Southern States - Karnataka   

IT Act gives good scope for lawyers: Jain

By Our Staff Correspondent

MANGALORE OCT. 18. The Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court, Justice N.K. Jain, has called upon the legal fraternity to study various pieces of intellectual property legislation such as the Patents Act, the Copyright Act, and the Trade and Merchandise Act as they had become important in the changed economy, particularly in the context of globalisation.

Delivering the inaugural address at a workshop on Copyright Law organised by SDM College of Law and sponsored by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development here on Saturday, Mr. Justice Jain said the field of law was feeling the impact of the developments in the computer world, including the Internet. Lawyers, who needed to have up-to-date information on judicial precedents and look up the right law within the minimum time, would find computers an essential tool.

He said the newly introduced Information Technology Act provided good scope for lawyers and, in the coming years, there would be substantial case laws on the subject. Copyright violation would be an important element in litigation based on the Act which had an international background.

The preamble to the Act said it was intended to grant legal recognition for transactions carried out by means of electronic data interchange, referred to as electronic commerce, which involved the use of alternatives to paper-based methods of communication and storage of information to facilitate electronic filing of documents with government agencies and further to amend the Indian Penal Code and the Indian Evidence Act. Quoting a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1997, Mr. Justice Jain said a model law on e-commerce drafted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law had been adopted and all members should give favourable consideration to it when they enacted or revised their laws in view of the need for uniformity.

He said copyright law protected only the expression of the idea of the holder of the copyright and not the idea as such. In India, computer software fell under copyright law and, therefore, only the expression of the idea behind the software could be protected.

He said the philosophy behind the Internet was freedom of information and freedom to information which meant there was no restriction on information available in many forms on the Internet; one could have access to it and use it in any manner he desired. On the other hand, intellectual property protection was meant to give a monopolistic protection to the authors of the work. The conflict was between the two ideologies, he added.

Presiding over the inaugural function of the workshop, the High Court Judge, Justice P. Vishwanatha Shetty, stated that along with economic changes, there was also widespread piracy of intellectual properties all over the globe.

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