SpicyIP is arguably the leading blog for experts on India’s copyright machine. Still, hyperlinks to it disappeared from Google’s seek index following a fraudulent claim of copyright infringement filed through Saregama, India’s oldest document label. The label claimed that a professional document from 2010 on the history of Bollywood music referred to as “Apni To Jaise Taise” infringed at the copyright to the tune. It did now not. Luckily for SpicyIP, they have no shortage of copyright specialists who can argue their case with Google’s takedown system and that they were reinstated.
However, that is a bad omen for the future of free expression in India, which is considering rules much like Europe’s catastrophic Article 13, which might automate censorship of whatever claimed as copyrighted, without any requirement that these claims be straightforward or made inappropriate religion. Regardless of being aware-and-takedown, it’s miles obvious that setting a duty to police copyright infringement on intermediaries creates perverse economic incentives on non-public events like Google or YouTube to over-comply and takedown felony content material. This is not entirely a result of the intermediaries’ practices themselves; however, the coverage and felony selections created and are supposed to strike stability among getting entry to information and copyright safety inside the virtual age.
While we hope SaReGaMa has a stern word with its lawyers, it’s funny, and (perhaps on the stability) suitable that this takedown is aware came to a copyright law blog. We can discuss and dissect such methods. Yet, had it happened to a non-lawyer, or maybe, someone who had ceased to take the hobby of their old blog, as it frequently does, it’d bring about the permanent elimination of public records from an index which serves as the gateway to the net, because of the ‘mistakes’ of private parties whose pastimes do not coincide with public get admission to. What does this suggest for the future to get admission to understanding? These are hard questions which Indian lawyers and policymakers need to grapple with, especially while we’ve got mindless duties just like the mechanism for ‘computerized takedown of unlawful content’ being proposed for intermediaries via the Ministry of IT
