Sound Board

Our thoughts and views on the practice of Intellectual Property in India and around the world.

Thou shal not steal is definitely the underlying point of all intellectual property rights, and Twitter reaffirmed this by deleting a tweet on a complaint made by Olga Lexell, a freelance writer from Los Angeles. Her premise was that she’s a freelance writer who makes her living writing jokes and since that’s her creation (intellectual property), other users didn’t have the right to re-post it without giving her due credit. This has definitely raised a lot of questions on whether jokes can…

The other day I was just walking on the road trying to get somewhere when someone just handed me this pamphlet which stated that the coaching centre was providing some kind of training to get a hang of this particular software at a certain fee. I passed it on to one of my friends who I thought might be interested in taking up the course. That is when I was told that this can’t be legit as the actual course costed twice the amount.

The general notion, I’m sure is that copyright is a bundle of rights which is primarily an economic right (unless you are Gandhi, who resisted to enforce the copyright in his work for economic gain as economic rights) more than it being an indicator of the source of origin of the goods as in the case of trademarks. So what happens after you have assigned, either wholly or partially, the copyright in your work to someone else? Does that mean you have lost all your rights in the work that you…