In India, alongside ballots, branding has become equally important in elections. Campaigns are built on slogans, jingles and logos that can inspire trust or resentment in a matter of seconds. But what happens when one political party accuses the other of stealing their campaign slogan?

That’s exactly the kind of predicament political strategist now-turned politician Prashant Kishor found himself in. What started out as a series of allegations of slogan and content theft changed into India’s first court case of copyright infringement in the political arena.

In early 2020, Shashwat Gautam, a former national data coordinator for the Indian National Congress, accused Kishor of stealing a slogan, logo and data that he had created for the Bihar Assembly elections later in that year. Gautam alleged that one of his colleagues had stolen his laptop that contained details of his Bihar Assembly elections campaign plan called “Bihar ki Baat”. Shortly after the colleague’s disappearance, Kishore announced “Baat Bihar ki” at a press conference in Patna.

The similarity was not coincidental for Gautam. He valued his alleged loss at Rs.10 crore and registered a copyright violation case in Patna alleging theft, breach of trust and fraud. Kishor in response dismissed the allegations as “third rate mischief” and a poor attempt by Gautam to gain attention and called upon the law enforcement agencies for an investigation.

The example that this case could set in the legal arena was much more important despite it having political overtones.

Legal Framework: Intellectual Property Rights in India

India has three main legal tools that could apply to this case. First is the Copyright Act of 1957 which protects original literary works. If slogans are able to demonstrate sufficient originality they can be covered, although courts have been skeptical of short, simple phrases as it would monopolise language that is publicly used. Copyright claims, in the legal sense, do not protect basic ideas or commonly used words. If every catchy small phrase is protected by the law, it would limit free speech and the ability of other political parties to freely engage in political discussions. The Trademarks Act of 1999 is the second legal tool that can be used in this case. Parties can use this Act by registering their campaign tools like slogans to identify and differentiate between campaigns. For example, “Make America Great Again”, the slogan used by Donald Trump is trademarked. Finally, Gautam also used the provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), filing charges of cheating, forgery, breach of trust and conspiracy. The usage of these frameworks led to the case in the area of criminal law.

The tension lies in the fact that India’s intellectual property framework was not designed with politics in mind. While slogans that are used by corporations and private firms are secured and protected, political slogans are still ambiguous.

Legal Developments in the Case

The dispute escalated and reached the court of law. A complaint was filed in the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s Court in Patna which was later transferred to another magistrate. An FIR was also registered at Patliputra police station under multiple IPC sections. Even though Kishor denied wrongdoing on his part, Gautam’s complaint was taken seriously and led to multiple procedural steps. Kishor’s request for an anticipatory bail was deferred and was transferred to the Sessions Court. Another Patna court rejected his bail plea in the content theft case.

Even though the case attracted significant media and public attention, there has not been any final verdict. This case blurred the lines between electoral politics and intellectual property law, hence making it a first of its kind.

Why This Case Matters

This was not just a power struggle between Kishor and Gautam. Indian law’s readiness to recognise political messaging as intellectual property was put to test through this case. Due to this test, a number of actors involved in campaigns would be protected in the future. Judicial recognition would lead to safeguarding of work done by creators and consultants from clients who may misuse work without any credit. Political parties would realise that original ideas would be required legally and not just during campaigns. Lastly, the courts would consider if campaign slogans should be protected by law.

There was no denying this case’s symbolic significance. It was described as India’s first political slogan copyright case by media channels and reports. This case brought to light the issue’s uniqueness and lack of established precedence.

Has Branding Become Political?

Along with ideologies and manifestos, branding has become an extremely important tool in campaigns and through slogans and logos public sentiment is captured. Political consultants are acting more and more like marketing agencies, designing and testing slogans. In an environment which is so competitive and fierce, allegations and disputes are bound to arise. Slogans that can influence and tilt entire elections do not enjoy the same protection as jingles and taglines for corporate brands. However, campaigns all over the world have recognised this need for legal protection. Barack Obama’s 2008 “Yes We Can” was trademarked and Donald Trump’s “MAGA” are sold across the United States. Intellectual property protection laws are an afterthought for Indian courts, one that arises only after a dispute emerges.

This case is also important for political strategists and the need to raise their awareness about treating campaign tools such as slogans, logos and jingles as intellectual property and seeking legal protection for them. It also highlights the ambiguity in India’s legal framework which does not provide clear instructions on how short political slogans ought to be treated under copyright law. Political parties must be professional in the way in which they approach intellectual property, just like they manage media and finance.

Not Just a Political Dispute

Although the Kishor-Gautam case may seem like a small political argument garnering media attention, it brings to notice the intersection between intellectual property and politics. The difficulty is determining what counts as authentic and what is public language.

No matter which way the verdict swings, this case has made significant progress by addressing the issue of intellectual property in the electoral arena. It serves as a reminder that campaign tools are not only important in speeches or manifestos but also in courtrooms.

Dear Readers,

After four meaningful years, we have decided to bring the IP Wave newsletter to a close. Your support, engagement, and encouragement throughout this journey have meant a great deal to us, and we are truly grateful to everyone who has been part of it.

However, this is not the end, but a transition.

We are pleased to share that we will soon be launching a new online journal under the IP Wave banner. This next chapter will allow us to build on what we began, with a broader vision and deeper engagement with the intellectual property community. We will be sharing further details very soon.

Thank you once again for being with us so far. We look forward to continuing the journey with you in this new format.

Warm regards,
Team IP Wave

Think about this: After opening an app and typing in “Darth Vader having a coffee on a neon Shanghai street,” a high-resolution picture of Disney’s dark lord of the Sith sipping a cappuccino while lost in concentration emerges in a matter of seconds.

It’s not fan art. The merchandise is not licensed. MiniMax, a Chinese firm, is the creator of Hailuo AI. And for that very reason, three of Hollywood’s largest companies—Disney, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Discovery—have just burst into one of the decade’s most intense copyright battles.

The Lawsuit That Shook Hollywood

On September 16, 2025, the studios filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Los Angeles that was more than 100 pages long. They claim MiniMax’s generative AI was built and sold on their favourite figures, including Wonder Woman, the Joker, Groot, and Minions.

The complaint doesn’t mince words: MiniMax’s actions are “wilful and brazen,” capitalizing on decades of Hollywood legend. According to the studios, MiniMax has failed to implement protections, disregarded cease-and-desist orders, and even used copyrighted characters to promote their AI.

If the court rules in favour of MiniMax, the company may be held accountable for up to $150,000 for each infringing product, not including injunctions and legal fees.

Why This Case Is Different

Lawsuits against American AI companies have been seen before; the most prominent of them is the continuing dispute over Midjourney, in which Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. contend that the AI picture tool allows users to summon Superman, Batman, or Bugs Bunny at the touch of a button.

MiniMax, however, has its headquarters in China. As a result, this issue involves jurisdiction, enforcement, and setting a worldwide precedent in addition to intellectual property.

“We don’t care whether you’re in San Francisco or Shanghai — if you abuse our characters, we will pursue you,” is what Hollywood is effectively saying.

Additionally, timing is crucial. MiniMax, valued at over $4 billion, intends to go public. A Hollywood lawsuit may deter investors or force the company to make an expensive compensation payment.

.The Defense We Might Hear

MiniMax still hasn’t made an official statement. If prior history serves as a guide, however, expect to hear arguments like- “Fair use.” People will claim that AI reworks rather than reproduces- “The user did it.” For example, if someone queries “Batman in Paris,” isn’t the user—not the business—at fault? “We employed legal data.” MiniMax can claim that its training data was licensed or in the public domain.

Of course, Hollywood anticipates this. Their attorneys argue that MiniMax developed the technology, profited from it, and had the ability to filter outputs, but failed to do so.

The Bigger Picture

This is not a one-time conflict. Here is a quick timeline:

• June 2025: Disney and Universal suit Midjourney for being a “quintessential copyright free-rider.”

• September 2025 (earlier): Warner Bros. joins the Midjourney case, comparing the AI outcomes with those of Superman and Bugs Bunny.

• September 16, 2025: The same group takes MiniMax to court, expanding the conflict internationally.

Legal experts are paying careful attention. Some think it would establish the standard for “fair use” of AI training. Some predict that it would force studios and AI firms into license agreements, creating an awkward détente between Hollywood and Silicon Valley (and, increasingly, China’s tech hubs).

Why It Matters

If the studios win, AI companies could have to agree to costly license agreements,more thorough auditing may be applied to training data and international startups may have to revise their business plans.

If MiniMax wins, it may inspire AI companies around the world to use protected content more aggressively.

In the era of artificial intelligence, Hollywood might not have complete control over how its characters are portrayed. Supervisors may step in and enact laws when the courts are hesitant.

The Story Behind the Headlines

This goes beyond a simple lawsuit. This project explores what creation looks like in the AI era.

Can a machine that has been trained with the best successes from Hollywood feign to create “new” content? Who owns the Parisian alleyway café and Darth Vader mashup? And is there any way that a Chinese business that serves users worldwide may be covered by US law?

One thing becomes clear as the papers mount: this dispute is bigger than Disney v. MiniMax. The future of commerce, art, and the liminal space between originality and plagiarism are all at stake.

