ICL and IPL the battle may lead to the Courts
Sify.com reports some excerpts
Indian cricket board vice president Lalit Modi may sue media magnate Subhash Chandra for using 'Indian Cricket League' (ICL), a name he claims has been his "personal property" for many years.
"We are pursuing it, our lawyers are looking into it - what the legal ramifications are as far as that (ICL name) is concerned," Modi told IANS. Chandra's Essel Group is organising a breakaway ICL Twenty20 tournament from October-end in India.
Asked how Essel Group could use it if he had the Trademark for the ICL name, Modi said: "That's a matter that will be debated in courts tomorrow (in days to come), not now."
Asked if he was planning to sue the Essel Group, Modi said: "When the time is appropriate it will happen. What is the hurry in this?’’
"That is why I am saying that this matter is sub judice now ... I mean, it is being looked at by our lawyers, and as and when they are ready with it they will take appropriate action at that point in time."
Modi said he got the ICL registered under his name in the mid-1990s, though at that time it was supposed to be a limited-overs inter-city tournament that never materialised.
Will IPL's name change to ICL if he files and wins the case against Essel Group?
Modi answered in the negative. "No. This (IPL) is the board property. That (ICL) is my personal property."
Approached for reaction, Ashish Kaul, executive vice-president of Essel Group, sounded unperturbed. "I ask Mr Modi that if he has indeed Trademarked ICL, then why has he kept quiet for almost a year?" Kaul asked.
The BCCI on Thursday announced an ambitious IPL with $3 million on offer as prize money and the Champion's Twenty20 league, to be contested by top two domestic teams from India, Australia, England and South Africa, with $5 million up for grabs.
Chandra, on the other hand, has set aside a corpus fund of Rs.1 billion for ICL and has signed the likes of former West Indies captain Brian Lara to lead one of the six city teams that will take part in the tournament.
It sees quite strange that Essel group who is planning to invest more than a Billion rupees never looked into the possibility of registering the Trademark ICL now assuming that Mr Lalit Modi has registered the Trademark ICL as claimed by him there is nothing under the Trademark Act, 1999 to prevent the registration of ICL under absolute or relative grounds under Section 9 and Section 11 of the Trademarks Act. The defence available to Essel group in such a case would be to attract Section 47 1 (b) of the Trademark Act, 1999 under which any bona fide non-use for a continuous period of more than five years from the date of which the trade mark is actually entered in the register as in this case the Trademark was registered in mid 1990s as this name has not yet been used by Mr Lalit Modi as claimed by him that his plans to use ICL never materialised this would amount to non-use of a Trademark, the Courts have also upheld the ground of non-use of Trademark for cancellation of a registration of Trademarks in many case like P.M. Diesels Pvt. Ltd. v. Thukral Mechanical Works and The Intellectual Property Appellate Board 2006(32)PTC269(Del) and M/s. Veerumal Praveen Kumar v. M/s. Needle Industries (India) Ltd. and anr. 93(2001) DLT600 also looking into the fact the amount of investment and effort already made by the Essel group unlike Mr Lalit Modi who never used his registered Trademark the courts would be quite reluctant to uphold the Trademark registered by Mr Lalit Modi. It would be quite Interesting to see how the court treats this case if it ever makes to the court.

Piracy some practical solutions

In order to find solutions to curb Piracy we have to find the source.

Software

Genuine: - Whenever we buy a Genuine Software we get a key with it, once we insert the key it gets validates by the server of the software manufacture.

Fake: - A trail version of the software is downloaded from the Internet and then a crack is inserted to make the trail version into a full version. If the genuine software is on a CD or DVD then these CD or DVD cannot be copied as they have a encoding so Image mounting software like ISO is used.

Solution: - Most of these cracks for software are available from the Internet, these sites where postings of cracks are done should be monitored and the cracks posted on these sites should be invalidated from the server of the software manufacturer so when a person validates his software through the company’s server it gets blocked or a software which acts like a crawling spider which Google uses to updates millions of WebPages being uploaded on the Internet, this software crawls through the web and finds out any changes and updates the servers with new information if such a software is used it will be quite easy to monitor such posts being uploaded, crack sites should be banned by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN from their search list and ICANN should also not register sites having cracks in their Domain Names.

With regards to Image mounting software they should be either banned or not made available commercially. Image mounting software is used only when there is a copyright material on a CD or DVD as only these will be encoded and Image mounting software are bound to be used for copying Copyrighted Material.

Another problem being faced by the software industry is peer to peer software like LimeWire almost all the software being uploaded on it are copyrighted material the only solution in these case I can think about is to request Networks like Gnutella network on which most of the peer to peer software’s operate to Monitor copyrighted material being uploaded on the Internet which I know is going to be very difficult another option is to make users sign a Click Wrap Agreement before they upload that they are not uploading any copyrighted content.

Music and Movies

Data from Original DVD and CD cannot be directly copied so ripper software’s are used to rip Movies and Music from original DVD and CD such software’s should be banned or not commercially made available.

These are just solutions to reduce the amount of piracy, piracy as whole cannot be eradicated, and for that people have to refrain from using pirated software.