Acting on a writ petition alleging that intellectual property rights of users were being surrendered on the social media websites, the Delhi High Court has granted the Centre more time to specify the nature of contracts signed by it with the sites such as Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. The Centre will submit copies of these contracts to the Court by November 18.
A Division Bench of the High Court had earlier asked the Union government to submit its contracts with the social networking website, video sharing site and mobile messaging app for their judicial scrutiny this week. As the Centre's reply was not clear about the data policy of contracts for dissemination of official information, more time was granted to it to make a fresh submission.
The public interest litigation, filed by former BJP ideologue K.N. Govindacharya, has questioned the use of social media by the government departments, while alleging that the official contracts signed with the sites had led to surrender of all intellectual property rights of the data uploaded on them. He also alleged that the Centre had become the “biggest marketing agent” for social media sites.
The Bench, comprising Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, said on Wednesday that the contracts to be provided by the Centre must be those which are in force as of now and must be submitted along with an affidavit. The Court will study the agreements to verify the petitioner's allegation that the government had failed to protect privacy of the Indian public. The Court had earlier directed the Centre on May 7 to produce these contracts, after which the government sought extensions several times.
Additional Solicitor-General Sanjay Jain, appearing for the Centre, said the government had “enough safeguards” in place to deal with the misuse of contents shared by it on social media. Petitioner's counsel Virag Gupta contended that allowing the foreign companies to use intellectual property rights for commercial gains amounted to violation of Section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which lays down security measures to be taken while dealing with sensitive personal data.
