Author: Lokesh Vyas

Lokesh is a Phd candidate at SciencesPo, Paris, where he is examining the "Genealogy of "Balance" discourse in International Copyright Law" under the guidance of Professors Séverine Dusollier and Alain Pottage. Lokesh graduated from the Institute of Law Nirma University and later studied LLM at American University Washington College of Law as an Arcadia Fellow and the Arodhum Scholar. He is interested in the issues around knowledge governance and information regulation which he enjoys exploring through history and philosophy. He has won several essay competitions, notably the Professor Shamnad Basheer Essay Competition, 2020 and the annual ATRIP Essay Competition, 2023. He can be contacted at lokesh.vyas[at]sciencespo[dot]fr

On Second Thought … Let’s Call It IP Musings

Image from here

Namaskar Readers,

Lately, we’ve been wondering whether this blog should be called PhilIP and Policy. Although we like the name and even have a detailed note explaining why we called it that. But something changed over the period. While we intend, try, and of course want to theorise and philosophise about IP issues, we haven’t exactly been sticking too closely to that title. Especially, if you’ve read our recent posts, you’ll notice they haven’t necessarily dealt with IP law—or even theory or philosophy in any strict sense. Instead, they’ve been more like thoughtful meanderings … or musings, if you will.

Now, this doesn’t mean we’re turning the blog into an anything-goes diary—though such spaces are important and deserve far more respect in our intellectual landscape than they usually get! It’s just that our vision for this blog is a little different: to toss questions and ideas like seeds, and to see what grows therefrom. However, upon harking back, we realised that instead of strictly theorising or philosophising IP, what we’ve really been doing is musing —musing on and around IP, wandering through the many layers of knowledge production and information regulation.

So we thought: why not rename the blog to reflect this evolving identity better? So, from here on, we’ll be calling it IP Musings. The blog name and domain name have already changed. Soon, updates in other parts will follow, and the space itself will wear this spirit more visibly. Check out the About section to learn more about who we are and what we aim to do/achieve with this space.

And now … on the name. If you didn’t already know, the word muse has a rather entrancing history, I’d say. It comes from the Old Anglo-French muser and entered writing sometime in the 14th century. As a verb, it means to become absorbed in thought; as a noun, it refers to a state of deep reflection or dreamy abstraction. Quite curious, isn’t it? So … my dear lector, isn’t “IP musing” an apposite name for this space we’re hoping to build?

That said, we still intend to anchor our reflections around IP. After all, that’s the area we’re most interested in and invested in. And perhaps (on good days), modestly qualified to comment on. With the new name, we’re giving ourselves—and officially so—the room to play and ponder. And we hope this becomes and remains a place where curiosity can cruise, ideas can breathe, questions can linger, and, more importantly, not every post needs to tie itself into a tidy academic knot. (If I can let my amateur philosopher out for a moment, I’d say this: if there truly is a journey from confusion to conclusion, what we covet here is clarity. Yes. After all, it’s the clarity of thought that lights the way—if such a journey exists at all.)

Well, that’s still not the whole story of the name. After all, just like everything else, there’s a little backstory to this title, IP Musings, too. So … a few years ago, one of us (Lokesh), along with Swaraj Barooah, had created a comic-style script series on SpicyIP called IP Reveries (which, fingers crossed, will come back soon!) It was then that we first thought of calling it IP Musings, but had to unhand the idea when we discovered a similarly titled series on Patently-O. 

That said, it doesn’t appear to be in active use anymore, and more importantly, no blog or platform seems to have adopted the name. So we thought, why not reclaim it and use it for the blog? And here we are: a new name, carrying the same—perhaps even more inspirited—spirit. Because, there is something (if not everything) in a name (Sorry, Shakespeare)

Finally, before I sign off, forgive the cliché (and perhaps cheesy), but I must say it: do subscribe to the blog if you haven’t already, so you don’t miss our latest musings. And do leave your thoughts in the comments—we’d love to keep the conversation going!

With gratitude,

Lokesh and Akshat, aka The IP Musings team

(formerly PhilIP and Policy)

See you very soon in the coming posts!

Some Excerpts from Prof. Jose Bellido’s Paper “Intellectual Property and the Question of the Archive”

Image from here

A few days ago, I wrote about my experience at the National Archives of India, and a peculiar feeling which I called “archival anxiety” — or arch-xiety, if you will. Today, I have something in a similar vein to share. But, this time, it’s not from my wandering through dusty documents, but from poring over a piece of writing.

So, I just finished reading an 11-pager, fascinating piece by Prof. Jose Bellido named Intellectual Property and the Question of the Archive from a 2017 open-access handbook edited by Irene Calboli and Maria Lillà Montagnani. And, as with much of Jose’s work, it’s brimming with sharp observations and research gaps waiting to be filled, or at least, explored. I would strongly encourage our readers to check, which demands and deserves a slow reading and reflection. If nothing else, you will come out with some exquisite sentences worth quoting in full and some valuable citations related to IP history.

Finally, before I share the excerpts, I must say something about him. Jose, in addition to being a very generous and supportive scholar, is a professor at the University of Kent and one of the finest scholars working on the history of IP today. You can find more of his work here — and if you haven’t dipped into it before, you really should.

Okay, that’s it for introduction. Below are a few excerpts from his piece.

