Critical Analysis Of The Issue With Copyrights Of Cyberspace

Sreenithi Venkatasubramanian, LLM- IPL, School of Law, Christ Deemed to be University, Bangalore

ABSTRACT

Innovation found by human beings should be protected and preserved for centuries, and intellectual property rights (IPR) are the rights that are given to such people to protect their rights from their own work being duplicated. One of the most important and main achievement of human beings is the creation of information technology, the evolution of this has taken mankind to a whole different perspective. Even though the cyber world has its own advantages rapid growth of this field has equally created problems and infringement with IPR is increased, however, to resolve such issues the government introduced the Information Technology Act, 2000.

This Act however does not highlight certain issues such as; domain names, cyberspace, media convergence, etc., hence the researcher in this paper wants to highlight the infringement of copyright issues in cyberspace. Cyberspace is a platform to allow virtual communication, dealing with the electronic world which is accessed through computers, and with the rapid growth in this field the crime rates have also increased along with this, and infringement of the IPR is very challenging in this field.

This paper puts light on the history of copyrights and mainly focuses on copyright issues in cyberspace and further highlights the violations caused by copyrights with the help of case laws. The researcher would like to give inputs on how Acts such as the Copy Right Act 1957 & Trade Mark Act 1999 are silent on these issues and would conclude by analysing the loopholes in US legislation and compare if Indian legislation has any such and finally gives the views and suggestions on how to improve the current situation.

Keywords: Intellectual property rights, information technology, cyberspace, copyright.