Moot Problem 

The Nation of Vormir was situated in the south-central part of the continent of Pandora. The nation was a booming economy with a lot of upcoming sectors which were showing promising growth. The reason for the promising growth was the age demographic of the population of Vormir, 65% of the population of Vormir was young, that is between 18-45 with a huge workforce contributing to the growth of its economy, major sectors that benefitted from it were IT, Automobile, Infrastructure Development, and Telecommunication.

As most of the population was consisting of working professionals, there was a huge potential consumer base for consumer goods for many companies around the world, one such company was Seppon Technologies Limited which was an electronic appliance manufacturing company for the purpose of doing business in Vormir, they incorporated a subsidiary in Vormir under the name of Seppon Technologies Vormir Ltd. whose basic objective was to manufacture and sell electronic appliances. However, Seppon Technologies was incorporated long before than many other companies in the market. Hence, their products were not technically up to date compared to the other companies in the market, which was leading to Seppon Technologies loosing their market share when it came to consumer electronics. Therefore, they had decided to invest in R&D and they wanted to create consumer electronics that would appeal to the young generation which was quite technology inclined. After performing an intense market research they came to the realisation that IoT appliances and Artificial Intelligence are the future of consumer electronics, Seppon Technologies had decided to put a large sum of their reserves into R&D and to create a product that was able to use both technologies. After 3 years of intense R&D they came up with a product line of consumer refrigerators called as Stelark Line of refrigerators.

Seppon Technologies Vormir Ltd. introduced a new product an AI based IOT refrigerator named Stelark series. There were an instant success as they had application integration of most popular grocery delivery services integrated into the fridge where you could directly make a purchase of inventory items whenever they were low. It also had a premium feature which was a paid service provided by Seppon Technologies in their Stelark line of refrigerators which would provide intelligent recommendations with the help of AI based on seasons of different items that were available in different grocery delivery services that were integrated into refrigerators operating system. In the paid feature AI also provide recommendations based on preferences of the users and provide auto purchase feature of certain staple items if provided permission to do so. With these many features available with the paid version of the service many people opted for the service.

Mr. Henry Maison was an engineer by profession but was a free lancer and was working for many electronic companies across the nation and he was a self-trained programmer specializing in AI programming. He had the hobby of taking apart electronic devices for studying their functioning. He was an avid supporter for right to privacy because of that he was involved in many online forums as moderator for promoting privacy in IT space. In these forums they would generally discuss how to get rid of features in software that came with electronic devices and how to bring this movement to a larger stage. He was of the opinion that ownership should be absolute, and corporations should not dictate what an owner can do and cannot do with the devices that they purchase with their hard-earned money. One fine day Mr. Maison was tinkering around his own Stelark refrigerator trying to understand its functioning and software integration. The software was based on an open OS buntu which was freely available for modifications but Seppon has made some significant changes to the code base of the OS to make it proprietary for which they have taken a copyright and registered a patent for its functioning as it was one of a kind AI integrated software for refrigerators. Mr. Maison with the help of his co-members in the forum that he was a part of were able to hack into the code base of Seppon’s refrigerator software. After analyzing the code they found out that Seppon refrigerators specifically their Stelark line of refrigerators was creating audio logs of everything that was aid in front of them and was sending this logs to Seppon’s servers to be stored as data. So, Mr. Maison and his friends decided to create a modified version of the software to block the software from creating audio logs and sending it to Seppon’s servers. After creating the modified software they uploaded it on the forum with the detailed guide of how to install the software in the refrigerators. This post by Mr. Maison became quite popular and got into the notice of few tech journalists who published an article regarding this post on their new websites. It caught the attention of Seppon PR team which in turn informed it to the higher management and legal department which decided to issue a seize and desist notice to the forum and file a suit against Mr. Maison in the High Court of Mesomera for 25 crore rupees for infringement of their copyright and patent rights. Mr. Maison on the other hand filed a writ petition of Quo Warranto against the state for granting copyright and patent to a product that was against the public policy of the nations in the form of right to privacy under Article 21 by wire tapping every customer of Seppon. In the High Court of Mesomera decided to combine the matters and conduct a collective hearing of the case.

● All laws of Vormir are pari-materia to the laws of India and Mesomera High Court Rules are pari materia to Delhi. Any resemblance to any matter fictional otherwise is purely coincidental and created for educational purposes.

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