First posted on spicyip.com on 30.05.2014 Last week, popular torrent tracking website torrentz[dot]eu was in news after the UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) got the domain name suspended. Surely, to the disappointment of the right holders, the site was back online the next day. The site’s Polish registrar restored the domain name’s server (“DNS”) entries after Torrentz’ legal team pointed out that the suspension was unlawful. This post analyzes the legal issues behind such actions and provides a contextual background for the same. In conclusion, because domain names providers are accredited by the ICANN, the resolution of disputes is governed by the ICANN rule... Continue reading
First posted on spicyip.com on October 9, 2013 Web-Crawling.jpg 31.3 KB The rise of the Internet has led to the creation of vast repository of data residing in across servers and domains. This vast repository contains a large datasets that includes “publicly available information.” This publicly available information includes – time sensitive information – news, financial information and data, reviews, auction information, and in multiple other categories. Because the information is public, and because current information technology tools that gave rise to the internet in the first place, it has become extremely convenient to extract as required ... Continue reading
First posted on spicyip.com on 26.01.2013The previous post discussed the development of the US and European laws as applicable to reverse engineering. This post compares the Indian provisions with the European and US counterpart legislation. One important aspect is the growing number of application developers in India for the Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows platforms. Usually application developers do not start development of applications from scratch. A mish-mash of existing and new code is used. For example, all four of the platforms discussed above provide tutorials and common libraries for their platform. Developers then add to the existing libraries and build their uniqu... Continue reading
First posted on spicyip.com on 26.01.2013In discussions with a few of my colleagues in software development related to mobile applications for Android, Windows, and iOS platforms, a question arose whether studying an existing application (already developed and available for a device) and using the existing application as a study tool is legal under the Indian Copyright Act? At first glance the relevant provision (Section 52) under the Indian Copyright Act prescribes that studying software is legal. However, there are many practical issues that come up while analyzing the statute: As developers know, one cannot study software without first decompiling it. Decompilation, ‘inter-oper... Continue reading