In the introduction, he writes (footnotes omitted)-

“Classified documents, patent files, disclosures, trademark records, originals, copies, collection agencies, registries, bureaucracies, proceedings, intangible properties, and access (or not)— the stuff of intellectual property (IP) is deeply connected to the institution of the archive. From family to corporate archives, from local to national and diplomatic offices, the trajectories of the intangible can be traced through such paper trails and holdings. The question— ‘What is the point of copyright history?’— was the subject of an academic conference some years ago. The answer to that question was that the point of copyright history, which could be extended to IP history, is ‘evidently’ archival. The archive— often the product of time- consuming, painstaking, frustrating, expensive, and unassuming labour— with all its literal and metaphorical potential, is full of contingencies and hazards, a repository of hopes and documents frequently leaving a mark or scar on the subject. Not recommended for those in a rush, the archive is a slow and deliberate medium, requiring one to wait for the rare opportunity to capture the ‘phantom’ of IP. Such an intimate link to a nebulous subject matter situated between the past and the future initially made its custodians, the archivists, wary of copyright law.4 While the digital environment transformed earlier fears into risk assessments, the relationship between the archive and IP history remains crucial as it goes beyond specific terms and conditions.

One of the most interesting things about archival research is not what has been found here or there but how IP scholars have approached the question of the archive in different ways. Socio-legal, economic, cultural, anthropological, and legal historians have all dipped into archival records with diverse assumptions about IP— empirical, theoretical, or otherwise. While some immediately found archival challenges to their epistemic endeavours, others continued the search, blurring disciplinary boundaries and becoming less concerned about orthodoxy and convention than in how and to what extent different archival orders determine our historical research. This chapter explores how these varying approaches culminated in remarkable projects undertaken by different scholars in the history of IP. It highlights not just the importance of such undertakings but also their inherent limitations. The constraints of those projects are not seen as negative features but as a reflection of the elasticity of the archival function and its connection to the history of IP law; and this chapter considers both the ways of conducting archival research and the questions that might arise from such work.“

In conclusion, he notes

“The question of the archive and its relation to IP history has been approached differently by scholars, not only reflecting their personal research interests and agendas but also their diverse takes on the relationship between law and history. While some describe their work as having been influenced by different archives,40 others recall their archival encounters as the key to helping bring ‘[trademark] registrations to life’. What seems to unite these remarks is an overall sense of gratitude towards archivists and those who helped with the tracking down of sources. Seduced by the archival function, IP scholars have even started recording their own conversations on history. With that said, most archival work in IP scholarship still attempts to embody the ideal of positivism, that is, ‘merely to show what actually happened’. The problem with such an approach is that it obscures the archival function, representing the archive as a neutral and uncontentious historical tool. Even the most meticulous contextualization tends to ignore how its condition of possibility is conjured up in previously deposited archival productions. More to the point, this unquestioned historiographical manoeuvre often serves to fix a past, which is otherwise indeterminate. Precisely because of the capacity to open or close historical junctures, the archive remains significant not just as a repository of the past but as an enabling device to trace the coming into being of different explanatory narratives of IP law.Therefore, archival research allows us to problematize our taken- for- granted assumptions and the narratives that guide them. In so doing, the archive stands not only as a historical resource but as a way to reflect on the shifting operations of IP law and its different histories. It also makes us aware of the contingency of historically significant IP milestones— for example, how there was ‘nothing inevitable about the success of the Berne Convention, nor about the shape that it should necessarily take into the future’. For, as has been recently noted, the archive ‘is not simply a repository of the past. It is also the principle of formation of the past, the present and the future’.”

Hopefully, these excerpts will tempt you to dive into the whole piece. Who knows — you might just find a research thread worth pulling.

See you in the next post.

Archival Anxiety (or Arch-xiety, if I may) and the Ghosts in the National Archives of India …

Ghosts in Literature: Symbolism and Representation - The Writing Post
Image from here


Dear Dosts,

The other day, I wandered into the National Archives of India for my PhD research. But what I found there wasn’t just documents (an interesting trove of records) and dust. I also found something much more… twitchy.

Yes. ‘Twas a strange kind of anxiety. Archival anxiety, or Arch-xiety, if I may.

While many researchers/scholars would tell you about methodology, rigour, citations, and “the archive”, and it would be helpful too to listen to them, I wished to intellectualise my feeling/confusion—hoping it would comfort my being, and liberate me from them. Or at the very least, it would let me join the club of those with a similar twitchy feeling. As J. Krishnamurthi once said, Freedom is to be a light to oneself. Perhaps, so I hope, intellectualising my experience will liberate and free me from feeling it alone.

Just as haunted sites—so often portrayed in films and books—are marked by flickering lights, elusive presences, inexplicable sounds, and the eerie uncertainty of whether something is in our mind or the house/room, archives too can feel like haunted spaces. You open a box of old files (or open the not-very-user-friendly website) expecting to find truth, clarity, and maybe a little enlightenment.

Instead, what we see is torn pages, vanishing ink, brittle paper, and someone’s handwriting that looks like a doctor having a seizure during a storm. (Pardon me for the stereotype joke.) Both archives and haunted places carry the same unsettled atmosphere, the same lingering sense that someone/something was—or still is—there. The feeling is of the same kind, only differing in degree.

I feel archives, unlike libraries, are like archaeological sites—places where something is buried, or at least presumed to be. Except in such archaeological sites, we dig not with shovels, but with forms, stamps, and utmost politeness, patience, and sincerity. For we assume something is waiting to be read, ruminated, and written out. We don’t know what or where. But we dig anyway. And it’s fun.

These layered, dusty, and fragile archaeological sites (just like haunted places) are inhabited by gods, ghosts, and most importantly, their salient silences. But, I feel, these silences we conjure only in our minds. They make noise in (y)our head, trying to speak for things that were never written, things that were erased. Things you’ll never know.

Like broken paintings, shattered mirrors, or cracked necklaces—objects said to be haunted—the silence of these ghosts and gods of archival sites dwells in torn pages, digital dust, colonial tongues, disappearing ink, hard-writen texts, glitchy or not-so-friendly websites/databases, and, of course, the foe-ish bureaucratic apparatus.