References

1. Reuters — Levine, D. (2025, September 16). Disney, Universal, Warner Bros Discovery sue China’s MiniMax for copyright infringement. Reuters. Link

2. Financial Times — Browne, R. (2025, September 16). Disney, Universal and Warner Bros sue Chinese AI start-up MiniMax. Financial Times. Link

3. Los Angeles Times — James, M. (2025, September 16). Disney, Universal and Warner Bros Discovery sue Chinese AI firm. Los Angeles Times. Link

4. Variety — Spangler, T. (2025, September 16). Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, NBCUniversal Sue Chinese AI Company MiniMax for Copyright Infringement. Variety. Link

5. AP News (contextual, Midjourney litigation). (2025, September 4). Warner Bros sues Midjourney for AI-generated images of Superman, Bugs Bunny and other characters. Link

6. The Guardian — Hern, A. (2025, June 11). Disney and Universal sue Midjourney over AI images of superheroes and film characters. Link

Semaglutide sold under brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy, is creating a wave of excitement among those who struggled with obesity. Clinical trials demonstrated that patients have lost more than 15% of their body weight, a result unmatched by earlier treatments. For instance, if someone weighing 100 kg, that could mean losing around 15 kg or more.

For years, obesity was framed as a personal responsibility and simply a failure of willpower “eat less, exercise more, and try harder”. GLP1 drugs have shifted the narrative, reframing obesity as a chronic disease with biological roots rather than just lifestyle choices.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently added both Wegovy and Ozempic to the Essential Medicines List of their clinical benefits, for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes and kidney complications but not for obesity alone. Meanwhile, new oral drugs like Orforglipron, for diabetes and weight loss still in the late-stage trials, may soon offer the treatment easier to injections. Earlier evidence suggesting strong weight-loss potential combined with other benefits for liver disease, sleep apnea, and even cardiovascular prevention.

For public health systems, the potential is huge. If obesity is managed better, countries could save billions in future healthcare costs. But they also raise questions about cost, inequality, culture, and long-term safety.

From Hype to Market Buzz

Rising demand for Ozempic and Wegogy, for weight loss raising ethical and safety concerns. Rising off-label prescriptions, often influenced by social media trends and celebrity endorsements becoming prominent through online platforms and unregulated sales. In the UK, Medical experts caution that unregulated and inappropriate use outside of Type 2 diabetes treatment can endanger lives. that misuse could lead to serious health problems including the mental health problems, pancreatitis, and gallbladder disease. 

India has also seen a troubling rise in safe semaglutide products, putting lives at risk and violating drug laws. Alarmed, the Delhi High Court, have expressed concern over the unregulated use of these drugs in gyms and wellness centres, often without appropriate medical supervision calling for stricter rules. At the same time, Indian pharmaceutical firms are expected to grow strongly with new generic versions coming soon.

The Indian Context: Opportunity and Misinformation

Wegovy launched in India in mid-2025 specifically approved for chronic weight management in people with morbid obesity. The arrival of these drugs has caught public attention not only because of their medical benefits but also due to interest sparked by famous Indian celebrities. A celebrity mother noticing celebrities magically losing weight tried Ozempic injections and Semaglutide tablets and reduced 15 kgs in 3 months.

Stories like these have made the internet and social media buzz with questions and excitement for dramatic weight loss transformations. But while the hype is real, it also raises some important questions:

• Are these drugs always prescribed by qualified doctors?

• Is selfuse without supervision putting patients at risk?

• And are lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise being sidelined in the rush for quick fixes?”

Lifestyle vs Quick Fix

In India, the market for these drugs boomed for GLP-1 drugs, fuelled not only by obesity and diabetes rates but also gym culture and beauty clinics promoting them as slimming injections. Experts Caution! these drugs aren’t for everyone.

As per official labeling guidance by FDA and CDSCO (India’s drug regulator) as of 2025, Wegovy can only be used with a low-calorie diet and regular exercise to aid and manage weight loss. It is only prescribed for people with a Body Mass Index of 27 or higher, have high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol. However, overreliance on GLP-1 agonists overshadowing lifestyle modifications. When treatment ends, many patients rapidly regain weight quickly, highlighting the risk of dependence on drug without a healthy lifestyle.

Opportunities and trade-offs

So, GLP-1 drugs are changing the weight loss conversation in India, while they come with both opportunities and trade-offs. On one hand, better management of chronic diseases could save billions. On the other, misinformation, offlabel misuse, and neglect of preventive care risk undermining these gains. Regulators have to balance different needs, one is encouraging new drug innovations but sold under ethical way with clear information to the users and, while emphasizing lifestyle modification.

Amid all the hype, there is a strong consensus that GLP-1 drugs are not a quick weight loss fix. They only complement but not replace ongoing lifestyle changes including diet, exercise, and behavioral interventions.

And if you roll around to Geneva, diplomats drink espresso discussing whether artificial womb technology (the Matrix coming to life much?) would qualify as a medical innovation or a “sociopolitical revolution”.

Welcome to the three months between July and September 2025, where gender and intellectual property (IP) didn’t just overlap - they exposed certain truths - mismatched puzzle pieces being forced into the same frame, exposing the cracks in the system that pretends they naturally fit.

When Copyright Meets Consent

The initial fracture came in the growing controversy over AI-generated deepfakes. Technology caught up with nearly every legal protection by mid-2025. Spain and South Korea tried to criminalize the non-consensual production of sexually explicit AI content, but enforcement fell behind the pace of development. And who took the hit? Women.

It’s not that men were not targeted by deepfakes, but the overwhelming evidence indicated women, particularly public figures - were disproportionately targeted. The questions flowed:

• If your image is hijacked, is it an IP infringement or a human rights violation?

• Must your face be copyrighted like Disney copyrights Mickey Mouse?

• And if so, who cracks down on it, you, your government, or some global IP bureau suffocating in acronyms?

By the end of August, online feminists were referring to it as “the pornography of pixels“, highlighting how the lack of robust IP protections on personal identity made an old tale deeper - women’s bodies, even when represented virtually, were indeed public property.

Patents and the Politics of the Body

At the same time in Geneva, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) focused on biotech. The patenting of artificial womb (ectogenesis technologies) took centre stage. To some, these machines symbolised freedom - separating reproduction from women’s biological costs.

To others, they had the whiff of dystopia - what about when companies control the devices that could one day substitute for pregnancy itself?

The feminist movement was divided. Some welcomed ectogenesis to ending patriarchal dominance of women’s reproductive work. Others were concerned about commodification of gestation, in which a multinational corporation could hold not only the machine but also the process of giving birth.

And the lawyers descended with their categories. Is gestation a “method” or a “device”? Does the patent extend to the physical device, or the biological one it imitates? Hiding in the legalese was a larger question:

When technology imitates something deeply human, should it ever be owned by a company The argument over who owns reproduction was no longer theoretical - It was commercial, gendered, and pressing.

Fashion and Feminist Copyright

Pan-continents, another war raged related to fashion IP. In July, Kenya and India again led the charge to safeguard traditional cultural expressions—embroidery, weaving designs, motifs usually held together by women in native communities. Fashion houses in Milan and Paris, still egregiously guilty of “borrowing” freely, were attacked, read Prada.

One of the viral headlines was: “She Weaves, They Profit.” The outrage was not only about cultural robbery but gendered erasure. Rural women craftswomen who had kept these skills going for centuries weren’t even present in the room when contracts were inked.

And thus, the IP paradox revealed itself - it promises to reward creativity but tends to reward lawyers, labels, and lobbying capacity. Feminist theorists contended that IP in its current form is more about sustaining hierarchies—gendered, raced, and economic—than about safeguarding ideas.

Tech Bros and the Metaverse Makeover

And then the metaverse arrived, which—much to critics’ claims of being passé—wouldn’t quit. By September 2025, sites started to allow users to “trademark” avatars. And then the debates ensued: if you trademark your pixelated self, does that mean no one can replicate your virtual strut or your neon sari?

It empowered some women. After years of harassment online, having your avatar was like taking back control. But others feared: what if corporations trademark you before you can? Already, incidents emerged where influencers found their digital clones owned by startups eager for licensing opportunities.

This was also gendered. Women’s avatars were more commonly hijacked, eroticized, and commodified. The metaverse, which was supposed to be a playground, reiterated the same tired tune: Can women ever really own themselves—online or offline—when IP systems privilege capital over consent?

The Global South Speaks Up

Some of the most striking interventions were from the Global South. Latin American and African activists reshaped IP not as a technical niche but as a battleground for gender equality. In August, an alliance of NGOs launched a campaign called “Our Knowledge, Our Rights”, insisting that traditional birth practices, medicinal knowledge, and women’s collective innovations not be patented by pharmaceutical giants.

Consider this - when a corporation patents a fertility herb rural women have used for ages, is it innovation or theft? Feminist attorneys termed it biopiracy in legal guise.

In this case, the discussion of IP intersected with postcolonial feminism. Whose knowledge is considered worthy of protection? Whose innovation is dismissed as “folk wisdom” until a corporation repackages it for global consumption?

The Heart of the Matter

What was so interesting about these months isn’t that the law is complex but the intransigent reappearance of one theme - ownership. Ownership of faces. Ownership of wombs. Ownership of stitches, avatars, and even ancient seeds.

The 19th and 20th century design of the IP system continues to blunder into the 21st century questions of gender and power. And once again, women’s bodies and work are the site of experimentation.

So maybe the question is really this - Is intellectual property actually about the protection of ideas, or about determining whose ideas are permitted to be important?

Where Do We Go from Here?

By the 23rd of September in the year 2025, no magic bullet had appeared. Legislation lagged behind technology; feminist protests preceded both. But something changed. Gender activists no longer presented IP as a drab, esoteric matter. Rather, they claimed it as a feminist front—one that bridges the rural craftsman to the digital influencer, the biotech critic to the gamer, the lawyer to the activist brandishing a protest sign. It sees IP as a beacon of change.

Maybe this is the finer disturbing lesson of 2025 - IP isn’t simply patents and copyrights. It’s about power.

