Digital Rights Management in India:A Study of Legal Mechanism to Curb Digital Piracy

The intellectual property (IP) regime grants the exclusive right in the form of Copyright to the creators of digital works to use and distribute those works for their financial benefits. But with the advancement in digital technology, the copyright realm is facing the challenge of 'digital piracy' i.e. unauthorized use of and access to copyrighted works. To tackle it, the IP community has advanced a mechanism called Digital Rights Management (DRM). India, in order to bring its copyright law in conformity with international standards and to prevent the revenue loss to original content creators caused by wide spread evil of digital piracy, has introduced in 2012, inter alia, three new provisions to the Copyright Act, 1957 under its Section 2 (xa), Section 65A and 65B to specifically deal with Digital Rights Management. The research paper is an attempt to analyse and evaluate the efficacy of these new provisions and suggests some concrete submissions to remove various lacunae and to strengthen mechanism of the digital rights management vis-a-vis the rights of consumers.