Comparative Analysis of Secondary Liability on Copyright Infringement in Cyberspace with Reference to Indian & International Scenario
Tabrez Ahmad, Suraj Singh · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2011
Secondary liability in the legal sense denotes indirect liability or third party liability, now because of new technological advancement we will see how Internet service provider (ISP) are not only coming under third party liability but we will also discuss about a new kind of secondary liability developed after MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd, Which is based on express acts of inducement and not on a mere failure to act. One of the most problematic issues in cyberspace is replication of infringed material. While every single replication is considered infringement in its own, in such situations there are chances of inducement to public to upload and download potential infringing material by the hosting/content providers without looking into the content. One major problem from the view of intermediaries is that large heap of data cannot be filtered manually as such they have to evolve software which goes on checking whether the provided content is copyrighted and if copyrighted then if the content provider are having enough security to make it private, so that no one can access those content without author’s permission. Further we will see how in the case of peer to peer services(p2p) the host are immune resulting millions of copyrighted material being uploaded & downloaded from torrent sites worldwide every day. Furthermore the problem strains when the hosting sites are in countries where internet laws are weak and the government is not aware of such copyright infringement methods. Although Indian parliament had enacted IT Act 2000 and subsequently amended in 2008, which expressly provide liability of third parties but the infringement are still increasing day by day, Indian entertainment industry alone hit a loss of one billion.