In India’s media landscape, the past is increasingly shaping the future. From remixes topping music charts to retro films finding a second life on OTT, nostalgia has emerged as one of the most reliable engines of growth. Companies are no longer treating their archives as dusty backrooms but as active revenue streams. Old intellectual property—songs, films, television shows—is being revived, repackaged, and monetised in ways that were impossible even a decade ago.

The clearest example is the music industry. Saregama, one of India’s oldest music labels, has built a renewed business model on its vast catalogue. Its Carvaan device, pre-loaded with retro Hindi tracks, became a cultural phenomenon by blending nostalgia with convenience. But the real transformation is digital: as streaming platforms rely heavily on algorithms and metadata, classic songs are constantly resurfacing in curated playlists. For younger listeners, these tracks arrive as fresh discoveries; for older audiences, they’re a comfort zone. Either way, labels are seeing returns on recordings that were thought to have exhausted their commercial life.

Films and series are undergoing a similar revival. Streaming platforms, in their hunt for differentiated content, are acquiring rights to older films and shows to plug gaps in their catalogues. But the revival isn’t limited to passive consumption. Bollywood is leaning on remakes of classics—sometimes scene-by-scene, sometimes loosely inspired—to capture multigenerational audiences. What was once dismissed as creative recycling has now become a business strategy: the recognition factor of an old hit reduces marketing risk in a crowded entertainment market.

The nostalgia wave also intersects with live performance. Tribute concerts, retro nights, and revivals of old television shows are drawing strong crowds, particularly among millennials who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s. Stage adaptations of classic films or reboots of old soap operas on digital platforms show how IP can travel across formats. A familiar character or tune becomes the anchor for entirely new experiences.

Technology is central to this trend. The rise of AI and digital restoration tools allows companies to remaster old visuals and audio, making them more palatable for today’s high-definition expectations. At the same time, data analytics help predict which archives are worth reviving. When user behaviour on streaming platforms shows unexpected spikes for a decades-old show or song, rights-holders can respond with targeted campaigns, remixes, or even full-scale reboots. The process of reviving nostalgia is no longer guesswork—it’s driven by audience signals in real time.

The appeal of nostalgia is not just commercial but psychological. In uncertain times, familiar sounds and stories offer a sense of stability. For Gen Z, who may not have lived through the original releases, retro content functions almost like cultural heritage, a way to participate in India’s collective memory. For older generations, it’s a return to formative moments. This dual appeal is what makes nostalgia such a powerful tool: it bridges audiences across age groups, creating common ground in an otherwise fragmented market.

However, there are risks. An industry over-reliant on the past can stifle originality. Audiences may tire of endless remakes or formulaic tributes. There is also the danger of over-monetisation, where every beloved track or film is rehashed to the point of dilution. For IP holders, the challenge is to balance nostalgia with innovation—to use the emotional pull of the past without becoming trapped by it.

Still, the opportunities are undeniable. In a content ecosystem where attention spans are short and competition is brutal, nostalgia provides a ready-made hook. It offers a starting point that new stories can build on. For India’s media economy, the lesson is clear: the archives are not a museum, they are a goldmine. And as technology enables ever more creative ways to mine them, nostalgia may prove to be the most modern business model of all.

Every day, my colleagues and I take a cab from our office in Vasant Kunj to Kalkaji Mandir. During these rides, I’ve noticed something concerning drivers often watch movies or music videos on screens while navigating through evening traffic. They seem to assume their familiarity with these routes—honed over years of driving—makes this behavior safe. This reflects a troubling reality in India: overconfidence often trumps caution. 

Government enforces strict rules on seatbelts and phone use, yet traffic police turn an impartial eye to screens playing in cars. I assumed built-in car systems would halt video playback once the vehicle starts moving, but they don’t. Why? Many cabs—and I suspect countless private cars—sport aftermarket touchscreens, installed under the guise of “modifying” the vehicle. These cheap/or luxurious displays, unlike factory-installed systems, lack safety features to disable videos while driving.  

India’s roads are deadly. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) reported 461,312 accidents in 2022, with 422 deaths and 1,130 crashes daily. Over 3,000 fatalities that year were linked to mobile phone use. Traffic accidents don’t just claim lives—they inflict profound social and economic losses. While we lack specific data on touchscreen-related crashes, the behavior I’ve witnessed—drivers engrossed in Bollywood films despite traffic rules and passenger safety—suggests a reckless disregard for consequences. They do not put their life but their co passengers' lives on stake. Globally, the burden of disease estimates a death rate of 17.11 per 100,000 people due to traffic injuries in 2021. In India, where the driving age starts at 18, MoRTH data shows 66% of 2022 road accidents involved people aged 18-45—a demographic central to our workforce. 

Aftermarket screens, costing between ₹15,000 and ₹20,000, play videos nonstop, turning cabs into rolling theaters. Even factory-installed systems—for radio, AC, or navigation—demand too much attention. Where on one hand, use of touchscreen devices in cars is a convenient human – technology interaction, leveling up the interior aesthetics, it's also causing visual manual distraction. In a research experiment for a study shows performance of drivers was significantly impaired in using touchscreen in cars.  Research by David Strayer at the University of Utah shows touchscreen tasks take twice as long as physical buttons. In India’s chaotic traffic, where potholes and rickshaws demand split-second reactions, those extra seconds can be fatal. A 2020 UK Transport Research Lab study found touchscreen use slows reaction times by up to 57%—worse than alcohol’s 12% impairment. The University of Utah and UK studies also linked touchscreens to delayed reactions, lane departures, and a higher crash risk, with 1,000 fatal U.S. crashes in 2017 tied to in-vehicle distractions. 

Music, too, plays a dual role. Systematic reviews suggest 70-100% of drivers consider it essential, with 75% listening while driving. For many, it’s a stress reliever or mood booster. Research indicates driving quality hinges on attention, response time, and mood—factors music can influence. Yet its impact is debated: it may calm anger or stress, but it can also increase mental workload. One study claims 25% of accidents stem from listening to music, though the effect depends on the type and volume—details too subjective to generalize. 

In India, strict seatbelt laws and fines have saved lives, but touchscreens threaten to undo that progress. Fancy In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS)—internet-linked screens for navigation and multimedia—are gaining traction in cars like the Tata Nexon and Hyundai Creta, sparking safety debates. Euro NCAP’s 2026 rules will favor physical buttons to curb distraction, labeling touchscreens an “industry-wide problem.” In India, the stakes are higher: drivers play movies mid-journey, treating roads like entertainment zones. 

Policymakers must act. We need studies to quantify touchscreen-related crashes, stricter police reporting, and clear regulations—ban video playback while driving, mandate intuitive controls, and penalize reckless use. The World Bank notes South Asia’s rapid vehicle growth drives crashes and fatalities, exacerbated by a heterogeneous mix of transport. India, with the world’s highest reported road crash deaths (1.19 million global deaths annually as per WHO (2019)), faces a unique challenge. The government, a signatory to the Sustainable Development Goals, aims to halve road injuries and deaths by 2030—reducing accidents to around 200,000. Yet, the World Bank & Bloomberg Philanthrophy estimates India needs $109 billion more to meet this target. A 50% fatality reduction could boost GDP by 14% over 24 years, a compelling economic case. 

From a policy perspective, regulating touchscreen sales and use is low-hanging fruit. The government should enforce strict checks on aftermarket systems, ensuring they meet safety standards. India’s National Road Safety Strategy (2018-2030) and the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act of 2019 aim to reduce fatalities, but implementation lags. The Indian government is also working on a US$2 billion State Road Safety Incentives Program to help the MVAA pass by giving states financial grants to pursue ongoing road safety improvements.  

In a case that could redefine the relationship between artificial intelligence and content creators, AI start‑up Anthropic has agreed to a groundbreaking US$1.5 billion settlement in a class‑action copyright lawsuit. Filed by authors including thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, the suit alleged that Anthropic illegally copied millions of copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” to train its AI models, including the Claude chatbot. If approved by a US federal judge, it would be the largest copyright settlement in US history and a major precedent for how AI companies use creative works.

The lawsuit traced Anthropic’s actions to the acquisition of over seven million books from piracy sites such as Books3, Library Genesis (LibGen), and the Pirate Library Mirror. The company initially downloaded roughly 200,000 books and eventually expanded to more than 7 million works. While training AI models on copyrighted works is not inherently unlawful, US District Judge William Alsup ruled in June 2025 that Anthropic’s use of pirated copies was illegal. Experts warned that without the settlement, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work could have totalled billions of dollars, threatening Anthropic’s future despite its recent $13 billion funding round.

Under the settlement, authors would receive roughly $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books covered. Anthropic has also pledged to stop using pirated content for training its AI models. The settlement is being described as “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders,” highlighting its wider significance for the AI industry and its message that creators deserve compensation when their work is used without permission.

Global Implications and Australian Concerns

The settlement has already drawn global attention. The Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Society of Authors have urged the government to ensure that creators are compensated fairly, arguing that AI firms should not profit from unauthorised use of copyrighted works.

Still, gaps remain. Only works registered with the US Copyright Office within a certain timeframe are eligible for compensation, meaning many international authors, including Australians, may miss out. Advocates are calling for new laws that mandate ongoing payments to creators whose work is used in AI training, ensuring fair compensation across borders.

The Wider AI Copyright Landscape

Anthropic’s settlement is part of a growing wave of legal scrutiny over AI training practices. Meta’s AI model Llama 3 has come under fire, with internal documents revealing that the company heavily relied on pirated content from LibGen, which hosts over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Meta employees reportedly received permission from CEO Mark Zuckerberg to use the dataset.

Meta considered licensing books but abandoned the effort because it was deemed “unreasonably expensive” and slow, with delivery times exceeding four weeks. Internal discussions noted medium-to-high legal risks, with attempts to reduce exposure by removing ISBNs and other identifying markers. Millions of files were downloaded via BitTorrent, a method that risks redistributing pirated content.