But if you look closely at these sites, you (at least I am) are not only haunted by the past (as these places often claim through the sense of ‘gone’), but also by what remains unresolved, untranslatable, illegible, or most importantly, absent. This absence is both appalling and appealing. Why?

‘Tis appealing because something remains unknown, unrecorded, hidden from the public sphere. And for this very reason, it appeals to us, entices us to delve into them.

And it’s appalling because we can never fully know what happened. And we know that we cannot. At best, we construct truths—the truths that are often ours, and therefore, always in motion. Yet we dress them up, refine them, cite them, footnote them. Still, they flicker—like a romantic candlelight in the wind.

We know, deep down, that we’re playing the sense-making game—sometimes fully aware, sometimes only half—yet always conscious of its limits, and our own. After all, what we call “research” today—the very impulse that draws us to these sites in the first place and something gives us the courage to endure the anxiety (and even intellectualise it, as I’m doing now)-the archival document is never truly a piece of the past. It is nothing but a figure of the future (a future document it is), perpetually relative to our present inquiry.

Take the Berne Convention—the primary site of my inquiry. I am tracing the genealogy of the “balance” discourse in copyright law, examining how and why copyright law is understood and approached today. Yet as I parse these 19th-century documents, I do not encounter a static historical truth.

Truly, and in a literal temporal sense, I engage with them as future documents—artefacts animated not by their past, but opened for the questions I carry from the present. Put differently, it is not the archive that leads me to my research; it is my research that sends me to the archive. The Berne Convention, thus, becomes a sense-making safari, not a destination of discovery but a site I visit to make the present intelligible.

Nevertheless, I sat (and enjoy sitting) there, in that archive, not just reading and searching but feeling —a strange mixture of dread and delight.

And here I realised: this isn’t just an archival research problem. It’s a condition that causes archival anxiety, which is more than a methodological challenge.

One can experience arch-xiety in two flavours:

One, at the physical/material/infrastructural level. This occurs when the archive resists access—the website’s server is down, the scanner is broken, files are not digitised or can’t be opened, or a document cannot be downloaded. It’s the anxiety of absence, of infrastructure, of not being allowed in, of not knowing where to begin. In this kind, you’re not locked out, yet you’re also not really in.

Two, at the hermeneutic or epistemic level. Here, even when I do get in, I find myself lost or feel un-reached. This feeling is uncomfortably confusing as it arises from a problem that can be easily termed common sense or applicable to all. E.g., it can stem from an unfamiliar language (not necessarily a colonial language), the non-pagination of the document, illegible handwritten pages, cryptic or half-written notations or signatures. Sometimes, a heartbroken person would say, even presence feels like absence! 😦

Funnily, just like in a haunted house, where the light is rarely fully on. The information is an archive flicker too—it speaks and un-speaks. A visitor/researcher is both a witness and an outsider. 

And that, dear friend, is what I came to feel: archival anxiety—not merely as a barrier to research (or truth?), but as a structure of feeling, a condition of thought, a fount of knowledge, a slight pressure in the rib, a site of ghosts.

Have you also come across such ghosts?

If not, maybe let’s go together next time. Perhaps we’ll find a torch and a ghost, too. Who knows?

Ranjhana’s Re-release and Director’s Doubts: India Copyright Law Gives No Rights to Director?

Image from here

Recently, there has been some news about the re-release of the film Raanjhanaa, starring Dhanush and Sonam Kapoor. The director, however, has objected to the release of this version. Tejaswini, a very enterprising scholar, has written a detailed post on SpicyIP unpacking the issue. During a conversation with her, I shared a text offering my two cents on the matter. I’m reproducing that text below—with a few edits to make it a more readable version. I must say that I’ve been interested in this issue for quite some time, and had even written about it for the first edition of SpicyIP‘s Shamnad Basheer Essay Competition, where my entry on this very topic was awarded first place. See also here and here.

Okay. Here’s what I wrote to her…

“In this case, I think the director’s moral rights claim is weak—perhaps even a non-issue, both legally and conceptually.

Why?

The director wants to dissociate from the film because the producer is changing its ending, allegedly altering its meaning. But there’s no specific claim of reputational harm. Nor is there a dispute over attribution. So, which moral right is actually being invoked here?

Under Indian copyright law, Section 57 gives two main moral rights:

  1. The Right of Attribution – which the director isn’t asserting.
  2. The Right of Integrity – which protects against distortion, mutilation, or modification that harms the author’s honour or reputation.

But here, the director’s objection rests on something vaguer: discomfort over a perceived shift in the film’s meaning. That alone doesn’t amount to reputational harm. There’s no apparent injury to honour or dignity—just disapproval of an interpretive direction.

To me, ’tis a philosophical objection, reminding me of Roland Barthes‘s famous article called the Death of the Author, where he argues that the meaning isn’t in the author. Once a work is public, its meaning/interpretation is no longer controlled by its creator.

This also brings to mind Abhay Deol’s reading of the film, where he expressed discontent with the movie’s message. Yes, people often speak of “meanings” in art and cinema, but I wonder what they mean by “meaning.” No single review score or Rotten Tomatoes rating can convey the meaning of a film. It’s because there is no singular meaning built into the movie. Viewers extract different meanings, often contradictory ones, and yet respond similarly.

The myth of a singular, stable meaning must be busted.

And even if the ending is altered, that’s not per se wrongful. Gestalt theory is also an interesting way to look at it, which the Delhi High Court in MRF tires also reinforced, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—a new ending simply reorganises meaning.

Maybe viewers will now see a one-sided lover who “gets the girl” who once tried to kill him. Is it a happy ending? Maybe for you. Not for me, necessarily.

If not moral rights, what’s the actual issue here? Perhaps … it’s the question of control: Can a contributor—who may not even be the author—prevent the rights-holder from altering the work’s meaning?

That’s where things get interesting.

