdrawing Consent for Processing 9. Individuals Requesting Their Data 10. DPDPA Exemptions Appendix: DPDPA Povisions re The Data Pro ..read more

an essay on copyright and musical creativity which 'discusses cultures of musical borrowing in the realm of Indian music from ancient times to the present day, and examines the effect of the introduction of colonial copyright law in India. It posits that the Western paradigm on which contemporary copyright law is based cannot be easily integrated with Indian musical practices, and argues for the decolonisation of the law'. 'This essay, excluding the personal note introducing it, is a lightly-edited version of what would have been my contribution to the volume — Music Borrowing and Copyright ..read more

This write-up describes first impressions of the 2022 Indian bill dealing with data protection. It has not been edited, and considering that it's been drafted after close to 36 hours without sleep — some days are especially long — it will almost certainly be rethought and edited at some point. Its difficult to miss the deficiencies of the 2022 Digital Data Protection Bill: the proposed statute appears to be well intentioned, and it does attempt to protect those whose data is collected — data principals as the document refers to them — but it's inability to set meaningful boundaries and to dr ..read more

"I was recently confronted with an agreement I drafted some 10 years ago which, much to my embarrassment, was still being used possibly slightly edited but essentially still my draft: an agreement I'd put together with maybe 15 minutes of thought prior to drafting. Legally, it was and still is watertight. It also has all the hallmarks of a petty bully. Utterly lopsided clauses not in favour of the the other party, stringent obligations placed on them... the works. Somewhere between having mellowed with age and having no particular need to demonstrate that I'm aggressively protecting client in ..read more

Copyright began as the right to copy or reprint a protected work and, in time, it has become the right to control avenues through which a work may be financially exploited. At the micro level, this has meant that copyright has evolved from a right which does not allow author-owners of works a say in whether or by whom or how their works may be translated to a right which enables them to control, at the very least, whether a protected work can be translated at all and, if it is translated, by whom it may be translated. Granting permission for a work to be translated, however, may be an act of f ..read more

Copyright law is cognizant of the ways in which anonymity can play out in conventional fields as it demonstrates through provisions determining the term of copyright to anonymous works. The law, however, is not especially well equipped to deal with anonymity and blockchain together despite the fact that we have partially segued from the industrial information economy, which copyright law could be considered to have anticipated, to a networked information economy.  Blockchain and traditional copyright law do not fit together neatly allowing open data and 'piracy' to effectively be two side ..read more

It appears the Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2021, proposes to amend the statute in a way which would effectively result in there being two primary statutes which contain provisions relating to the infringement of intellectual property rights in films: the Copyright Act and the Cinematograph Act.  Reading through the proposal, it isn't at all clear how the relevant provisions in the two statutes, if they were all to simultaneously be in force, would act together and, to make matters even more concerning, the provisions proposed to be inserted into the Cinematograph Act seem incoherent ..read more

Equitable healthcare to address the CoVID-19 crisis requires a multilevel, multipronged approach, and it is important to achieve equitable healthcare not least because, as we've heard over and over again, no-one is safe till everyone is safe. Borders, whether drawn on maps or in minds, will not — cannot — guarantee the safety of those within their bounds. Not when one speaks of being safe from a virus such as this. Intellectual property rights play a role in the process of achieving equitable healthcare although they are, by no means, the only factor: ultimately, it is realpolitik which play ..read more

A committee constituted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a draft report on non-personal data governance in India in July 2020 which it revised in December 2020 following the receipt of feedback from stakeholders. The December 2020 report envisages parallel regimes for the governance of personal and non-personal data although it does not appear to take into account how fluid the two forms of data are. The report's underlying principles also seem fairly ambiguous; the document suggests that 'regulation in India to establish rights over non-personal data collected ..read more

Abstract Copyright does not function in isolation. It is supported by contract law, and it is but one of the laws which governs content, its ownership, use, and dissemination. Focusing on broadcasts, whilst recognising that the processes applicable to them also apply to other forms of dissemination in modified form, this text describes, in broad strokes, the field in which negotiated grants of copyright function from a statutory point of view, describes what goes into attempting to ensure that content per se is ready for legal dissemination, and discusses how relationships between the various ..read more