LibGen’s collection includes works by acclaimed authors such as Joan Didion, Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, along with academic articles from Nature, Science, and The Lancet. Despite repeated lawsuits, LibGen continues operating. Elsevier won a $15 million injunction in 2015, and a group of publishers including Macmillan Learning and McGraw Hill secured a $30 million damages award in 2023, both largely unenforced.

Apple is also facing a class-action lawsuit. Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson claim that the tech giant used pirated copies of their books to train its OpenELM large language models. Microsoft and OpenAI face similar cases. These lawsuits expose growing tensions between AI’s reliance on vast datasets and the rights of authors whose work is used without permission.

Balancing Innovation with Rights

For authors worldwide, the settlement offers hope for tangible financial recognition, but also raises critical questions about access, licensing, and ethics in AI training. Experts acknowledge that while pirated libraries increase access to books and academic research, AI companies profit from these works without proper attribution or compensation. The Anthropic settlement could be a turning point, encouraging licensing frameworks that protect authors while still enabling the development of AI.

As governments and courts navigate these challenges, the central issue remains: how to foster AI innovation while ensuring creators are fairly compensated and protected. The case stands as both a warning and a potential blueprint for the future of copyright in the era of AI.

Mark Cuban is no fan of understatement, and his view of the AI race is no exception. No kumbaya dreams of scientists trading code on GitHub, please. The future, he maintains, will be controlled by those who stash talent and intellectual property (IP). That is: fewer open labs, more locked vaults. That prediction, while reeking of Silicon Valley cynicism, speaks to a much bigger narrative on how IP has become the frontline asset in today's game of geopolitical chess.

Power Plays and Patents: The Overlay

Intellectual property is now no longer just a technicality for lawyers; it's a stand-in for national power. Take the EU–China dispute at the WTO where arbitrators in 2025 found that Beijing's courts overstepped their bounds in issuing "anti-suit injunctions" that prevent foreign firms from enforcing 5G patents.

What appears to be dull trade law is actually Beijing asserting its muscle to control patents, standards and inadvertently the future.

The statistics speak similarly. In the years 2014 to 2023, China put on the market 38,000 generative AI patents, more than the entire world combined. Washington might be the hegemon of the hype cycle, but Beijing is steadily hoarding IP like rare earths.

Talent as the New Oil

Cuban is correct on at least one point - talent is the fuel of innovation, no matter where one is. In the current market, AI researchers are akin to sports stars with seven-figure salaries. OpenAI and Anthropic poach Europe's and India's top PhDs with million-dollar offers, while China's Thousand Talents Program has long attempted to lure its diaspora scientists back to the mainland with money and status.

This is intellectual property in flesh form. Keeping people is not merely about reputation, it ensures tomorrow's patents, tomorrow's algorithms, and tomorrow's weapons programs. That's why America restricted visas for Chinese researchers, and why universities are now caught in a geopolitical tug-of-war as to who gets to frame the AI talent pool.

Collaboration or Cold Storage?

The discussion on whether AI needs to be open-source or proprietary reflects older ideological differences. Early AI work existed by the credo ‘publish or perish,’ with researchers publishing data and code openly. Then the money arrived. OpenAI, to its credit initially, went whole proprietary the moment Microsoft's $10 billion check cleared. Anthropic, conversely, continues to attempt to don the halo of a mission-oriented altruism that seeks to influence the future of mankind," as if financial gain or profit were a mere afterthought.

But Cuban has a different opinion on what is up. In a trillion-dollar market, benevolence is a thin cover. And geopolitics will always concur. The U.S. increasingly threatens that open-source AI constitutes a national security threat? Its concerns are after all, what if an open model ends up driving Chinese military drones or Russian cyber-attacks? Secrecy, not sharing, is the new norm.

Standards: The Invisible Battlefield

If patents are guns, standards are the game rules. Whoever authorizes them determines who emerges victorious. Beijing has realized this more than most by starting the China Standards 2035 initiative to take over global organizations such as ISO and ITU. These alphabet-soup organizations can be boring, but they determine what technologies become ubiquitous and what disappears.

The West has scrambled to react, and the U.S., Japan, and EU are pressing shared initiatives to synchronize semiconductor and AI norms. Standard-setting is geopolitics by other means, and IP hoarding guarantees a better hand at the bargaining table.

What the Global South is Doing?

For most of the Global South, this arms race of the elite over patents is déjà vu. They've witnessed this act before with pharma, vaccines, and biotech. India and South Africa, during COVID-19, called for a TRIPS waiver to enable poorer countries to produce vaccines without charging suffocating royalties. The West opposed it, illustrating once again that IP tends to safeguard profits over people.

More recently, the WIPO GRATK Treaty of 2024 was a partial victory for Global South nations. It mandates disclosure of traditional knowledge and genetic resources in patent applications, with an attempt to stop "biopiracy" by companies that enclose indigenous knowledge for profits. In this case, IP is not merely about competition; it's about equity, justice, and avoiding another cycle of technological colonialism.

When Algorithms Meet Armour

Why so much secrecy and stockpiling? Because AI is dual-use. The same code that generates poetry could perhaps control drones. China's computer vision patents fuel both Xinjiang's surveillance apparatus and its drones. The Americans are aware of this, which is why they imposed export restrictions on Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips in 2023–24. Washington wasn't concerned about commercial competition per se—it feared the chips would train up China's next-gen military AI.

Here, Cuban's prediction of hoarding sounds less greedy and more realistic. Openness is admirable, but in a world where code is power, states and corporations would rather have locked doors.

Conclusion: Why IP?

So where does Cuban's candid observation fit into the larger picture? It encapsulates a very bitter reality that IP has turned into a geopolitical weapon. Talent is stockpiled like oil, patents are used as missiles, standards are warred over like land, and the Global South battles to stay out of being shut out altogether. In all the landscape is a mess.

The controversy isn't so much whether AI firms share or keep their code secret. It's whether intellectual property will be a kind of public good accelerating our joint advance, or a private arsenal solidifying worldwide hierarchies.

For the time being, the wind is in the hoarders' favour. But history warns us: gates constructed to hoard wisdom tend to topple under the pressure of those shut out. The question is who will be quicker: the gatekeepers, or the gate crashers?

The name of a god can unite millions, but can it also be owned? This uneasy question sits at the heart of a recent dispute between Odisha and West Bengal. When a new Jagannath temple opened in Digha in April 2025, it was unveiled as “Jagannath Dham.” For devotees in Odisha, where the 12th-century Puri temple has carried that title for centuries, the announcement felt like a challenge to the shrine’s unique identity. Politicians, priests, and pilgrims rallied around the claim that the phrase belongs only to Puri.

In response, the Shree Jagannath Temple Managing Committee (SJTMC), which manages the Puri shrine, announced plans to trademark a cluster of terms: Shree Jagannath Dham, Srimandir, Mahaprasad, Nilachal Dham, and Bada Danda, along with the temple’s emblem. For the committee, the goal is not commerce but preservation, preventing other bodies from appropriating phrases woven into Puri’s spiritual life. Yet this move presses intellectual property law into territory it was never designed for, raising a central question: can faith itself become a brand?

The IP Framework

Trademark law in India, under the Trade Marks Act, 1999, is built on the principle of distinctiveness. A valid trademark must signal the specific source of goods or services, not simply describe a generic idea. Terms like Mahaprasad or Srimandir are widely used across temples, making them “generic” in the trademark domain. Granting exclusivity would risk what lawyers call genericide, the monopolisation of words that belong to common usage. By contrast, “Shree Jagannath Dham” may arguably function as a badge of origin, because the phrase has become inseparably tied to Puri in the public imagination.

Beyond distinctiveness, Section 9(2)(b) of the Act introduces the safeguard of public sentiment, barring marks “likely to hurt religious susceptibilities.” This clause blurs legal and cultural lines. It requires examiners and courts to look not only at whether a term functions as a trademark but also whether its registration would provoke offence or unrest. This dual test, distinctiveness on one hand and respect for faith on the other, makes cases like Jagannath particularly hard to resolve.

There is also the issue of dilution, a well-recognised concern in trademark law. Famous marks are protected not only against direct copying but against uses that weaken their uniqueness. SJTMC’s argument rests partly on this idea: if multiple temples start calling themselves “Jagannath Dham,” the spiritual and cultural weight of the Puri shrine may be diluted, even if no commercial harm occurs. Here, trademark law offers a tool, but one whose fit with religious heritage remains uneasy.

Courts and the Clash of Principles

Indian jurisprudence reflects the tension between protecting collective heritage and recognising distinctiveness. In Mangalore Ganesh Beedi Works v. District Judge (2005), the Allahabad High Court allowed a bidi manufacturer to use the image of Lord Ganesh, reasoning that such use was not inherently offensive. More than a decade later, in Lal Babu Priyadarshi v. Amritpal Singh (2015), the Supreme Court took a stricter approach, refusing the registration of “Ramayan” as a trademark for incense sticks on the ground that the name of a holy text could not be monopolised. Most recently, in Shyam Steel Industries v. Shyam Sel (2019), the Calcutta High Court reiterated that religious terms are not barred outright; instead, each case must be assessed on distinctiveness and on whether registration would genuinely harm public sentiment.

For Jagannath, these precedents cut both ways. They suggest that SJTMC could secure protection for terms tightly bound to Puri’s identity, but will struggle with generic expressions. They also show that courts are reluctant to impose an absolute rule, preferring case-by-case judgments that balance exclusivity with openness.

Beyond Law: Identity and Global Lessons

Politics has only sharpened the conflict. Odisha leaders insist there is only one Jagannath Dham in the world, while Mamata Banerjee counters that reverence cannot be limited to geography. In such circumstances, trademark registration is not just a legal instrument but a symbolic act of cultural assertion.

