Piracy Of The Public Domain
- IJLLR Journal
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
Ananya Santhosh, Ramaiah College of Law Kevin George M, Ramaiah College of Law
A postgraduate student, researching a rare early 20th century Kannada novel titled Chandraprabhe, accessed it through her university’s digital library. The novel was unquestionably in the public domain, so she expected open access. Instead, she found the text locked behind a private tech aggregator’s restrictive viewer that blocked copying, downloading, screenshots, and offline reading. A work that the law had released into the commons had been effectively re-privatised through software design rather than copyright.
Her frustration led her to search for another edition. She discovered that an international archive had digitised the same novel under an open licence. However, this version was geo blocked for her region. Automated filters had misclassified the century old novel as restricted material. The paradox was clear. A public domain text was more freely accessible to readers outside India than to scholars within the very community to which it belonged. These barriers were created entirely by code, contracts, and platform policies and not by copyright law. This mismatch between legal rights and digital restrictions reflects a larger systemic shift.
Her incident was more than just a personal trouble, it represented a wider transformation in the digital ecosystem where the limit of public access is gradually being shifted from law to technology. Software works like a hidden boundary. Digital Rights Management tools play the role of gatekeepers. Automatic filters function as covert enforcers, at times stripping off rights that copyright law clearly grants. When code, contracts, and platform rules start to eclipse legislation, public domain works run the risk of being regulated more by private technical design than by the legal framework that was meant to liberate them. This movement is closely associated with how intellectual property evolved in the past.
Intellectual property, comprising copyright, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, did not gain economic importance until the late 1800s. In earlier times, industrialists were against the adoption of stronger protections due to the fear of losing market share. The emergence of monopolies and cartels, however, led the companies to advocate for more extensive rights over the intangibles. In the USA, this often served as a practical way to bypass antitrust laws. The term intellectual property started to be more commonly used only after World War II, when companies increasingly relied on monopolies backed by the government to maintain their profits. The last thirty years have seen a massive increase in the protection of IP, which has caused scholars and activists to express their concerns that such expansion mainly deprives the technology sector of a lion's share of the market. The same worries are already present in the way that the digital rights of public domain materials are handled.