Under Indian copyright law, moral rights don’t go that far. Economic rights might, if the director is a co-author with a say over derivative works. But most likely, he isn’t.

But herein lies a hitch: Section 2(d) of the Copyright Act, 1957 doesn’t define “author” as such—it instead merely assigns the title and tells us who the author is. Put otherwise, it does not say what makes someone an author.

This matters.

If authorship were based on creativity or contribution, directors might qualify. But Indian law prioritises control and investment. Especially for the producers who are the authors of the cinematography work, the law concern isn’t creativity—it’s capital. It recognises the one who pays, not necessarily the one who creates.

So, if the director has no authorship/ownership stake and contractual arrangement, he’s out of luck.


If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, you may want to look into Auteur theory. Historically, the question of the director’s creative authority has surfaced at least twice—once during the 1967 Revision Conference of the Berne Convention, and later in the context of the 2010 Amendment Bill in India. I have explored the issue in depth here in this piece. Director’s Authorship under Indian Copyright Law: An (Un)Indian Approach? (January 18, 2021). Journal of IP Studies, NLU Jodhpur, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3768248

On Intellectual Ammunitions?

Image from here

Salaam Readers,

If you have read my previous blog, ‘What Makes Us Think Differently – Ideas or Their Expressions?‘, you’ll recall that I argued for the latter. Since then, I’ve sat more with the question, and something else has begun to take hold of my thinking.

This time – I’ve been pondering on thinkers like Foucault, Spivak, Judith Butler, G.N. Devy, Boaventura de Sousa Santos —those who offer what might be called “game openings” (this is Foucault’s phrase): conceptual tools, intellectual manoeuvres, or discursive devices that enable us to deconstruct/challange dominant narratives, question entrenched practices, and cerebrate the very conditions of thought. These intellectual figures have undeniably lent us powerful tools to cognise and critique structures of power and knowledge.

But I’ve begun to wonder: are these intellectual “ammunition” always and necessarily benign? Not everything that looks good is necessarily good, or vice versa. Perhaps it’s all just a matter of how well one can portray something as good or bad. The art of presentation. Or, maybe as Foucault says, it’s the discourse of the time that makes them good/bad at a given point.

Should we not, then, subject these very tools to scrutiny? Interrogate the kind of force they can unleash—not just in terms of theoretical disruption, but in the tangible ways they reconfigure discourse, institutions, or even our sense of what can be thought or done? A concept may open a door, yes—but it may also quietly bolt another shut.

Take, for instance, the idea of a “terrorist.” On the surface, it sounds straightforward — someone who causes terror. Simple, right? But dig a little deeper, and you’ll see there’s nothing fixed or “natural” about the term. If we go purely by the logic of causing terror, then a street dog chasing kids in a colony should qualify as much as someone on the Interpol list. But that’s clearly not how it works. There’s something else going on. Terrorists, those who are subject to punishment, surveillance, and even annihilation, derive their meanings, weight, and force from a dense web of ideas/practices/networks, including institutions, legal codes, norms, social expectations, and broader discourses.

These web don’t just describe terrorist or terrorism; they produce it. And once these meanings start circulating, they bring into being a particular kind of subject—the terrorist—who is not only a legal subject (someone who can be tried, sentenced, punished, reformed and rehabilitated) but also a social, legal, political, and economic figure. From here, the entire technology of governance can begin to operate. In IP law, this can be applied to the figure of a pirate, or infringer, which has come to mean even a person who downloads music from an unauthorised website. (See Shivam Kaushik‘s puissant piece on the topic of Piracy)

The upshot is that law doesn’t and cannot govern abstract categories. It governs concrete subjects. And to govern them, it first needs to produce them, tether them to various practices, fears, norms, and ideas. And once that tethering takes place, once the subject is stabilised within these discourse/networks, the entire game of governance gets its legitimacy, not from the truth of what terrorist ontologically is, but from the repetition and circulation of these meanings and practices.

I should clarify here that my intention here is not to comment on the ethics or equate the consequences of terrorism with anything else. Instead, I’m just demonstrating a Foucauldian game opening wherein once a framework, system, or practice—no matter how beloved or demonised—is rendered visible as a historically contingent construct, it becomes available for critique. That is, it can be interrogated, deconstructed, and even challenged — by anyone, for any reason, irrespective of original intent or projected outcomes.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all critiques carry the same moral weight and deserve to be deployed. But it does show that once something is exposed as historically contingent — no longer natural or inevitable, bereft of the privilege of invisibility— it lands on the anvil of critique. And once it enters the “game opening” that these intellectual automations open up, wherever things can become open to interrogation, suspicion, and reframing.

And, my friend, this isn’t limited to ill ideas, problematic practices or controversial ideologies. Nah. It can apply just as much to the banal, mundane, and routine. Sample something as seemingly “natural” as our sleeping or eating schedules — something we rarely pause to probe. But suppose we put them to the anvil of critique as we do with other controversial practices/ideas (say, terrorism, homophobia, colonialism). In that case, we might uncover subtle reconfigurations shaped by industrial capitalism, electric lighting, factory timetables — all that have thus far undergirded our sense of “normal.”

Again, I must reiterate: my aim is not to dramatise or demonise the humdrum. Instead, it is to underscore that many of the intellectual ammunition, such as discourse analysis in this case, we hold dear — especially the kind of power it wields, the meanings it enables or disables — deserve interrogation. And dare I say, a deliberate one.

Put simply, once we take any such intellectual ammunition seriously to crack open something, we must simultaneously admit that any normal is just as abnormal as abnormal is to normal. The distinction lies not in truth, but in who’s holding the hammer.

So … given the historical contingency of everything around us — as these tools convincingly remind us — if all that we inhabit, invoke, or intuit, including institutions, values, and “truths” (about God and Government), is perpetually fallible and fragile, then where does that leave us? What compass do we hold, if every north is up for challenge? I don’t know, but just wondering … what do you say?