Globally, IP law has confronted similar challenges. The US Patent and Trademark Office has blocked registrations of Native American sacred terms, framing them as collective heritage, while allowing some biblical references in clearly commercial settings. The European Union Intellectual Property Office bars religious symbols when their use offends public morality, such as placing crosses on alcohol branding. Thailand permits certain religious marks but restricts their use if deemed disrespectful. Across systems, the guiding theme is caution: intellectual property rights may sometimes protect cultural integrity, but they must never reduce the sacred to the merely commercial.

Drawing the Line

The Jagannath case highlights the clash between two intellectual property principles: protection against dilution and preservation of the public domain. Trademarks can safeguard unique identities, but they can also overreach, turning shared religious expressions into private property. If the law leans too far towards exclusivity, it risks treating devotion as a marketable asset. Refusing protection altogether, however, leaves sacred heritage open to misuse.

The solution, as courts in India and abroad suggest, lies in nuance. Distinctive terms tied closely to one shrine may deserve protection, while generic words of faith must remain free. Trademark law should act less as a tool of ownership and more as a shield against exploitation.

The battle over “Jagannath Dham” is therefore more than a quarrel between two states. It exposes the uneasy fit between intellectual property and the language of faith. Whether SJTMC succeeds or not, the case underscores a truth: in religion, names are never just labels. They carry memory and devotion, and trying to protect them through intellectual property will always remain contested.

What makes this year’s ranking especially significant is a methodological change. For the first time, WIPO has incorporated venture capital deal data alongside patent and publication activity. The intention is clear, measuring innovation cannot rest solely on knowledge creation; it must also capture entrepreneurial dynamism and financial backing.

A New Lens on Innovation

Previous editions of the GII relied on two main measures: the addresses of inventors listed in published Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications, and the locations of authors of scientific publications. For 2025, WIPO added a third dataset: venture capital deal counts drawn from PitchBook, covering the period 2019 to 2023. The final dataset is immense. It includes 1.3 million PCT applications (with 4.2 million inventor addresses), 8.2 million scientific articles (28.5 million author addresses), and 236,046 VC deals across 66,755 locations.

Using a geospatial clustering method, WIPO identified 237 candidate clusters, later refined to the top 100. VC data was mapped onto these regions after the fact, ensuring that clusters remained geographically meaningful rather than distorted by the sometimes scattershot geography of investment. The result is a clearer, more holistic picture of global innovation ecosystems.

The Global Top Ten

The 2025 list is led for the first time by Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou, overtaking Tokyo–Yokohama. The Chinese–Hong Kong cluster filed 117,542 PCT applications between 2020 and 2024, representing 9 percent of the world’s total. It also produced 193,635 scientific publications (2.4 percent) and logged 6,916 VC deals (2.9 percent). Tokyo–Yokohama remains dominant in patents with 135,129 applications (10.3 percent of the global share) but lags behind Shenzhen in venture funding.

Third place goes to San Jose-San Francisco, the United States’ Silicon Valley, which demonstrates unparalleled strength in venture financing. It recorded 16,296 VC deals between 2019 and 2023, accounting for 6.9 percent of the world’s total, alongside 50,813 PCT filings and 56,510 publications. Beijing ranks fourth, topping the global list for scientific output with 331,874 publications (4.1 percent of the world’s share), combined with 49,792 patents and 6,727 VC deals. Seoul, in fifth place, remains a powerhouse of patenting, with 71,318 applications (5.5 percent), as well as 142,509 scientific papers and 7,376 VC deals.

The rest of the top ten includes Shanghai–Suzhou (6th), New York City (7th), London (8th), Boston–Cambridge (9th), and Los Angeles (10th). Notably, three U.S. clusters now feature in the top five, reflecting the weight of venture capital in the revised methodology. Conversely, Osaka–Kobe–Kyoto (Japan), San Diego (U.S.), and Nanjing (China) slipped out of the top ten, underscoring the growing role of financing ecosystems in determining global rank.

Regional Leaders and National Profiles

China and the United States continue to dominate the innovation landscape. China leads with 24 clusters in the top 100, although this is down from 26 last year. The United States follows closely with 22 clusters, an increase of two. The inclusion of VC deal data has helped narrow the gap between the two, given the U.S.’s stronger startup financing networks.

Europe holds its position but shows some slippage in rankings. Germany has seven clusters, led by Munich (27th) and Berlin (30th). The United Kingdom now has four, with London at 8th joined by Cambridge (69th), Oxford (77th), and Manchester (94th), a new entrant. France has two clusters in the top 100, with Paris (12th) and Lyon (90th), though Basel, a cross-border cluster shared with Germany and Switzerland, dropped out.

The Asia-Pacific region is led by Japan and Korea, though both saw slight declines. Japan maintains three clusters: Tokyo–Yokohama, Osaka–Kobe–Kyoto (11th), and Nagoya (28th). Korea also has three: Seoul (5th), Daejeon (25th), and Busan (95th), while Daegu fell out of the ranking.

India stands out as a success story. Its four clusters, Bengaluru (21st), Delhi (26th), Mumbai (46th), and Chennai (84th), all improved dramatically under the new methodology. Bengaluru rose from 52nd under the old system to 21st, Delhi from 63rd to 26th, and Mumbai from 88th to 46th. These gains reflect the country’s expanding startup ecosystem and robust venture funding activity. Hyderabad (102nd) and Pune (112th) now hover just outside the top 100, indicating more potential entrants in the near future.

Beyond these established innovation economies, several middle-income countries feature. São Paulo (49th) remains Latin America’s leader, now joined by Mexico City (79th). In the Middle East, Tel Aviv–Jerusalem (19th), Istanbul (58th), and Tehran (63rd) stand out. Cairo (83rd) is the only African cluster in the top 100.

Rising and Emerging Clusters

Ten clusters entered the top 100 for the first time this year, including Miami (67th), Phoenix (78th), and Salt Lake City (92nd) in the United States; Ningbo (93rd) and Ningde (99th) in China; Dublin (71st) in Ireland; Mexico City (79th); Oslo (85th); Hamburg (91st); and Manchester (94th). Their inclusion reflects both performance improvements and the new weight given to venture capital.

WIPO also extends its ranking beyond the top 100 to identify emerging hubs. Riyadh (101st), Hyderabad (102nd), and Lausanne (103rd) are closest to breaking in. Additional clusters include Buenos Aires, Belgrade, Bangkok, Lisbon, and Lahore, pointing to a wider geographic spread of innovation activity.

Innovation Intensity: Leaders Per Capita

In addition to ranking by size, WIPO measures innovation intensity, defined as combined shares of patents, publications, and VC deals relative to population. On this measure, the San Jose–San Francisco cluster leads globally, followed by Cambridge (UK), Boston-Cambridge (US), Ningde (China), and Oxford (UK).

Ningde’s sudden appearance in the top five illustrates how a single firm can propel a region forward. Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), a global leader in energy storage and battery innovation, has driven a surge in patent activity there. The intensity ranking also highlights clusters like Helsinki (9th) and Eindhoven (10th), underscoring Europe’s continued strength in research-driven ecosystems even where VC markets are less deep.

The Shifting Geography of Innovation

The 2025 rankings make one thing clear: the geography of innovation is evolving. U.S. clusters dominate in venture capital, China remains unmatched in the scale of patents and publications, and India emerges as a fast-rising player thanks to its expanding startup ecosystem. Europe continues to lead in research intensity but often falls behind in commercialization and financing. Middle-income economies, while less represented, are carving out important footholds, from São Paulo to Cairo to Mexico City.

The inclusion of venture capital as a metric brings the rankings closer to the real-world conditions that drive innovation: not just scientific and technical knowledge, but also the funding that allows ideas to reach markets. For policymakers, the message is clear. Building world-class innovation ecosystems requires not just universities and research institutions, but also vibrant financing networks that connect science with entrepreneurship.

Read full Report here: https://www.wipo.int/en/web/global-innovation-index/2025/innovation-clusters

A Courtroom Verdict with Far-Reaching Ripples

On 23rd August 2025, a decision that would change how information is accessed in India shook the halls of India's research institutes. Within twenty-four hours, the Delhi High Court mandated that the Department of Telecommunications and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ban access to Sci-Hub, Sci-Net, Library Genesis (LibGen), and its mirror sites. Many saw the order as a devastating blow to the fragile ecosystem of knowledge in a nation where access to scholarly literature is already extremely unequal. For others, it was the result of years of legal battle against websites accused of systemic copyright infringement. Elsevier, Wiley Periodicals, and the American Chemical Society were among the publishers who initially petitioned the court in 2020, claiming that shadow libraries were devaluing intellectual property and making money off from infringement. Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub, had promised the court that no new copyright information would be made available throughout the protracted legal battle. However, the court adopted a harsh stance after learning that publications from 2022 were still available, concluding that Elbakyan had committed contempt and that blocking was both appropriate and necessary.

The Black Market in Academic Papers and why publishers are spooked?

On the surface, the case could appear to be a typical copyright protection dispute. At another level, however, it draws attention to a more general and unsolved global conflict: how to strike a balance between the rights of publishers and the universal right to knowledge and education. The last 10 years have seen a significant controversy surrounding the shadow libraries, particularly Sci-Hub and LibGen. Carrying millions of research papers, journals, and books across borders and boundaries, they are the academic community's unseen veins. Academic papers are sold illegally out of intellectual necessity rather than wanton enjoyment, unlike pirated movies or counterfeit designer items, which are motivated by frivolous consumption. Journals that are more expensive than institutional budgets, libraries that cannot afford large subscriptions, and individuals who must spend thousands of rupees for a single article are just a few examples of the structural hurdles that researchers must overcome in order to use the internet. Beyond just disseminating papers, shadow libraries exposed the weaknesses of an academic publishing system where knowledge produced and analyzed mostly with public dollars is hidden behind high paywalls.

