India: the complexities of e-commerce

Today, with the growing awareness of intellectual property, e-commerce involves selling products and services that are based on IP and its licensing. Pictures, music, software, etc, can be the traded with IP playing a pivotal role in the business transaction. While the advent of e-commerce has facilitated ease of businesses, certain significant issues have arisen that need attention.

Trademarks and domain names

Brand names play a crucial role in businesses, especially e-commerce, so domain names have acquired the same status as that of trademarks. The nature of cyberspace has given rise to challenges such as cybersquatting, deep hyperlinking, meta-tagging and other such violations.

In the landmark judgment of Yahoo v Akash Arora & Anr (1999), the Delhi High Court held that trademark law applies with equal force in the virtual and physical worlds. In this case, the court rejected the attempt to register ‘Yahoo India’ as a domain name due to its close resemblance to the registered domain name ‘Yahoo’. The Indian courts have repeatedly followed this approach in several subsequent cases such as Rediff Communication v Cyberbooth & Anr (1999), where the Bombay High Court upheld a similar principle and asserted the value and importance of a domain name as a corporate asset.

Domain name squatting often leads to confusion among consumers and damage to the goodwill of the rightful owner. Moreover, such offences result in diversion of traffic to competing businesses and counterfeits, and hence lead to loss. Therefore, technical measures to curb such illegalities are imperative. For domain name disputes, proceedings can be initiated when country-code top-level domain names are registered. In India, INRegistry adjudicates such domain name disputes.

Copyright

Digitisation of data has led to a rapid rise in unauthorised copying, downloading and reproduction. Linking and peer-to-peer file-sharing have led to rampant digital piracy. In the day and age of streaming unlicensed content online, copies are made available in minutes, leading to loss of revenues for the copyright owners.