Are Indian legal & financial frameworks out of sync with the internet economy?
There have been multiple cases (read controversies) in India recently, that demonstrate that either Indian legal & financial frameworks are simply too naïve to understand the internet economy or they are trendsetting & will give the entire world novel lessons in how to regulate the internet.
The latest controversy showcasing this is the Naukri v/s Bixee case. As the report indicates, naukri.com has dragged bixee.com, a Bangalore based job aggregation site to court and the courts have restrained Bixee from deeplinking & aggregating content from the Naukri website. Interestingly, Naukri could have simply used standard circumventing means (like modifying robots.txt) to stop this. Also, this has happened, in spite of Naukri’s CEO earlier saying (in this report) that aggregator sites would actually benefit Naukri.com immensely. Bixee has since taken off all references to Naukri.com from its homepage. Wonder, what the thousands of job/news/classifieds aggregator websites in other parts of the world would have to say about this. This incident is not isolated and is amongst a barrage of equally bizarre cases, such as -
-Google being asked to pay service tax for the Adwords program- the tax authorities earlier ruled that Google was liable to pay service tax for selling advertisement space on its search site to Indian entities.
-The Bazee MMS clip episode– the infamous case which led to the CEO of bazee.com being imprisoned because somebody tried to hawk a pornographic MMS clip on the auction site; are service providers liable for prosecution for the content they carry?
-The IIPM controversy– the first case in the world where a blog writer got sued over a blog post (and had to quit his job with IBM because of this).
Such incidents can’t entirely be explained away by the credibility of the parties involved; while the IIPM controversy was sparked off by an institute of questionable repute; naukri.com certainly is not in the same league as IIPM, yet they have chosen to act in this manner. This blows away all notions that self regulation is a better solution than judicial activism in such cases.
With every such incident, people will clamor that the Indian IT Act 2000 (in its current state) is inadequate to deal comprehensively with such issues. While that is certainly true, I am not sure that an act of legislation will ever be able to keep pace with the new issues that the rapidly changing technopreneurial landscape is going to throw up every now and then. Every time some new incident happens, the act is likely to be blamed but can law ever keep pace with technology?
Maybe some umbrella industry body (like a media ombudsman or something on the lines of TRAI) needs to be contemplated. It would be worthwhile to understand how the internet savvy countries like US, South Korea etc deal with these issues at a systemic level.
Does anybody have any suggestions….?
4 comments
well democracy works as follows, what is prevalently followed will eventually become the law
like take photocopying … buks do prohibit photocopying “in whole or parts” blah blah blah … but its has becomes quite common everywhere … like an unstated law
such funny cases are only a mar on the level maturity of the indian IT laws … hope the industry doesn’t end up paying for such bloopers
Yeah the robots.txt is respected by all crawlers - so why not just use that if you don’t want people to crawl. Indiatimes does, for one. Deep crawls are here to stay, and not going away that soon.
Your post is very impressive. An article in India’s media would be of interest.
Are the US Internet companies inching into a situation where there would be an opportunity for countries like India to create another Google? Does India meet all the requirements? What steps should India take?
“It’s time for an Indian rival to Google,” write G Anandalingam and Chris Dellarocas of the Robert H Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, in The Economic Times….
E-discovery, Indian laws need to witness sea changes and conversions to adapt to the new age of electronic information.
Paper documents were considered as the best documentary evidence in Indian courts for centuries. Today, documents are rarely handwritten. Most documents are created using personal computers or E-mail programs. Professionals rely upon personal computers to maintain diaries and to create their written communications. Most computer users have become prolific writers because of the convenience that computers provide. More documentary evidence exists today than ever before and it exists in a variety of electronically stored formats. However, a majority of computer-created documents are never printed on paper. Many are exchanged over the Internet and are read on the computer screen. Thus, the legal document discovery process has drastically changed as it relates to computer created documents.
LAWYERS AND JUDGES are seeking production of the entire computer hard disk drives, floppy diskettes, zip disks and even cell phones and palm computer devices. These new forms of documentary evidence have broadened the potentials for legal discovery. Unfortunately, our legal system has not kept pace with computer technology and the new document discovery requirements and electronic data. Electronic documents and its discovery should change the way lawyers and the courts do business in India .
Under the current legal system an increasing quantity of information relevant to civil and criminal cases is stored electronically , rather than on traditional paper form. Despite this development, there has been no widespread study or debate as to whether the provisions of our Criminal procedure code, Civil procedure code and Evidence act adequately address the difficult issues that frequently arise when evidence is stored in electronic form.
We cannot assume that the same rules applicable to the discovery of traditional form of evidence can be applied to electronic data. I have great concern on this wrong assumption. We need to have simple but important changes in our existing laws to adapt to the new age of electronic information.
We need to change our current legal system which is complex and outdated. We need laws that promote technology based services. Our existing discipline of law need to witness sea changes and conversions with the help of technology. Litigation support products/technology should evolve rapidly over the next few years and become part of our legal system more vital than they are today. They should be designed to prepare lawyers, law firms and legal departments to try a case, which includes interviewing witnesses, discovery of documents, document review, and case preparation. Litigation support services should help lawyers to reduce their costs, increase efficiency, and improve the quality of their work product so that they can focus on the practice of law.
Vinod Kuriakose- vinodkuriakose@gmail.com
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