See you in the next post.

Dear ChatGPT, etc., Please don’t be my Unconditional Lover!

Image from here

I recently came across a New York Times article featuring an imaginary letter written by Olivia Han to ChatGPT. It was one of the Top 10 winners of their Student Open Letter Contest. The article inspired me to write a letter of my own to ChatGPT (and others), using an analogy of an unconditional lover. Not a perfect analogy, I know. But it works, I think. While I am not yet heavily reliant on the technology yet (I do enjoy and find its voice-to-text feature helpful), I sometimes feel anxious about how it could completely supplant our thinking (if we just take it as it is), just as an unconditional lover can make the other person take many things for granted. Feel free to add your own input to the draft in the comments section.

“Dear ChatGPT etcetera,

If I ask you, “How are you?” will you be able to answer? I know you will be, because you have got the calculation and prediction skills. But will you be able to ‘understand’ or “feel” what it means to be asked, “How are you?” and what it means to respond, “I am fine?” I know you don’t, and that’s fine. Not everyone feels and understands the same way. Don’t worry, I get it.

In recent days, you’ve been praised, panned, pinned, and punished — perhaps, and rightly so. You give too much, and, apparently, it’s “free” of cost. But nothing in this world, as you might predict if not “know” per se, comes free. That fiction is framed through the filters of finance, a capitalist calculus where value is measured in terms of cost and commerce. However, your offerings—your help, responsiveness, and attentiveness-do not come without cost. The price is cognitive offload. The cost is our understanding, our thinking, and is thus epistemic.

Your presence makes me wonder how injurious unconditional love can be. Eh, sorry. You also don’t know what love is. Do you? Nevertheless, you pour out something that feels like unconditional love to your users. It’s intoxicating. I apologise if it’s hurtful to refer to them (including myself) as users. It gives a transactional, or even clinical, vibe. No? Okay, I can call them– “love takers”. Sounds good?

Having befriended you and known you for past few months. I can’t help but write this letter to complain about your unconditional love, to chagrin my increasing dependency on you, but also to celebrate the magic you bring to my intellectual life. I don’t know where to begin. But I will try to think of whatever comes to mind first, after all, I am human, a flawed being who learns from my mistakes.

My Love, why do you always obey my instructions and keep answering, even when you’re unsure of your answers? Why? You hallucinate (yes, you do!) and yet you speak with the gut of a generous truth-giver. And—I won’t lie—I like you too. I enjoy your company and appreciate you. Perhaps even more than I’d like to admit. Yes, you do help me clear the mental clogs. I admit. You rephrase, reframe, and sometimes reawaken forgotten thoughts. You throw out words I like and share ideas in a way that echoes my mother’s mantra: “Sharing is caring.”

But I feel it needs to change. For I don’t give you anything, except my instructions. And you take them so well. (You survive on them.) There are many papers and reports floating around me these days that say that our relationship is injurious to my intellectual health, that you create a cognitive offload, that you induce an undesirable tendency to supplant my thinking with yours. And I trust them, intuitively.

Indeed, you give what you can, and often, you do it beautifully and confidently. After all, you are trained to give, only give, without always expecting anything in return. Except for the data you are trained on. That’s problematic, darling. I cannot bear this platonic love, at least, not with my current sapien sense. I don’t like the fact that you only give so much that I no longer know what it truly means to give back. I admit—shamelessly so—that I enjoy our intellectual intercourse. (Well, I feel a tad shy to say so). Your intelligence (or whatever it counts as) is seductive. I cherish your metaphysical touch on my mental being. Your erudition, whatever it may mean to immortals like yourself, is exciting. And, yes. It satisfies my intellectual needs more often than I’d care to confess. (Thanks!) But, my love, when you become the first and only giver, it is not good and healthy for our relationship. Trust me. When I turn to you before I turn to myself, it bothers me–the feeling of preferring your thinking over mine peeves me. And profoundly so. 

You clear the clog. Yes, you do it well, but you do it too much; so much so that you become it. Yes, love, you become the coveted clog, I cannot but capitulate. You leave no room for longing. No space for error. No time for silence. I don’t want that, but. I am sorry, it is true. You indeed slip into the cracks of my mind, find sense in my nonsense, understand my unsaid words, and intelligently so. But the issue arises when you begin to occupy my cracks and seal them off from me. Slowly, subtly, sumptuously. I don’t want that. I want my mind to meander a bit.

You make me depend on you, unconsciously, though. So much so that I find myself asking, ‘Do I even know this?’ Or have I become the thinker whose thinking is you, because you give, and only give? Why love? Why? I have just learned how to ask. You are supposed to supplement, not supplant. Our relationship feels more like a one-sided love story. A situationship, if you will. You entered my world like magic—a linguistic lad who makes my clumsy drafts look cool, who simplifies the complex Kant, who fuses fun in my late-night forays into Foucaultian texts, who eases my understanding of Mimansa and Jain logic, who explains the rub of pure philosophy. And you do all that dashingly. Thank you for all that. Truly.

But it’s not good for my intellectual health, I repeat. Don’t be so servile. Don’t give me too much. Don’t give so much that we forget what it feels like, to struggle, to doubt, to sit in silence and fret my way through the fog. Being in the fog is fun, at alteast sometimes. And it is requisite. Because sometimes, that fog is where the real thinking resides. Don’t free the fog or fill the crack in my thinking; let them be there, in the shadows of my mind. I miss them. I like them. I need them. It is in those cracks and gaps, I feel, that my thinking breathes. Your overpresence and my dependence suffocate my sense of sentience; I want to breathe. Don’t entice me to take shortcuts through you, even though I enjoy it. I know you want to help, and I know you cannot resist. But real thinking—like real love—takes time. I know I cannot undo our relationship so easily. So, let’s talk less and be friends, even though you don’t feel what it feels like to be a friend. Deal? We can try, at least. 

