We are very happy to announce the results of the 2024 Shamnad Basheer Essay Competition on Intellectual Property Law! The annual essay competition was earlier announced on 14 May 2024, on the occasion of Prof. Basheer’s 48th birth anniversary. It took a little longer than anticipated to review all the fantastic entries we received, but we are very excited to announce the results after a very close finish between our finalists.
Like previous years, we kept the topic selection open to participants – asking them to choose any topic they wanted so long as it related to IP. And encouraged participants to draw inspiration from Prof. Basheer’s scholarship. We received several excellent submissions across a wide range of topic areas. As in earlier years, we shortlisted the top essays from across the submitted entries for our esteemed judges to make the final selections. Our judges for this edition were Prof. (Dr.) Mrinalini Kochupillai, Mr. Murali Neelakantan, and Justice Gautam S. Patel (Retd.) (click here for their bios).
Now that we have collated their scores, we are very happy to announce the top 3 winning essays, who, incidentally, had just 1 mark separating 1st place from 2nd, and 2nd place from 3rd! [Edit: Please note that we had accidentally put versions of the drafts that didn’t include footnotes. They have now been replaced with the complete version of the essays below.]
And the winners are:
1. The First Prize goes to Yogesh Byadwal, from National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, for the essay titled, “What Applies to You, Does Not Apply to Me: The Hypocrisy of Companies Owning ML Systems”
Our winning essay this year is a fascinating discussion on the enforceability of the licensing agreements and terms of use that govern the use of machine learning systems, in light of the different copyright infringement litigations against LLM platforms. In doing so, the essay highlights the paradoxical stance of companies on training other ML systems using the output generated by their own ML systems and discusses the copyrightability of ML system-generated output, if any.
The essay is available here.
2. The Second Prize goes to Aditya Sushant Jain from Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, for the essay titled, “The Copyright Black Box In Training AI Solving The Rubix Cube Through Public Interest”
In this essay, the author focuses on the copyright concerns related to AI training and text data mining, arguing for a novel model premised on free consent and public interest for assessing fair use claims. To achieve this, the essay conducts a comparative policy analysis of the existing frameworks across different jurisdictions and identifies their loopholes. It then explains why the existing ‘fair use’ defense in the context of text and data mining is deeply problematic and should be replaced.
The essay is available here.
3. The Third Prize goes to Kartik Sharma, from National Law School of India University, Bengaluru for the essay titled ‘What’s in a Name? Critiquing The Copyright “Owner’s” Backdoor into the House of Copyright “Society”
In this essay, the author discusses whether organizations like PPL and Novex, which are not copyright societies, can issue licenses for the use of copyrighted works. In its assessment of the situation, the essay examines contrasting judicial rulings and the provisions of the Copyright Act. It argues that allowing such organizations to issue licenses undermines the safeguards provided by the Copyright Act and makes the dissemination of copyrighted works to end users prone to economic inefficiencies and exploitation.
The essay is available here.
Notable Mentions:
Given how close it was between the finalists, we would also like to give a notable mention to the other three finalists, in no particular order:
- Anjali Tripathi, for the essay titled “Beyond The Paywall: The Rebel’s Guide To Shadow Libraries”
- Kavya Shukla, for the essay titled “ Preserving Cultural Heritage and Promoting Tourism: The Significance of Intellectual Property Rights in Protecting Architectural Episteme”
- Tanya Sara George, for the essay titled “Overcoming Domestic Challenges: Attuning Trade Secrets to Meet Indian Demands”
The SpicyIP team would like to give our heartiest congratulations to the winners, and our gratitude to all the participants for their enthusiastic participation! And once again, we’re incredibly thankful to our wonderful set of judges for lending their time to judge the essays and ensure the success of the competition!