Madras HC chief Agrawal talks candidly on local turmoil : Recently elevated Madras HC chief justice RK Agrawal, at his farewell, made reference to HC justice CS Karnan barging into his chamber hurling abuse. Agrawal said that while nobody had “ever raised their voice” to him in his 37 year career, K...

Chinmayi Arun, NLU Delhi’s research director at the centre for communication governance, senior advocate Aman Lekhi and Legally India editor Kian Ganz talk “internet laws around the world” in a panel discussion hosted by Newslaundry’s Madhu Trehan. Should India’s IT Act be amended? Lekhi says, not r...

TRAI-ing new approach: On enforcing the 12 min/hour advertising cap on TV, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India head Rahul Khullar says: “I don’t have to win a fucking election. I am a regulator, I am answerable to Parliament, my job is to enforce the law. Once the regulation is issued, it is law. ...

A unified regulator – the Unified Financial Agency (UFA) - for markets, insurance, commodities, pensions, and eventually banking, also subsuming the SEBI, SAT, IRDA, PFRDA, and FMC and merging the RBI with it, was proposed on Friday [ BS ] US Supreme Court may partially strike down law denying legal...

In last week’s Mint: Travel site Cleartrip landed a massive PR victory and garnered lots of Internet brownie points this month, ironically after firing its PR company.

21-year old law aspirant Shreya Singhal, a graduate in astrophysics from the UK’s Bristol University, daughter of Supreme Court advocate Manali Singhal and grand daughter of the late Delhi high court judge Justice Sunanda Bhandare, challenged section 66A of the Information Technology Act in the Supreme Court today under which two women were booked for a comment critical of Bal Thackeray on Facebook 10 days ago.

The magistrate who had ordered two women, who criticised Mumbai’s shut-down on Facebook after the death of Bal Thackeray last week , to be taken into judicial custody and later released on Rs 30,000 bail, has been transferred to Jalgaon in the far North of Maharashtra. The Bombay High Court has orde...

A 21-year-old woman and her friend were arrested for allegedly posting and endorsing a comment on Facebook that was critical of the two-day bandh following the death of Mumbai politician Bal Thackeray on Saturday, according to several independent media reports.

The Indian courts made 20 orders for the removal of 487 content items hosted on the internet by Google services between January and June 2012, setting a new record and keeping India’s second global place in Google’s internet censorship rankings, as the executive asked for personal data on 3,467 users of Google services.

Today’s Legally India page in Mint: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013.

The Ministry of Communications and IT, Department of Telecommunications on Saturday directed ISPs to block 76 webpages, including 10 handles on micro-blogging site Twitter, 12 pages on video-sharing site YouTube, 14 Facebook profiles, and blogs and other pages with religion-related content. The orde...

The Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011 (The Rules) continue to breathe after the statutory motion to annul them moved by member of parliament (MP) from Kerala P Rajeeve was defeated by voice vote in the Rajya Sabha yesterday.

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal was heard on Rajya Sabha TV saying: “We are more liberal than US and Europe but let’s not cut our arms.”

Luthra & Luthra’s Delhi office won in the Supreme Court today for Indian B2C portal Ebay and its managing director Avnish Bajaj, in the case of eBay v State and Avnish Bajaj v State.

Rajya Sabha’s member of parliament (MP) from Kerala, P Rajeeve, whose statutory motion to annul the IT (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011 is slated for discussion in Parliament tomorrow, aims to convene a meeting of MPs, internet societies, and bloggers in the first week of May to create awareness against the draconian effect of the rules.

A Kerala High Court writ petition by local lawyer Shojan Jacob, on Friday struck at the government’s blocking of websites and content in India under the controversial Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011.

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.

Breaking: The Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has carried out an undercover investigation into the “chilling effects” of new information technology laws on freedom of expression online, with six out of seven major websites removing innocent content online without proper investigation, creating a “private censorship regime”.

Kochhar & Co has filed police information reports (FIRs) against websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Sulekha, MSN and others that allegedly hosted “defamatory and objectionable material” against Congress party general secretary Digvijay Singh.

The law playing catch-up with fast-moving technology and failing is almost a cliché.

In many countries it is similarly common for law makers to try and finish the arms race with laws that leapfrog technology as well as common sense and constitutions.

Kochhar & Co managing partner Rohit Kochhar has withdrawn a case against Legally India in the Cyber Regulations Appellate Tribunal on Friday, which had passed a stay order five weeks ago prohibiting Legally India from publishing any material relating to any of Kochhar’s disputes.