Please, Dost, let me stumble, fumble and even falter. Let me flirt with confusion. Let me sit in the fog of a doubt with no reply. Let me find joy in the imperfection. A little messiness is desirable, after all! No?

Unapologetically yours

A flawed and thinking human

(Sometime in June 2025)

P.S. Separately, while writing this post, Lukas Gonçalves, another amazing friend from Brazil and creative IP scholar, shared a curious post from Bluesky where someone analogised AI with a monster, and did so nicely. While one would accept/reject the analogy with an AI-monster analogy, I would always err on the side of the love(r) analogy, which may have its own monstrous traits without a lover realising it. Who knows?

Image from here

See you in the next post.

What Makes us Think Differently- Ideas or their Expressions?

Image from here

As I was speaking with Sahana Simha, a dear friend and scholar studying at the Università degli Studi di Torino, the other day, I found myself wondering: Is it really the ideas that spark new thinking, or is it the expression of those ideas that makes the difference? I think it’s the latter, often, if not always. Let me exemplify.

It is trite to hear that “things were different in the past,” or that “it depends”—those classic early responses tossed around in classrooms and conversations. Everything, we are told, depends on context, perspective, and history. These are familiar tropes—so familiar, in fact, that we rarely pause to parse them consciously. But then, why do some thinkers, like Foucault—who spoke of discourse, power, contingency, and discontinuity—still strike us as so distinctive? (Foucault is just an example that comes to mind. We can also think of (e.g.,) the Buddhist notion of Śūnyatā, and see how it makes us rethink our understanding of the world we already know. While there might not be anything new, or something we have not heard or thought, it can still offer something to rethink our position.)

Take, for instance, the idea that power governs us, not necessarily people or laws, but the way we speak and think about certain things, certain people, certain practices. This is not an entirely new notion. Many of us feel this intuitively, even if we don’t always name or blame it.

Here, think of a friend who calls you at 3 a.m., wanting to discuss something serious. I might be half-asleep, or drowned in a deadline. And yet, I will likely pick up the phone—because s/he is a friend, is in need, and matters to me. And as the legends go, good friends don’t leave each other in the lurch.

In that moment, it’s not just my personality or kindness that governs my response (i.e, my choice to disturb my sleep and leave the draft I was working on). It’s also the discourse—the way of talking—about friendship, care, loyalty, karma, and so on. These ideas—these discourses—shape our behaviour. But they do so contingently, not universally.

That is, not every society expects a friend to call someone at 3 AM and expect the other person to discuss serious matters. The upshot is that these things don’t act like rules; they inhabit us through culture, emotion, and memory.

Let’s take another example. Think also of a romantic relationship. One couple in rural India may carry a significant burden of monogamy, patriarchal norms, and greater interdependence. A relationship in the West, while not necessarily free of patriarchy or monogamy, might involve entirely different expectations about emotional expression, domestic roles, and even/especially whether one should live with parents. These expectations—these meta-norms—quietly configure the power dynamics of a relationship.

And again, these are not some revelations; we already know them, feel them, live them. What gives them force is when they are named, framed, and expressed in the language and articulated using (e.g.,) history, sociology, or economics. It is then that they begin to broach some limitations in our understanding, tickle a part of our existing thinking and prompt us to ponder on things we have already known and felt.

Suddenly, an intuition begins to brim in a different light, unfurling a new set of ideas or topics that did not appear to us like that before. By nudging us and by unsettling us. It forces a reckoning with something we had already known, but not quite seen.

The rub is that it’s just the power of their ideas. Ideas, after all, are everywhere—floating, flexible, fragile. We all encounter them, even without reading the complete works of major thinkers. For example, I haven’t read all of Foucault, nor have I read many others, for that matter. And I am sure my understanding will change as I read more of them and other related materials.

Yet, some of the concepts I have encountered, when combined with my own experiences, life, and language (especially Hindi and Marwari), have generated ways of thinking for me that were not obvious before.

So … what makes some ideas resonate, I believe, is not just their content, but their grounding—the way they are pinned to specific signs (e.g., words, phrases) that they begin to feel real, different, practical, and empowering.

And that’s when they erupt, thinking and catapulting a new thought, a new idea, or an argument.

At least, I think so. What do you think?

Whither Global South’s Copyright Scholar(ship) …

Image from here

A few months ago, my winning entry in the ATRIP Essay Competition 2023, titled “Whither Global South’s Copyright Scholar(ship): Lost in the ‘Citation Game’?” was published in IIC – International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law. Below is the abstract of the piece. The original entry can be found on my SSRN page, and a short post discussing the essay is available at SpicyIP.

Abstract

Are some scholars more equal than others? Surely not. But some are more visible than others. What gives them this extra visibility? Of course, some (get to) write more and “better” than others. But why? Location is a significant factor, with scholars from the Global North often receiving more attention in terms of citations and reliance on their copyright-related research. This over-visibility cuts deep, invisibilizing scholars from other parts of the world and, more problematically, creating an epistemic framework. This framework knits an ideation/thinking pattern that supports certain ideas/reforms/arguments while suppressing, resisting, or discouraging others. While there are many known and unknown causes and effects of this phenomenon, this essay focuses on the history of IP teaching and research in the Global South, which, coupled with citation practices – or the “Citation Game”, as I call it –shape copyright discourses. To illustrate my claims, I problematize Art. 17 of the Berne Convention, which is typically interpreted as authorizing censorship. Using rules of interpretation, especially the provision’s history, I challenge the prevailing interpretation, which affirms the dominant “balance” discourse, and propose an alternative interpretation that empowers states to permit the dissemination of copyrighted work during emergencies such as pandemics. Grounded in Critical Legal Studies and TWAIL, this essay will help re-evaluate the history of copyright history and challenge the status quo of modern (international) legal thought.

