Let’s IPsa Loquitur: The Personality Rights Debacle – Whose Face Value Is It Anyway?
Swaraj Barooah
Regular readers (and now, viewers!) would've seen the launch of our SpicyIP TV series with the Summer School edition, where we spoke with many of the fantastic faculty members who had come to generously spend their time with our summer school students. That series (still on-going, with more to come), is geared especially towards those who are interested in the state of legal education as well as various ways of approaching how to build one's career in IP and related fields. Following on from that, we're now happy to announce the launch of what we hope will become our main SpicyIP TV Channel - "Lets IPsa Loquitur"! This is of course a play on the flow of words in the latin maxim - Res Ipsa Loquitur, or "the thing that speaks for itself'. We've modified it to - Let's "IP"sa (IP-itself) loquitur (speak about it)!
As the name suggests, we plan on using this as an online space to bring forward many of the conversations we frequently have behind the scenes, out in front of an audience! This may include bloggers who are carrying forward thoughts about posts they've written, or those of us who are trying to think aloud through interesting ongoing developments, or perhaps we simply think a particular topic could use more discussion or debate. This will of course be in addition to, and not in place of, our regular blogposts. It's a new format for us and one that I'm sure we'll continue to learn from as we go along, and hope to get your inputs on as we grow!
Our blogger Tanishka Goswami hosts the 1st episode in our Let's IPsa Loquitur series, bringing in Adyasha Samal and Akshat Agrawal, to discuss some on-going developments that surely everyone in the IP world has taken note of - the surge of "Personality Rights" cases. While this is no doubt good for lawyers, what does it mean for law, policy or society? In this 45 min episode, they touch upon various angles and facets of this question, as well as how it intersects with cultural meaning making, deep-fakes, free speech and other related issues. Hope you enjoy the show!
About our Speakers:
Adyasha is a researcher at the Institute for European Tort Law in Vienna, Austria. Previously, she worked at AZB and partners in the areas of IP
and data protection law. Adyasha has been associated with SpicyIP for several years now and was a student fellow in 2020-21. She holds a BA LLB honours from Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur and a B.C.L. from the University of Oxford. Her previous posts on the blog can be found here and here.
Akshat is the founder and counsel at AASA Law Chambers. He possesses comprehensive experience in IP laws, having worked as a senior associate at Sai Krishna and Associates, as a Wikimedia Race and Knowledge Equity Fellow, as a counsel at the Chambers of Senior Advocate Jayant Mehta and as a judicial law clerk to Justice Prathiba Singh. He holds a BA LLB honours from Jindal Global Law School and an LL.M. in IP Law from the University of California, Berkeley.
His previous posts on the blog can be found here.
All views expressed here by the speakers are in their personal capacity, and in general are to be considered as curious engagement with the subject at hand. If you want the formal language, then: This podcast is intended solely for informational and academic discussion purposes and does not constitute legal advice or create any attorney-client relationship.
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