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Indian copyright and the Matsya Purana

By Jeremy

The IPKat's friend Shefalika Samaddar (Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad Deoghat, Jhalwa Allahabad 211 011 India) has written a most unusual piece of work, "Doctrine of Fair Dealing in Copyright: The Matsya Purana Version". According to its abstract,

"There is an old maxim that, if something is not mentioned in Mahabharata, that will be non-existent in Bharata or India. An extension of this maxim leads us to the belief that whatever that exists today in Indian scientific, technological, social, economic, administrative, legislative, political system was mentioned in some form or other in our old scriptures.

There are eighteen Mahapuranas and several Upapuranas. Mahapuranas are major puranas and Upapuranas are minor puranas. Matsya Purana is the sixteenth Mahapurana.

This paper discusses the Doctrine of Fair Dealing in the Indian Copyright Act 1957 and tries to draw an analogy from Matsya Purana. The paper successfully establishes that the Doctrine of Fair Dealing was very much prevalent in the concept of societal rule of Pauranik ages, as is evident from scripture in Matsya Purana".

If you'd like to read the full text of this article, you can either get it from Shefalika or from the IPKat himself. When you've read it, Shefalika would greatly appreciate your comments and feedback by email.

Full post as published by IPKat on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).