THE RECAP A ROUND-UP OF MEDIA, ENTERTAINMENT & GAMING INDUSTRIES LEGAL UPDATES

Presenting Volume XXII of INDUSLAW's The Recap, your round-up of legal updates for the media & entertainment and gaming industries. A key theme of some of the updates for this edition is the jurisprudence in India on obscenity. In 1964, the Supreme Court held that sellers of the famous D.H. Lawrence novel, “Lady Chatterley's Lover”, could be prosecuted under the IPC 1860 for obscenity. However, the court also observed that the “condemnation of obscenity depends as much upon the mores of the people as upon the individual”. Fifty years later, in 2014, the Supreme Court was hearing an appeal in a case filed against publishers of a magazine which had carried a photo of Boris Becker, the world-renowned tennis player, posing nude with his dark-skinned fiancée Barbara Feltus, a film actress, as a part of an article which discussed racial discrimination. The Supreme Court quashed the criminal proceedings against the publishers and observed that “while judging as to whether a particular photograph, an article or book is obscene, regard must be had to the contemporary mores and national standards and not the standard of a group of susceptible or sensitive persons.” This edition covers some must-read updates from the months of March and April 2024 – ranging from the Supreme Court's views on obscenity and misleading advertisements to content takedown on X in light of the general elections.