Press Council of India (PCI) chairman Justice Markandey Katju issued a press release today with his latest essay on the sensible limits of freedom of speech in an India only “partially emerged from the dark, feudal age”, Salman Rushdie’s prose, the Jaipur Literature Festival and why no one cares about Nobel prize winners.

Netizens world wide ‘celebrated’ today, with websites such as Wikipedia taking their content offline as a mark of protest against the tabling of the potentially draconian US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Google, whose doodles usually denote a birthday or other notable day of feast, replaced its logo with a black square for US users. But what’s the fuss about? We have long had it as bad if not worse in India.

JSA partner Lalit Kumar glances back through 2011, the year that was dominated by the Anna Hazare campaign, via his lens of the most important reforms and changes in corporate laws.

The capital gains tax liability imposed on AT&T in the infamous Idea Callular case were caused by an avoidable drafting error and incorrect structuring, argues Naveen Goel.

J Sagar Associates (JSA) associate Leena Levakumar offers a jurisprudential history of competition law.

Hitesh Sanghvi discusses the safeguards that need to be followed to preserve subrogation rights of Export Credit Agencies (ECA) in External Commercial Borrowing (ECBs) transactions.

J Sagar Associates’ (JSA) regulatory and policy practice argues that one of the lessons to take away from last year’s Commonwealth Games in Delhi, is that Private Public Partnerships (PPP) are the future of Indian sports.

Critically analysing the vital provisions of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996, Hammurabi & Solomon senior partner Shweta Bharti recommends ways to improve the application and workability of the Act to expedite alternate dispute resolution mechanisms for the increasing number of commercial disputes.

Like most Indians in the past few weeks I have been thinking about corruption, notes Sanjay Bhatia in this Legal Opinion, as the events leading to the recently concluded Commonwealth Games hogged headlines for all the wrong reasons. He argues for a solution to the problem that borrows heavily from US practice.

Is it “gentlemanly” by an advocate to be the self-styled “strong arm of law” and participate in the television reality show Big Boss?

Majmudar & Co discusses the latest withholding tax implications for foreign entities after the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in the case of GE India Technology that in effect overrules the Karnataka High Court’s Samsung decision and provides a reprieve from the obligatory TDS payment and deduction on foreign remittances with no India nexus.

Clifford Chance

senior partner Stuart Popham recounts his UK ministerial visit to India last month, which included Ambani, best friends and mile-high parties, as first published by the UK’s The Lawyer magazine.

The new 2010 Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill is a double-edged sword full of loopholes and unanswered questions that are more likely to cut the Indian public than protect it from disastrous scale nuclear disasters, argue Hammurabi & Solomon advocates Sangmitra Sawant and Vishnu Anand.

The tentacles of the “pseudo-lawyers” have driven the bar to the wall, claims advocate and partner Elizabeth Seshadri. Is a bar exam enough to cure the setting rot or do we need a test that reaches far more deeply?

Starting up a legal process outsourcing (LPO) business may be a perceived goldmine and en vogue these days but it takes more than just office, staff and website and most start-up LPOs are wasting their time, warns SDD Global Solutions’ Sanjay Bhatia.

Foreign investments in India’s educational sector have been hampered by regulatory restrictions but the new Foreign Educational Institutions and other bills promise to change the landscape, explain M Dhruva & Partners partner Manthan Unadkat and senior associate Tanya Raghani.

Concerned with the menacing rise of celebrity domain squatting cases, FoxMandal technology law head Salman Waris asks whether the current laws are an adequate deterrent to cyber squatting.

As lawyers in Tamil Nadu continue their fight to make Tamil the official court language through hunger strikes and the latest public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court, Madras High Court advocate and Iyer and Thomas partner H Karthik Seshadri highlights the dangers of a regional language-based divide.

Legal process outsourcing (LPO) companies have come under the spotlight after the the recent Balaji Chennai High Court writ petition and the Bombay High Court’s decision in the Lawyers Collective v. Ashurst case. The cases have created significant uncertainty, argues SDD Global’s Sanjay Bhatia, although for the most part it has been a false alarm for LPOs.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) is expected to be implemented from 1 April 2011 but there is a long way to go before it is actually ‘implemented’, argue Zeus Law’s senior partner and associates.