Indian Kanoon - Search engine for Indian Law

31. All the judgments and orders of the High Court are available on its websites and in the Case Information System. The Case Information System software is a giant move under the initiative of the e-committee to make the Indian Judiciary more transparent and litigant-friendly. The whole idea of CIS, in a nutshell, is that the litigant should be able to view the daily status of his case, the orders of the case, hearing dates of his case, the progress of the case on any date, etc., online from any part of the world. Indian Kanoon obtains judgments from the Case Information System of Courts, which are accessible and free of cost. The Courts shall have no copyright claim over judgments as the same forms part of public records. Under the Copyright Act 1957, reproduction for judicial reporting, reproduction, or publication of judgments are not copyright infringements. Indian Kanoon provides free access to different statutes and case laws of various High Courts and the Supreme Court of India [See Vysakh (supra)]. The primary relief sought against Indian Kanoon (respondent No.4) is to remove Ext. P4, which discloses the petitioner's identity, from their website.

32. In the light of the declaration of the right to privacy as a fundamental right by the Apex Court in Puttaswamy (supra), a Division Bench of the High Court of Kerala recently in Vysakh (supra) examined the right to privacy in the context of data made available by the parties to the litigation before the court. The Bench was dealing with a batch of petitions seeking the removal of identifiable information from judgments or orders published in various online portals and the High Court website, alleging that it is a violation of the right to privacy and right to be forgotten. It was contended that the publishers of judgments like Indian Kanoon and other law journals have no right to publish the details of the parties and allow them to be indexed, ignoring the privacy rights of the parties. After adverting to several issues, such as the right to privacy, the right to anonymity and the right to forget the past of parties in lis, the right of the public to know the details of the court proceedings, the right of the publishers and law journals to report and publish judgments, the need to maintain transparency in judicial records and the absence of a judicial policy regulating uploading judgments containing name and details of the parties, the Division Bench held that the claim for the protection of personal information based on the right to privacy could not coexist in an open court justice system, and a mere extension of an open court system in digital space cannot itself be called violative of privacy rights, in the absence of any law laid down in this regard by the Parliament. It was further held that the court cannot prevent the dissemination of case details in the public domain, citing the privacy of individual litigants and the Individual privacy rights must yield to the larger public interest of the court, making judicial function open to all to ensure public confidence. It was also held that reporting and publishing judgments are part of freedom of speech and expression protected under Article 19(1)