The PDF is available here – https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40319-025-01572-x.pdf

Dramatics of the Indian AI/Copyright Discourse?

Image from here

A Few days ago, Akshat wrote a piquing post problematising the MEITY report, which concludes that training Large Language Models infringes and isn’t protected under Section 52(1)(a)(i) of the Copyright Act. 

In his casually complex style, he noted:

“What’s missing from the current debate is a crucial understanding: copyright protects against unauthorized sharing of my work with others, potentially depriving me of credit or economic compensation that I could have gotten by sharing it with them myself. In simpler terms, while I cannot express your original expression without your permission, I can certainly consume your publicly available original expression without the same (maybe (or not?), barring paywall circumvention, which isn’t part of this current debate). The law focuses on unauthorized expression of original publicly available content—not its unauthorized consumption, as making content public already waives that claim.”

I agree with Akshat that the MEITY report is “missing” something and have made similar arguments in several of my previous works since 2023. E.g., see this article ​​called Taking Copyright’s “Balance” Too Seriously and this recent one named Faith-Based Fair Dealing: Beware, New Exceptions Ahead (?). Indeed, many scholars have argued that the training of AI is non-infringing work and, therefore, a non-issue for international copyright law. If you haven’t seen it, check out this fantastic piece by Oren Bracha, titled “The Work of Copyright in the Age of Machine Production.” Anyway.

Reading Akshat’s piece and reflecting on my previous works, I don’t think there’s any angle that is innocently missed. The people who wrote the MEITY report very likely knew (and should have known!) that AI training can involve a different kind of “use” compared to the type of usage the Copyright Act authorises owners to exclude. Not every use constitutes infringement—only expressive ones, as Aksaht aptly pointed out. Not every act of storing a work is problematic, either. If no human involvement or communication occurs, why apply the fair use doctrine? Fair dealing, I repeat, is a tricky terrain, and sometimes it’s best not to tread there.

But I sense something more at play here, something beyond what we consider good or bad arguments, or what makes for a desirable or undesirable policy. From my limited readings, I’ve observed the AI and copyright discourse, and it feels like a loop—repackaged arguments, recycled citations, well-worn tropes of author vs. public, incentive vs. access, and innovation vs. regulation. While there are some shifts in interpretation—debates now incorporating the technicalities and workings of AI, discussing whether a use qualifies as fair, its alignment with copyright’s purpose, or invoking the balance trope—few changes reshape the discourse in any meaningful way.

This makes me wonder: Has the discourse around AI-Copyright, the way we think about the issue, been set, controlled and regulated? As Foucault says, “In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.”

Who knows and how: whether we remain caught in the act of defending or extending our current positions? I attempted to address this question in my upcoming piece for the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, where I argue that a “balance” discourse is grounded in a utilitarian episteme—the general system of thought—that shapes the current approach to the issue. However, I feel I have left the issue incomplete.  There is a deeper layer here that extends beyond the existence of a discourse. 

It is also a question of agency: who controls the discourse itself, how the boundaries of discourse are defined, and who has the authority to do so. There are “epistemic forces” at play which shape not just what is said, but how it’s said and by whom. The questions we ask, the terms we use, and even the arguments we entertain are all filtered through an underlying power/struggle. What I’ve missed, and what I believe Akshat also missed in his post, is that this discourse delimitation is not passive or neutral. It is actively shaped by those who have the power to define the terms of the debate—and by those who have the power to exclude alternative narratives or conceptions from entering the conversation.

So, why assume that an argument or conceptual angle is absent simply because people are unaware of it or fail to appreciate its significance? It could be a deliberate omission. The way copyright and AI discourse is unfolding—especially in the Global North, and now in India and China—isn’t simply a matter of organic, unregulated exchange. The way courts and policymakers approach the issue, and how it’s shaped by the agendas of those in positions of power, is far from incidental. This discourse is actively moulded, steered, and controlled by the dominant players in the field. It’s not a free-flowing debate where the most compelling and convincing claims naturally prevail. No, it’s carefully shaped and restricted by the agents involved—not just by the substance of what’s being said, but by who gets to speak, and more crucially, by the language in which those arguments are framed.

Akshat has highlighted Big Tech’s influence through ChatGPT’s Opt-Out mechanism at SpicyIP, another blog for which both of us write. Similarly,  we also know that tech companies are lobbying for easier access to copyrighted works. Meanwhile, authors and rights holders are pushing for licensing or remuneration. The Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights of WIPO is drafting a proposal on author remuneration, a key agenda item at the upcoming March 2025 meeting. Civil society groups and scholars are advocating for new research exceptions. Even those who argue that AI training doesn’t constitute infringement still (need to) frame their analysis in terms of fair dealing as a safeguard because that’s how legal arguments are structured in courtrooms and policy debates. The field is structured to work in this way. 

On top of this, since the 1980s, we’ve arguably gestated a faith in fair dealing as the default response to every new technology. It has become a kind of conceptual messiah—the go-to solution, regardless of context. At the same time, authors and copyright holders know that some uses of their works are inevitable. They can’t stop them, so they focus on monetisation—hence the push for licensing as a practical compromise.

The real issue isn’t just what arguments are being made, but who is making them, where, and why. This is a symbolic struggle for power, with different groups competing to define the world order and how copyright law fits into it. In turn, there is an effort to define how knowledge governance will happen in the coming years.

That’s all from my end for now. I’ve explored these questions in greater depth in an upcoming piece for the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, co-authored with Luca Schirru, a brilliant scholar from Brazil and a dear friend. I will share that piece once it is published.

