An Efficient Fight against Counterfeiting in India

Presently, one issue that is troublesome at a global level is counterfeit. This vicious circle is so dense that it is becoming more and more difficult for any brand owner to work on any kind of anti-counterfeit activity.

Becoming aware needs to be the foremost priority that one needs to consider for fighting this venom prevailing in the society. Counterfeit is not just affecting the brands and brand owners but is directly affecting the consumers by making available cheaper quality replica products. Up till now, most of the patrons have not realised that counterfeiting and piracy are capable of creating a menace to their wellbeing. At many instances, when people are aware of the presence of fakes, they aren’t able to distinguish between the false products due to the impeccable similarity to the original product.

Fight counterfeiting in India is a cause raised due to the alarming growth rate of the fakes present in the market. Though, the truth remains that counterfeiting is not invincible. A brand owner needs to be aware of his IP rights, that include trademarks, designs and patents, that  make available the ways to tackle the production fake copies. Nevertheless, to enforce such rights demands extensive plan.

There are various specialized agencies including BrandsandFakes that work towards the ways to stop counterfeiting. The priority lies in identifying the fakes. We have number of professional anti-counterfeiting forces and tools that help brand owners to spot and act in opposition to counterfeiting. We work along with a group of Volunteers, Brands, Investigators etc.

Fighting counterfeit isn’t a child’s chore; it is a battle that the society needs to fight together, hand in hand. People from different walks of life need to get together and battle against this evil. Intellectual property right plays a momentous function in our economy too; it encourages creativity, art and research of any form and allows the reinforcement of competitive positioning of individuals and companies in the economy. Counterfeited goods, ground a serious threat to the development of the economy. Many organisations make huge profits through forged designs and signs which are protected by intellectual property rights.

Counterfeiting and piracy are concepts which are generally used to indicate a violation of intellectual property rights, this means that certain acts are carried out without the consent of the intellectual property right holder and need to be stopped immediately. As individuals, what we really need to do is, focus and be aware; this will help the society to fight the battle against counterfeit.

Brands and Fakes Web Based Platform: Avoiding Copyright Infringement

Have you ever uploaded an image or a video to a website, only for it to be deleted because of copyright issues? While some areas of copyright law can be complicated enough to cause copyright lawyers sleepless nights, the basics are very simple. Armed with some simple principles, you can save yourself from running afoul of copyright law.

Understand the scope of copyright law. 

It does protect literary works, paintings, photographs, drawings, films, music (and its lyrics), choreography, sculptures and many other things. It generally doesn't protect the underlying ideas, and it does not protect facts. For example, copyright doesn't prevent you from expressing in your own words ideas and facts found in a book or journal you read (but you should always give appropriate credit to the sources in which you found them; it is common courtesy to do so, and not doing so could constitute a violation of the Copyright Act as what you have created may constitute a derivative work pursuant to the Copyright Act, unless you have obtained license or permission from the copyright holder to create the same). It may also constitute plagiarism under state common law.

Don't take anything from the Internet, or anywhere else, because it is almost always copyrighted, by default. 

"I found it on the Internet" is not a defense against copyright infringement; works on the Internet are as copyrightable as any other kind of work. Nor is "it didn't say it was copyrighted." In nearly all jurisdictions and all other Berne Convention signatories, it is not necessary for a work to have an explicit copyright notice for it to be copyrighted. It is also not necessary for copyright in a work to be registered; this simply makes it easier to be compensated in court. Without an explicit dedication to the public domain, assume that it is still under copyright.

Don't confuse copyrights, trademarks, and other forms of "intellectual property."

The term "intellectual property rights" itself, and the kind of thinking it encourages, has led to these very different things being confused with each other. Trademarks, for example, forbid using certain words, marks, symbols, and so on within certain contexts, to protect consumers from misrepresentation. Copyright would not prevent you from, for example, writing some new text editor software and calling it "Microsoft Text Editor", but trademark law would.

Be creative.

If ever you wonder whether a certain action would infringe on the copyright of someone else, the question to ask is: is this a creative work on my count, or am I simply drawing from the creativity of someone else? Lunches, as any economist would tell you, are not free. Some examples:

·         Scanning something yourself does not, by itself, give you a new copyright over anything. You cannot scan a photograph from, say, a magazine and then put it on the Internet; the copyright would still reside with the author of the work. The flip-side of this is that scanning a work which is in the public domain would not, in many jurisdictions, give you the copyright over the resulting scan.

·         Taking a screenshot of a video or a computer program does not generate a new copyright. The copyright in the resulting screenshot would still be held by the copyright holder of the original video or computer program.

·         Some non-creative things are not copyrightable, for example, a plain text logo in a generic font. Neither are simple geometric shapes. But don't rely on this unless you are certain.

Learn about the public domain laws for your jurisdiction. 

"Public domain" is short-hand for "uncopyrighted", not "publicly distributed". A work can be out of copyright due to age, by the nature of authorship, or other reasons.

Don't rely on "fair use" called "fair dealing" in many jurisdictions, fair use is simply a guarantee that copyright laws do not infringe freedom of speech and make critical commentary impossible.

Some uses of text under "fair use" are teaching, critiques, comments, reporting, and research. It permits, for example, limited quoting of copyrighted material. In some jurisdictions, it would allow creating a copy for personal use (such as a backup)^[4]. It is not a blank cheque granting you a right to do anything at all and call it "fair use". Fair use is an extremely complex body of case law; it is often very difficult for non-lawyers to tell in advance whether or not a certain use will be considered fair use in court. If in doubt, seek permission first.

Be wary about writing fiction based on other works. 

It was said above that "ideas cannot be copyrighted". However, fictional characters, story-lines, and settings can be copyrighted (insofar as they are original). This means that fan-fiction, drawings of characters from copyrighted works, and so on are all technically copyright infringements. Sometimes copyright holders turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, but unless it has been explicitly authorised, don't count on this being the case.