Software License Agreements in India: A Critical Legal Analysis

Abstract

In the modern world, more than seven billion individuals and companies work, and at least fifty billion devices are connected to the Internet daily. All this is achieved online with individuals, companies, and objects interacting, transacting, and even bargaining with each other. The devices used in this digital era and loaded with many number of software. Many personal computer software licenses allow users to run the program on only one machine and make copies of the software for backup purposes only. Some licenses also allow us to run a program on various machines as long as it do not use copies at the same time. A software license is a legal tool for the use or transfer of copyright-protected software. Software licenses can usually fall into the following categories: commercial licenses, free software licenses, open-source licenses. There are different types of software license agreements, but the most widely used agreements are (i) Clickwrap agreements (ii) Reduced wrap agreements (iii) To browse-wrap agreements (iv) Network License Deal. Unfortunately, in our day to day life, these agreements are breached by many either by exceeding the scope of the licensed right or by disabling code in the software. There exist three kinds of laws in Indian law that helps to deal with such software breaches. Such laws are copyright law, trade secret law, and contract law. In this paper, the researcher will be studying the Contract Laws and how the breach of a contract under section 75 may well protect the infringements of software license agreements. However, the breach of the terms of the license is open to interpretation and reasoning. However, the licensor may protect such a license by expressly providing the terms and conditions of the agreement relating to the rights and responsibilities of the licensor and the licensee. The "standard terms" are the only issues prevailing in the realistic industry of the certificate that the licensee frequently ignores when approving the license before installing the program. Indian courts have a broken consensus on these STANDARD TERMS. In India we don’t have proper law solving the software license agreement issue.