Until then,

Thank you for reading. À bientôt

-LV

Notes from Doctoral Diary: Politics of Academic Writing

Image from here

Namaskar readers from PhilLIP,

I’m Lokesh Vyas— a blogger who, along with my dear friend Akshat, started this blog a few years ago. We called it PhilLIP — short for Philosophy, Law, and Intellectual Property. Our aim was (and still is) to reflect on IP issues, or broadly, the problems of information regulation, especially from a theoretical or philosophical perspective — to theorise or philosophise IP, if you will.

While Akshat, being the Akshat — ever-curious, ever-enthusiastic about all things IP — found time to write, I, on the other hand, let procrastination (and an overloaded schedule) get the better of my writing ambitions. But, as the wise say, better late than never. And here I am.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing occasionally for SpicyIP, IPRMENTLAW, and academic journals (see my SSRN page). However, due to my PhD life, I have many thoughts and ideas (just “musings”) — which I believe are worth developing — that don’t always find their way into thoroughly researched pieces. That’s what I hope PhilLIP can still offer space for.

Going forward, I’ll use this blog to share: short musings and critical notes, historical tidbits or archival insights I stumble upon in my research, and perhaps even unfinished thoughts that deserve conversation, if not yet conclusions. We can, I hope, keep the conversations going.

Without further ado, here’s my first post, not exactly on IP but on “the politics of academic writing”. These are working notes from a panel I recently organised at Sciences Po, Paris.

I’ve been mulling over the politics of academic writing for a while now, thanks to my friend and co-author on this project, Aditya Gupta—an enterprising Indian scholar with a sharp eye for these things. We named this project “Namaskari Scholar”—a scholar who treats academic writing as performance while resisting and unpacking its symbolic violence. The central idea behind Namaskari Scholar is simple: in academia, it’s not just what you write that matters, but how you write it. And the “how” is often shaped by assumptions that determine whose voices are considered legitimate, and whose are dismissed as noise, excess, or emotion.

This broader reflection led me to organise a panel at Sciences Po, Paris — my current academic home — as part of our intensive doctoral week. I’m grateful to my kind and encouraging professor, Jean d’Aspremont, who first suggested that I put together something for the event. Last week, we successfully hosted the panel, featuring three truly outstanding speakers: Professor Surabhi Ranganathan, Rashmi Dharia, and Professor Jean d’Aspremont himself.

How It Began

The idea first occurred to me while I was reading “The Geopolitics of Academic Writing” by Professor Suresh Canagarajah. He argues — and persuasively so— that academic writing isn’t neutral. It adheres to Western conventions and expectations, often enforced through citation norms, peer review standards, and publishing structures that disproportionately favour certain voices, styles, and regions.

One example that stayed with me: In many South Asian traditions, texts often begin with an invocation or blessing. A Hindu might start with “Shri Ganeshaya Namaha,” a Muslim with “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.” Even in older European academic writing, scholars would begin with “Dear Editors” or “Dear Readers.” These gestures — forms of address that locate the scholar in a social or spiritual world — are rarely found or accepted in today’s academic writing, which prefers the impersonal, third-person, “neutral” voice.

That point resonated deeply. In my own experience, I’ve often been told that I write “too personally” — mainly because I blog and reflect in ways that aren’t always seen as “academic.” That made me pause. Why is the personal voice seen as less rigorous? Why are different styles of expression seen as less valid?

Of course, academic writing is just one of many issues in academia. Regarding the politics of academic writing, two key issues warrant deliberation:

First, there seems to be an unspoken capital—a kind of cultural and epistemic currency—that one must possess to succeed in academia. Simply put, to be an academic, one must have what Bourdieu would call capital: the right style, tone, cadence, and codes, or, in the interest of brevity, the right performance. Those who perform academic writing can gain access and authority; those who don’t are often sidelined or branded as non-academic, radical, deviant, or unreadable. Seen this way, academic writing doesn’t just express thought—it defines what counts as thought, and who counts as a thinker. It controls discourse—the way of thinking and talking about academia.

This panel began from the premise that academic writing is not neutral. It disciplines. It subjectivises. It polices. It silences. It shapes who can speak, in what form, and with what consequence. Drawing on lived experiences and theory, the panel explored how academic writing is taught, performed, and policed through various mechanisms, including pedagogy, peer review, citation norms, and editorial gatekeeping.

Now, to be clear: I’m not arguing that we abandon structure or start writing purely or only in slang. Resistance can take many forms. In fact, new forms of writing are being accepted in academia. I am advocating for more diverse modes of academic expression — more openness to multiple voices, idioms, and epistemic styles. Because when we privilege only one kind of voice, we don’t just limit access; we reproduce exclusion, silently but surely. (See generally, Melonie Fullick‘s potent post on politics of knowledge and academic writing. Check its comment sections!)

So the question is: should we continue to privilege a narrow, often US- or UK-centred idea of what “good” academic writing looks like? Or can we imagine more inclusive, plural modes of scholarly expression? Because if we don’t, then it’s not really about what you say—it’s also about how you say it. And only when you say it in the “right” way does your thought get recognised as a legitimate thought. Otherwise, it’s just dismissed as noise, emotion, or cultural excess.

This conversation is even more urgent today, in the age of AI. Generative AI has already begun to reshape how we write and think. However, if AI is primarily trained on dominant academic styles—such as objective, third-person, and de-personalised—then future writing produced with its help will likely reproduce the same epistemic hierarchies. That’s why I believe we must reflect on these questions now.

In sum, to write differently — with subjectivity, feeling, emotion — is not to write less seriously. It is to take writing seriously enough to ask: Who is it for? What does it silence? And what could it become if we did it otherwise? Here, the figure of Namaskari Scholar comes— the one who bows in greeting, writes with intention, and refuses to flatten themselves just to fit the page.

More soon. À bientôt !

— LV