For publishers, it poses a danger to their survival. It is more than simply a financial annoyance. Their business strategy relies on exclusivity and is reliant on subscriptions, which may cost thousands of rupees for a single journal over the course of a year. company pricing power vanishes as soon as research articles are freely circulated beyond company walls. They fear that the economics of their whole sector will be destroyed if an open access culture becomes the norm. However, this fear clashes with another reality: shadow libraries are a need for researchers in countries like India, not a luxury. The Delhi High Court's decision is of unmatched significance because of this conflict of interest between academics who are determined to acquire the information they need and commercial publishers who are determined to safeguard their profits.

Academic Suffocation: Indian Researchers React and Civil Societies stepping in

This restriction is like intellectual strangling for Indian scholars. Sites like Sci-Hub and LibGen have been the only reliable sources of information on global research in hundreds of provincial universities with little funding and libraries that lack even the most basic journals. To organize her thesis, a PhD student in sociology at a regional institution may require dozens of recent journal papers. Without Sci-Hub, she would have to forgo entire research lines, rely on unfinished personal networks abroad, or spend exorbitant sums out of her own funds. Removing these resources is not just a hassle for young researchers, who are often the first in their families to pursue academia; it might limit their intellectual horizons and hinder their professional advancement. Scholars in India expressed their sorrow on social media after the court's decision, with many claiming that it was a death knell to the idea of equal access to information.

Not just individuals have opposed the prohibition. In their involvement in the case, public interest groups such as the Delhi Science Forum and the Society for Knowledge Commons have argued that fair dealing protections for research and education are included in India's own Copyright Act and should be interpreted broadly to protect access. Their stance is clear-cut: access to information should not be restricted based on financial means or institutional standing if it is a public good.

In a country that aspires to be a knowledge economy but is currently dealing with serious inequities in its educational system, the concept strikes a deep chord. The prohibition, according to the critics, threatens to create a two-tiered system in which most universities, particularly those in poorer states, would still be excluded while priority institutions like the IITs and AIIMS will continue to be allowed to subscribe to top publishers.

India’s Expanding Research Landscape and what India must do?

Given how rapidly India's research community is expanding, this sense of isolation is even more astounding. With over 900 institutions, tens of thousands of PhD students, and aspirations to establish India as a global knowledge economy, the demand for academic resources is enormous. However, there are still far too few facilities to meet that requirement. Even prestigious universities find it difficult to renew access to prestigious journals; most universities cannot afford full subscriptions. Shadow libraries have filled a significant void in this regard. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many Indian academics oppose the prohibition of such websites because they see them as hesitant defenders of intellectual equality rather than as thieves of intellectual property. However, how India must address the structural inequalities that make shadow libraries necessary is the real concern, not whether they are good or bad. It is not viable to rely on piracy, and it is not acceptable under the law. India must come up with ways to guarantee that scholarly content is made accessible at fair costs if it is to preserve its research future without sacrificing its legal commitments. Important actions include investing in local journals to reduce reliance on pricey international publishers, ensuring open access to government-funded research, and fortifying indigenous licensing consortia like e-ShodhSindhu.

Between Law and Justice

Thus, the Delhi High Court's ruling serves as a warning as well as an opportunity. It clearly illustrates the societal consequences of an unjust system while also acting as a reminder of the legal need for protecting intellectual property. The court may have forced the government to act, but it has also thoughtlessly brought up a more significant issue: what does it mean to democratize knowledge in the twenty-first century? Banning or ignoring copyright is not the only option. It must be in a compromise that respects the publishers' rights while allowing students in Patna or Guwahati to have access to the same corpus of knowledge as their Boston or Berlin peers.

References:

1. Bar & Bench. (2025, August 23). Delhi High Court orders blocking of Sci-Hub and Sci-Net in copyright infringement case. Retrieved from

https://www.barandbench.com

2. Outlook India. (2025, August 24). Delhi High Court orders blocking of Sci-Hub, Sci-Net and mirror websites. Retrieved from

https://www.outlookindia.com

3. TRT World. (2025, August). India’s researchers face crisis as Sci-Hub ban looms. Retrieved from

https://www.trtworld.com

4. Scroll.in. (2025, August 23). Delhi HC orders blocking of Sci-Hub mirror domains. Retrieved from

https://scroll.in

5. Medianama. (2024). Delhi HC lawsuit against Sci-Hub and LibGen. Retrieved from

https://www.medianama.com

6. The New Indian Express. (2025, August 24). Online piracy: Delhi HC asks government to block Sci-Hub and LibGen. Retrieved from

https://www.newindianexpress.com

7. SpicyIP Blog. (2025, August). Sci-Hub now completely blocked in India: implications for research. Retrieved from

https://spicyip.com

India is often called the “pharmacy of the world.” With a massive generics industry that supplies nearly 20% of the world’s medicines, over 10,000 manufacturing facilities, and exports spanning 200 countries. However up to 8-10% of drugs in India may be substandard, with some research indicating that up to 30% of generic drugs sold in less regulated channels. It could be a cough syrup or a painkiller that is ineffective or substandard. Yet, for Indian citizens, an everyday dilemma persists:

Where should I buy my medicines from the government’s Jan Aushadhi Kendras, my trusted local chemist, or the quick delivery apps?

Jan Aushadhi Kendras: Affordable but Not Everywhere

India has expanded to 16,912 Jan Aushadhi Kendras with a stock 2,100+ generic medicines and 315 surgical items, spanning most major therapeutic groups like paracetamol, diclofenac, ciprofloxacin, cetirizine and essential cough syrups are widely available. Generic medicines are affordable to all, as they are sold at 50–80% lower prices compared to branded versions. In fact, the government estimates citizens have saved ₹30,000 crore over a decade through Jan Aushadhi pharmacies.

The JAK supplies are regulated and sourced centrally, tested under CDSCO/DoP guidelines, and distributed via monitored warehouses. This means better protection against counterfeit or substandard drugs that sometimes slip into unregulated supply chains.

Despite the numbers, many parts of India particularly remote villages still don’t have a nearby Kendra. They experience stock outs and delivery delays very often due to a very limited basket of medicines and supply chain issues. This sometimes led to lack of convenience for citizens and making retail shops and online platforms more appealing and accessible.

JAKs guarantee affordability, but not universal reliability.

Local Chemists: Trusted but Inconsistent

Local chemist has been India’s go-to healthcare provider, often play dual roles as an informal medical advisor when doctors aren’t easily accessible and affordable. These chemists are licensed and regulated under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and the Pharmacy Act, 1948. For a large majority of citizens (mainly who are not tech savvy), trusting a chemist they have known for years feels safer and trustworthy than uploading prescriptions to an app digitally.

However, it also has systemic weaknesses such as supply consistency varies widely. Smaller chemist shops often don’t stock less-common or chronic drugs due to limited capacity. Although, the recent reform in 2025 are tightening regulations for more stringent Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and traceability, however compliance across millions of retailers will take time.

Quick Delivery Pharmacies: Fast but Fragile

The availability of generic medicines is rising rapidly not only through Jan Aushadhi Kendras, retail pharmacies but increasingly through quick commerce platforms partnered with e-pharmacies (e.g., Swiggy with PharmEasy, Tata 1mg with BigBasket) targeting fast delivery, including medicines with prescriptions in select cities. These platforms are gaining attraction, contributing about 2%–3% of total medicine sales in India a present. For urban Indians, these platforms make it easier and convenient to order medicines online, get them home-delivered, sometimes in 1-2 hours. The progress is huge, from $0.5 billion market in 2019, e-pharmacies have already grown to $4.5 billion by 2025, it will rise to 15% of India’s medicine sales over the next decade. The comfort of doorstep delivery is unmatchable to going to retail shops or Kendra’s for India’s working population and patients with some illness

However, the quick delivery service also has a regulatory grey zone. India still has no finalized e-pharmacy law. Draft rules introduced in 2018 (requiring registration with CDSCO) are pending, which means the online players operate in a no legal space.

Misuse of prescriptions such as uploaded prescription multiple times, enabling attempts at drug abuse. Identity verification is weak, and minors could technically order restricted medicines. There are no quality checks, a compliance review found none of India’s top e-pharmacies fully met regulatory requirements or registration. And most importantly, the rural citizens and less tech-savvy patients remain out of reach, deepening healthcare inequity.

Critics highlight risks such as lack of stringent prescription verification, handling of controlled substances, sale of expired or counterfeit medicines, and insufficient supervision by quick commerce platforms. Recently the chemists’ associations (AIOCD) seek to ban these platforms, lobbying aggressively against them. In fact, a 2018 Delhi High Court order briefly banned online pharmacies over fears of unsafe drug sales, highlighting the lingering mistrust.

We have so many options, yet the problem of access has not been solved because each option has its promise and pitfalls.

• Jan Aushadhi Kendras → Affordable + verified quality, but not accessible everywhere.

• Retail Pharmacies → Accessible and personal, but inconsistent on quality and prone to counterfeit entry.

• Quick E-Pharmacies → Convenient and modern, but legally unsteady and sometimes risky for patients.

What India Actually Needs?

The way forward is not about choosing one system over another, but about integration like Indian should adopt hybrid models by collaborating Quick-delivery platforms with Jan Aushadhi stocks to combine affordability with convenience. Retail chemists could also digitize to ensure home delivery but under licensed oversight.

Government needs to tighten uniform quality monitoring whether it’s a JAK, a retail shop, or a pharma app, that every drug sold should be verifiably authentic, tested, and traceable.

