CLL213 | Copyright and the Limits And Exceptions Relating To Education

The intellectual property (IP) discourse has traditionally been centered around the ‘maximalist’ approach of developed nations, whose primary focus has been to protect the monopoly rights of the IP holders. This is evident in international IP law, and consequently domestic legislation relating to IP, more prominently since the merging of IP framework with the trade framework in 1995 by way of TRIPS agreement. However, a counter movement, focusing on IP and the public interest has also evolved over the years, predominantly over the last three decades.

This course aims to explore and understand this counter movement focusing primarily on copyright law and the scope for limits and exceptions in copyright relating to educational use. To this end, the course begins by introducing the concept of limits and exceptions (L&Es) to copyright and its historical, theoretical, and philosophical justifications. It then discusses in general the place of L&Es in international law and moves on to deal with specific L&Es in international law relating to education. The course then moves into a study of two specific L&E, namely the doctrine of fair use and the doctrine of first sale /exhaustion on a comparative basis, wherein the laws of USA, EU and India are analyzed with the help of case law. This study also extends to an analysis of the doctrines in the context of digitization, more specifically the anti-circumvention laws in international and domestic legislations of the afore-mentioned jurisdictions.