Bar council of India (BCI) has been trying a lot to improve the standards of Indian legal profession but the one thing that it has to take care of is the lack of research capabilities and legal acumen. A closer scrutiny of most of the articles written by law students of even by national law schools show the poor state of legal research capabilities in India.Even worst is the platforms that publish the same. They even do not bother to make a preliminary search to ascertain whether the article in questions is original or not? One such platform that is very regular in copyright violations of other is Legal Services India. It frequently publishes copyright violated articles at its platform. At times they are almost complete cut, copy and paste one whereas on numerous occasions its authors pick large number of contents without prior permission and proper attribution.
For example, consider the article titled Copyright law in India published at Indymedia by Mr. Praveen Dalal. The same was published on 14/07/2005 at 15:23. Now consider this article under the same title published on 20 Mar 2008. It is a clear case of copyright violation as the dates suggests themselves.
There are many such articles published at the Legal Services India that is openly and blatantly violating the copyright of others. Now even the administrator of legal services is aware of this copyright violation, it would be a fit case to prosecute them under the provisions of Indian Copyright Act, 1957.
It appears that the legal research acumen of Indian legal fraternity is at its lowest rung. The efforts of BCI to streamline the same are praiseworthy but the task is not easy to manage as long as we have students and platforms like legal services that openly violate others copyright.