Finalize rules on verification, prescription handling, and data privacy. With India’s rapid digital adoption, leaving e-pharmacy in a legal grey zone is risky.

All these platforms are still urban-centric. Without reaching villages, the access remains limited. Thus, integration of all of these is important with pairing JAK affordability and safety, retail reach and trust, and online access and ease, we’ll finally have a delivery system that guarantees all three together.

India’s pharmacies, either government counters, chemists, or digital apps, each play a role. But they don’t want options and choice for the sake of health; they want certainty that when they take a pill, it is genuine, affordable, and available when needed.

Want to see the future of city streets? You might book a ride in Wuhan at rush hour rather than Phoenix at noon. In China, robotaxis are quietly slipping into everyday life, while the expected leader in the field, the United States, is still arguing over lane markings. It is tempting to declare a winner. Yet the picture is messier up close, and any lead may prove provisional.

Scale, Not Just Showpieces

China now runs robotaxi services from Baidu, Pony.ai, WeRide, AutoX and others in dozens of cities. Many new cars come with Level 2 driver assistance, which can steer and control speed on certain roads but still needs a human in charge. Waymo remains a technical leader in the United States and is adding cities carefully. Even so, China appears ahead on simple scale: more vehicles on the road, larger areas open for testing, and more people riding each day. More miles mean more data. More data means faster improvement, better handling of odd situations, and growing public comfort with computer-driven rides. Scale, however, is not the same as consistency. Big numbers can hide uneven quality, and a polished pilot zone does not always translate into reliable service across a whole city.

Policy Coherence and Infrastructure

China’s edge seems to begin with the rulebook. National and municipal authorities treat autonomous vehicles as a strategic industry. City governments carve out large, contiguous intelligent connected vehicle zones, publish clearer liability rules and streamline permits. Shenzhen’s early regulations became a template others could adapt, which reduced uncertainty for anyone investing in sensors, maps and fleet depots.

Autonomy is also paired with public-realm upgrades. Vehicle-to-everything roadside units, dependable telecoms, smart signals and defined pick up bays may sound prosaic, yet this is the concrete that lets software scale. In China, you can drive far from the big coastal hubs and usually keep a data connection. That reliability shortens the distance between laboratory performance and street performance. By contrast, the United States still works through a patchwork of state laws and city experiments, with federal standards lagging. Operators often win permission one jurisdiction at a time, then defend it in council chambers and courtrooms. Fragmentation slows deployment and blunts network effects. Even so, a slower, more adversarial process can surface risks earlier, and some American cities are building thoughtful playbooks of their own.

Regulators in China have also shown they will pull the brake. After a high profile crash involving a consumer car with advanced assistance, advertising claims were tightened and driver monitoring requirements hardened. Officials still aim to resume approvals for more capable systems on a defined timetable, but with a firmer safety spine. It is a promising balance, although consistent enforcement will matter more than the wording of the rules.

Demand, Data and the Flywheel

Autonomy is not only about algorithms. It is also about the market that absorbs them. Chinese consumers appear more comfortable with AI in the car, and the mobility mix leans toward ride hailing, delivery and bus rapid transit rather than universal private ownership. Fleets value utilisation, uptime and predictable routes, which suits autonomy’s economics. Yet enthusiasm can cool quickly after incidents, and public trust is easier to dent than rebuild.

Chinese technology firms are deeply embedded in the daily digital lives of users, which makes the car the next device in a familiar ecosystem. Xiaomi can sell a sedan that talks to your phone, your home and your payment wallet. Huawei supplies software, sensors and cockpits. Alibaba partners on cloud capacity for training and storage. More connected vehicles mean more driving data, which in turn improves models and ride quality, which attracts more riders. That is the flywheel. At the same time, looser data rules that help the flywheel spin may raise legitimate privacy concerns, particularly as vehicles collect information about streets and bystanders who never opted in.

The Export Test and What Comes Next

The next stage is a test of credibility abroad. Chinese operators are already planting flags in the Gulf and Southeast Asia, often in partnership with local authorities or global platforms. These are not weekend demos. They are routes, depots, maintenance contracts and service level agreements. If China can demonstrate consistent safety enforcement at home, those rules become a sales pitch overseas. If it cannot, hesitation from foreign regulators will grow.

Three questions will decide whether China’s early lead becomes a durable advantage. First, can safety regimes function like export licences, with transparent incident reporting, enforceable driver monitoring and clear thresholds for moving from supervised to unsupervised operation? Second, will city-to-city alliances accelerate diffusion, allowing mayors to buy a full stack rather than a single pilot? Third, can the unit economics close? Costs should fall as domestic suppliers scale lidar, compute and batteries, but profitability still depends on high utilisation and low downtime. China’s dense urban corridors give operators a head start, though not a guarantee.

The United States still has strengths that matter. Waymo’s validation culture runs deep, and American safety science remains a powerful moat. If Washington wants to narrow the adoption gap, it likely needs federal performance standards for autonomous operation, targeted funding for vehicle-to-everything corridors and shared, open datasets that let cities learn from each other. Without that coordination, the next global mobility stack could be built where rules, roads and data pull in the same direction. For now, that place looks like China, though the road ahead remains uncertain.

For decades, India’s graphic storytelling scene trailed behind Japan’s manga and America’s superheroes. Homegrown work existed, often as cult classics, but rarely went global. Now, creators are building exportable IP around original graphic novels with a clear focus on copyright, trademarks, merchandising, and screen adaptations.

Ravanayan is emblematic of this shift. Written by Vijayendra Mohanty and illustrated by Vivek Goel of Holy Cow Entertainment, it reimagines the Ramayana from Ravana’s perspective. What began as an indie passion project evolved into a model for creators who own their worlds and expand them across multiple media formats

Atharva: The Origin is another high-profile IP bet. Written by Ramesh Thamilmani and featuring MS Dhoni, the graphic novel launched with a cinematic and web series campaign. It illustrates how celebrity-anchored projects can fuel transmedia ambitions in India.

Even niche works are now part of the IP strategy. Sudershan (Chimpanzee), written by Rajesh Devraj and illustrated by Meren Imchen, and published by Hachette India, blends nostalgic charm with vivid design. It shows how unique Indian stories can travel when creators manage rights from the start.

Distribution channels are improving. Pratilipi Comics has scaled into a major multilingual comics app. Toonsutra, from Graphic India, has built a local webtoon platform in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and English, drawing strong investment and download numbers. Mobile distribution is reducing print risks and building audience data that can support licensing and adaptation deals.

The IP-to-screen pipeline is now proven. The Legend of Hanuman by Graphic India became a breakout animation hit on Disney+ Hotstar and has continued for multiple seasons. That success is pulling more graphic novel creators into early adaptation discussions.

The market numbers are encouraging. India’s comics market is estimated at USD 687 million in 2024, with a projected 12 percent CAGR from 2025 to 2030. This makes it a promising space to develop multiformat IP strategies, even though it is still far behind Japan.

Policy support is also playing a role. The National IPR Policy (2016) and CIPAM have raised awareness about managing IP. Maharashtra’s IP Crime Unit provides a legal channel to tackle piracy. Platforms like the WAVES (World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit) now spotlight comic creators through initiatives such as the Comic Creator Championship, helping match talent with commercial partners.

Challenges remain. Venture funding for comics-focused ventures is scarce. Piracy is persistent. Building overseas distribution networks is complex. Yet with cultural stories that are distinctly Indian and globally relatable, mobile reach, and a growing awareness of IP value, the pieces are coming together.

If one Indian graphic novel achieves a major international breakthrough, whether through a viral webtoon or a prestige animation series, the export model could become repeatable. The shift from comics as a hobby to IP as a core strategy is already underway. Somewhere in Mumbai, a creator is sketching a character and filing a trademark at the same time.

Wiping our faces with a cool, scented wet wipe is one of the most instantly refreshing things we can do on a hot summer day. These products provide a momentary feeling of relief and cleanliness. However, what looks like soft cotton is frequently a non-biodegradable fabric because the fibers are woven with synthetic plastic polymers, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment.

The Market Is Changing From Plastic to "Biodegradable"

In recent years, there has been an increase in public awareness of the harm that flushing wet wipes containing plastic causes to the environment. The market for "biodegradable" or bio-based substitutes has increased as a result. Nevertheless, studies reveal that many of these products continue to contribute to environmental pollution as microplastics in rivers and wastewater systems, even in spite of such marketing claims.

Microplastics — plastic particles less than 5 mm — are an increasing concern in aquatic environments, where they can enter food chains and carry harmful contaminants.

The Market's Size

During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for single-use, multipurpose wet wipes increased dramatically worldwide.

• Global market: USD 27,072.3 million (2022)

• India’s market: USD 2,093.8 million (2022), projected to reach USD 3,434.2 million by 2030.

• Share: India accounted for 7.7% of global wet wipe sales in 2022, making it the fastest-growing market in the Asia-Pacific region.

• Categories: Baby wipes, facial & cosmetic wipes, hand & body wipes, intimate wipes, flushable wet wipes, household/disinfectant/cleaning wipes.

Cellulose Wipes Are Not Without Problems

Even cellulose-based wet wipes, which are made from cotton, rayon, or wood pulp, can linger in sewer systems and the environment, according to a 2023 study by Thomas Allison et al. Although cellulose fibers physically break apart, normal environmental conditions cause a slow rate of molecular degradation. This leads to persistent, potentially hazardous microfibers because of the physicochemical characteristics imparted during manufacturing (as during this process the textile fibres can be modified with various chemical additives such as anti bacterials, softners, UV protections dyes and so on). and insufficient natural breakdown conditions.

