Blogging & Law - How to Manage & Protect your Blog/Website

Pavan Duggal,
Indian Cyber Law Expert

Is posting someone else’s copyrighted images on your blog ‘fair use’? Which court has jurisdiction in respect of Indian Blogs, where servers are located outside India?

These questions are answered by Indian Cyber Law Expert, Mr. Pavan Duggal, as he advises bloggers as to how to manage and protect their blogs.

Mr. Duggal stresses on the necessity of having well drafted Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and Disclaimers, in order to avoid liability for any defamatory or plagiarized content posted on a blogger’s blog by a third party user (visitor) on the blog, under the Information Technology Act, or any other law. Especially Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, under which a blogger can be held criminally liable for comments of the blog visitor.

Review Petitions in Death Sentence Cases not to be by Circulation; only in Open Court & by Bench of atleast Three Judges

  

"When it comes to death penalty cases, we feel that the power of spoken word has to be given yet another opportunity even if the ultimate success rate is minimal."

A five-judge bench of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, headed by Chief Justice R.M. Lodha, by 4-1 majority, in the case of Mohd. Arif @ Ashfaq vs. The Registrar Supreme Court of India & Ors. threw to the wind its approx. 60-year-old rule  and held that hearing of Review Petitions of convicts on death row should not be by circulation but should only be in open Court. The Hon’ble Court further held that hearing of matters in which a death sentence has been passed should be by a Bench of at least three Supreme Court Judges. The majority Judgement was drafted by Hon’ble Justice R.F.Nariman while the dissenting opinion was passed by Justice Chelameshar.

Full text of Judgement can be found here.

Judgement on ‘Honest Concurrent Use’ (Bombay High Court: [ITM Trust & Ors. vs Educate India Society])

Full text of the Bombay High Court Judgement can be found here.

For Plaintiffs: Mr. Aspi Chinoy, Senior Advocate a/w Ms.  Chandana Salgaoncar, Aditya Thakkar i/b Vigil Juris.

For Defendant: Mr. Arvind Chaudhary, i/b Amol Deshpande.

Coram                                                 : G.S.Patel, J.

Judgment Reserved on                       : 16th July 2014

Judgment Pronounced on                   : 15th September 2014

Brief Facts:

The Plaintiffs consisted of a public charitable and educational trust registered under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950 and its trustees. Till 1991, the Plaintiffs trade mark was "INSTITUTE FOR TECHNOLOGY & MANAGEMENT" in a certain curved/spherical form around a circular device along with another device of a shield at the middle. The Plaintiffs claimed that the trademark was in use since 1993. In June 2010, the Plaintiffs filed an application for registration of the mark "ITM-University" in Class 41, on the pretext that it was in continuous and uninterrupted use since 2002.