Copyright issues in Digital Environment

A student uploads a cricket highlights reel to a video platform and it disappears within hours. A developer copies an open library into an app. A streaming site in another country hosts a new Hindi film a day after release. The Copyright Act was written in 1957, when piracy meant a printing press and a cassette recorder. How does a statute that old deal with uploads, streams, links and encryption?

In two minutes

The Act handles the digital environment through definitions and exceptions added mainly in 1994 and 2012: electronic storage as reproduction (s.14), communication to the public including on-demand access (s.2(ff)), computer programmes and databases as literary works (s.2(o)), limited exceptions for transient storage and software users (s.52), and criminal protection of technological measures and rights management information (ss.65A–65B).

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.