Terms of Use

Legal scholarship, not legal advice

The Website is a work of legal scholarship. Nothing on it is legal advice, and nothing on it, or in any correspondence about it, creates an advocate–client or other professional relationship between you and the Author, Prof. Feroz Ali.

The Bar Council of India does not permit advocates to advertise or solicit work. The Website is not an advertisement or a solicitation. By using it, you acknowledge that you are seeking information of your own accord, and that there has been no advertisement, solicitation, invitation or inducement of any kind by the Author or anyone on his behalf.

1. The agreement

1.1 These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your use of the Website and of the Changelaw newsletter. By using the Website, or by subscribing to Changelaw, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Website.

1.2 The Privacy Policy published at www.aop.onl/privacy explains how personal data is handled, and forms part of these Terms.

1.3 The Website is provided free of charge. Nothing is sold on it, and no payment is taken through it. Books and courses referred to on the Website are published and sold by LexCampus (OPC) Private Limited on https://lexcampus.org, under LexCampus's own terms.

2. What the Website is

2.1 The Website publishes the Author's commentary on Indian patent law as a living treatise: a body of doctrine pages, written by the Author, and case pages, each built from the words of a judgment and linked to the doctrine pages that discuss it.

2.2 Views. The views expressed on the Website are the Author's own, and are not those of any firm, university or other institution with which he is or has been associated.

2.3 Not legal advice. The Website states the law in general terms. It does not take account of the facts of any particular matter and must not be relied on as a substitute for advice from a qualified professional on those facts. Please do not send the Author confidential information about any matter, as no duty of confidentiality arises from such correspondence.

3. The Living Treatise update model

3.1 Pages change. The Website is revised when the law changes: when an Act, rule, form or manual is amended, when a judgment is pronounced, or when the Author revises his analysis. A page may be amended, a new page may be inserted, and a page may be withdrawn.

3.2 Currency line. Each page shows the date of its latest update. The page states the law as the Author understands it on that date, and not necessarily on the date on which you read it.

3.3 No promise of timing. The Author does not undertake to update any page, or to reflect any change in the law, within any particular period.

3.4 Books and the Website. Books published by LexCampus contain short addresses, in the form www.aop.onl/[page], that lead to pages on the Website. A printed book states the law as at its date of publication. The page to which it leads states the law as at the page's latest update. Where the two differ, the page is the later statement.

3.5 Judgments. Case pages are built from the text of the judgment, and the court copy of the judgment is published alongside whenever it is convenient. The court copy is the authoritative text. Where a case page and the court copy differ, the court copy prevails. Judgments and orders of courts are reproduced as permitted by section 52(1)(q) of the Copyright Act, 1957.

3.6 Corrections. The Author welcomes notice of errors and omissions at the above contact email. A correction, when made, is recorded in the page's latest update.

4. Changelaw

4.1 Changelaw is a free email newsletter recording the changes made to the Website. You subscribe by entering your email address and confirming the subscription from the email that follows.

4.2 Changelaw is sent when the record changes, and not on a fixed schedule. It contains no advertising.

4.3 You may unsubscribe at any time using the link in every issue. The Author may stop sending Changelaw, or remove a subscriber, at any time.

4.4 Everything in these Terms about the content of the Website, including the statements that it is not legal advice and that it states the law as at a date, applies equally to Changelaw.

5. Copyright and permitted use

5.1 Copyright in the Website, including its text, its selection and arrangement of material, and its design, belongs to the Author and LexCampus (OPC) Private Limited, except for the text of judgments, statutes and other public documents reproduced on it.

5.2 You may:

(a) read, download and print pages for your own study, research, teaching or professional work;

(b) quote from a page, with acknowledgement, in the form shown under "Cite this page as", and a link to the page where the medium allows; and

5.3 You may not, without the Author's prior written permission:

(a) republish, reproduce or distribute pages, or substantial parts of them, on any other website, database or publication, or for any commercial purpose;

(b) frame the Website, or present its pages as part of another service; or

6. Search engines and artificial intelligence

6.1 Indexing and answers. Search engines and artificial intelligence answer engines may crawl and index the Website, and may quote from it in answer to a user's query, provided that they attribute the quotation to the Website and, where the medium allows, link to the page quoted.

6.2 Training and datasets. Use of the Website, or of Changelaw, to train, fine-tune or otherwise develop an artificial intelligence or machine-learning model, or to build a dataset, corpus, embedding store or knowledge base, requires the Author's prior written permission.

6.3 Reservation of rights. Clause 6.2 is an express reservation of rights for the purposes of any law that permits text and data mining unless the rightsholder has reserved its rights, including Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. The Website's robots.txt file, and any other machine-readable signal published on it, is to be read consistently with this clause.

7. Conduct

You must not interfere with the operation or security of the Website, attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of it, place an unreasonable load on it, or use it for any unlawful purpose.

8. Links

The Website links to other websites, including lexcampus.org and the websites of courts and government. Those websites are governed by their own terms, and the Author is not responsible for their content.

9. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

9.1 The Website and Changelaw are provided free of charge, "as is" and "as available". To the extent permitted by law, the Author gives no warranty that they are complete, accurate, current or free of error, or that the Website will be uninterrupted.

9.2 To the extent permitted by law, the Author is not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of, or reliance on, the Website or Changelaw.

10. Changes to the Website and to these Terms

The Author may change, suspend or withdraw the Website, any page or Changelaw at any time. He may revise these Terms by publishing a new version on the Website with a new effective date. Your continued use of the Website after that date is acceptance of the revised Terms.

11. Disputes, governing law and jurisdiction

11.1 A person wishing to raise a dispute about the Website or Changelaw must first give written notice to contract@lexcampus.org, and the parties will attempt to resolve it by negotiation within thirty days. If it is not resolved, either party may refer it to mediation under the Mediation Act, 2023, which may be conducted online. A dispute not resolved by mediation shall be finally resolved by a sole arbitrator under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, with its seat at Malappuram, Kerala, conducted in English.

11.2 These Terms are governed by the laws of India. Subject to clause 11.1, the courts at Malappuram District, Kerala have exclusive jurisdiction.

12. General

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest remains in force. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement about their subject matter.

13. Contact

Questions, corrections and complaints: contract@lexcampus.org.