T Allison, a researcher at Cardiff University who focuses on the environmental fate and degradation of wet wipes and microplastic pathways, reaffirmed in a 2025 follow-up study that "biodegradable" claims frequently fall short in practical settings. Wet wipes fall into three broad types:

1. Cellulose-based — natural plant fibers (cotton, wood pulp, bamboo, viscose); biodegradable only under favorable conditions.

2. Non-cellulose-based — synthetic fibers (polyester, polypropylene, polyester–viscose blends) with high synthetic content; common in industrial and disinfectant wipes.

3. Hybrid — blends of cellulose and synthetic fibers.

Social and Infrastructure Impacts

There are major social and economic repercussions when wet wipes are disposed of improperly. They are known to contribute to "fatbergs," which are solidified piles of wipes and other waste that clog sewer systems and require expensive repairs for wastewater utilities.

The “Biodegradable” Paradox

Cellulose, which is commonly used to make biodegradable wipes, has several benefits, including being cost effective, lightweight, chemically adhesive, biocompatible, and naturally occurring. Nevertheless, data indicates that a large number of products marketed as biodegradable do not completely break down in the environment.

Biodegradable-labeled wipes have been shown to last at least five weeks in river mesocosms. Although PPE waste, such as masks and gloves, has been extensively researched since COVID-19, the concurrent rise in single-use wet wipes has received little attention, despite its substantial and expanding use.

Researchers from East Anglia also shows that these non-plastic microfibres causes damage to digestive system of animals like shrimp, mussels, and oysters, causes stress and alter with their immune system. However research on this topic is relatively limited.

Policy Shifts and Remaining Questions

The UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) declared in April 2024 that the sale and distribution of wet wipes made of plastic would be prohibited by law. A piece published in the Independent quoted around 73% of UK beaches were covered with wet wipes litter. The majority of European nations have adopted a position on it. However, basic concerns regarding their environmental persistence persist despite the move toward cellulose-based products. The lack of specialized research on the effects of wet wipes in India is alarming. Regulation and consumer comprehension are made more difficult by the lack of a consensus, legally binding definition of "biodegradability." Even completely cellulosic wipes can release a lot of microfibers and remain in aquatic systems if there are no clear standards or independent testing.

Conclusion

Despite being marketed as hygienic necessities, wet wipes have a significant negative impact on the environment. Both synthetic and cellulose-based varieties have the potential to linger in the environment and release microfibers that could be detrimental to human health and ecosystems. Wet wipes' environmental impact will only increase in the absence of stricter laws, increased public awareness, and focused research, particularly in areas with high consumption.

So the next time you see a pack of biodegradable or environmental friendly wet wipes, just stop and ask yourself, are they really?

In a world of technological marvels and AI-powered breakthroughs, it’s easy to overlook the quiet revolutions happening at the community level. But sometimes, the most groundbreaking innovations are those born out of necessity, crafted by hand, and driven by empathy. One such story comes from the coast of Kenya, where a sociologist-turned-entrepreneur, Frank Thoya, has created a small cookie with a big mission: fighting malnutrition using the power of locally available products.

A Snack That Solves Real Problems

The Samaki Cookie, named after the Swahili word for "fish," is not your average treat. It combines whole dried fish, cassava flour, groundnuts, cashew nuts, fresh coconut, icing sugar, and margarine into a nutrient-packed snack aimed at pregnant women and malnourished children. While the ingredients may raise eyebrows at first, especially the use of the entire fish, the cookie has defied expectations.

Unlike processed meals or supplements that often involve waste and additives, Thoya’s approach embraces wholeness and locality. Every component of the cookie is sourced from local producers like fishers, coconut vendors, cassava growers making it an ecosystem solution as much as a dietary one. What began as an improvised response to the economic disruption caused by COVID-19 has grown into a multi-dimensional innovation targeting food insecurity, public health, and youth employment in the region.

From Event Planning to Empowered Innovation

Before the pandemic, Frank Thoya was an event planner. With gatherings shut down in 2020, his income vanished. But rather than wait for things to return to normal, Thoya started looking around Kilifi County and saw a different crisis brewing - malnutrition. Especially among children, the lack of affordable, nutritious food options was a silent killer.

He also noticed something else: children had an undying love for snacks. Could he merge the two worlds into something delicious, but also life-saving? It was a question no one else had asked, and certainly not answered with fish.

With no formal training in baking, Thoya relied on trial and error, spending over two years experimenting with different local ingredients. The first few batches were failures, and cassava flour which is a healthier and locally available substitute for wheat proved tricky to work with. But he persisted, eventually arriving at a formula that was not only nutritious and shelf-stable, but also pleasant to the palate.

Nutrition, Community, and Local Economy, All in One Bite

At its core, the Samaki Cookie is a food supplement. According to nutritionists at Pwani University, the cookie is exceptionally high in protein, thanks to the use of whole fish. It addresses micronutrient deficiencies that are common among pregnant women and children, especially in low-income regions. In doing so, it becomes a functional food;the kind of innovation public health experts have long advocated for, but rarely see implemented with such grassroots success.

This innovation also contributes to supply chain resilience. As Thoya rightly points out, fish farmers are often plagued by saturated markets and low demand. By purchasing fish for processing, Samaki Cookies create a new demand stream, allowing producers to monetise their catch even during low seasons.

With support from the YISA programme—a partnership between the Mastercard Foundation and Farm Africa focused on aquaculture and youth employment—Thoya secured a Kenya Bureau of Standards certification, expanded visibility across media outlets, and scaled up production. His business, SeaBerry Snacks, now employs six staff directly and has created dozens of indirect jobs through local sourcing.

Local Innovation for Global Problems

At a time when malnutrition continues to affect over 800 million people globally, Thoya’s innovation is a powerful reminder that solutions don’t always require complex global aid systems or biotech patents. Sometimes, they come from rethinking what already exists around us.

The genius of Samaki Cookies lies in their simplicity and adaptability. It reimagines undervalued resources (like fish offcuts), uses culturally accepted ingredients, and taps into existing food habits (snacking). In this, it echoes a broader message for development and health policy: if we want to solve hunger, we must first understand what people already eat, what they enjoy, and what they can access.

And perhaps just as importantly, Samaki Cookies prove that innovation doesn’t belong only to engineers and labs. Frank Thoya was a sociologist, not a chef. His idea wasn’t born from algorithms but from a deep understanding of his community’s problems—and a relentless determination to fix them.

A Bigger Vision

Looking ahead, Thoya envisions building a full-scale factory in Kilifi, complete with cold rooms and industrial ovens, employing more youth and improving supply chain infrastructure. His story is a powerful testament to what can happen when entrepreneurship meets empathy, and when local knowledge is treated as a foundation for innovation.

At a time when we debate the ethics of lab-grown meat and AI-enhanced agriculture, perhaps it’s worth pausing and asking: what other magic might we find in fish, cassava, and peanuts?

Sometimes, the future of innovation isn’t about inventing new materials. It’s about seeing the extraordinary potential in the ordinary.

Fish cookie, anyone?

Twelve years ago, Kundan died on screen but lived on in the hearts of those who watched him. His final moments in Raanjhanaa weren’t just dramatic, they marked the end of a deeply flawed, deeply human journey through love, guilt, and redemption. His death carried the weight of consequence and the grace of letting go. When the lights came on, people didn’t smile. They remembered. Because not all stories are meant to comfort.

But in August 2025, without the consent of the film’s director or its lead actor, Kundan was brought back to life through an AI-generated alternate ending. The Tamil version of Raanjhanaa, titled Ambikapathy, re-entered theatres with a newly imagined “happy” climax in which Kundan survives his gunshot wounds, smiles weakly at Zoya, and rises from his hospital bed as if none of the pain or sacrifice ever happened. This wasn’t the story the creators told, nor the one audiences held onto all these years. It was hollow, built by code, not by vision.

Filmmaker Aanand L. Rai was quick to respond, calling the edit “disturbing” and “a gross violation of trust.” Actor Dhanush, who played Kundan, wrote that the AI-altered climax had “stripped the film of its soul.” Both are now considering legal action. This is not just about artistic disagreement. It is about the sanctity of creative ownership, and the dangerous precedent that gets set when intellectual property is treated like a customizable playlist.

This controversy is a textbook case of what happens when copyright laws, creative control, and technological capabilities collide without alignment. While the production house, Eros International, insists it owns full legal rights to the film and can adapt or alter it as it sees fit, the creators argue that there is more to ownership than paperwork. Copyright might transfer legal authority, but it doesn’t erase the moral and ethical rights of the original artists. The distinction between legal ownership and authorship becomes sharply visible here. You can hold the keys to a house, but that doesn’t make you the architect.

In India, moral rights under Section 57 of the Copyright Act recognize the creator’s right to protect the integrity of their work, even if they no longer own the economic rights. What happened with Ambikapathy raises questions about how those rights are enforced in the face of corporate interests and AI-led edits. If a creator has no legal recourse to stop a company from fundamentally altering the meaning of their work, are we not hollowing out the purpose of intellectual property protections? When the law is on the side of the corporation, but the truth is with the artist, something is broken.

Globally too, AI has already been used to mimic actors’ voices, recreate likenesses, and design entire sequences. It was used to bring a dead actor’s voice back to life in a documentary. Marvel used it to generate the opening titles of a show. The technology is advancing fast, but the ethical conversations are lagging behind. If we’re not careful, art will become a database, and creativity will be reduced to editable templates. AI, used thoughtfully, it can enhance restoration, dubbing, or design. But when it reimagines finished work without consent, it erases intention. What should be craft becomes convenience and the creative process turns into an algorithmic patch job.

That’s what makes the new ending so troubling. Kundan’s death wasn’t optional; it was the heart of the film’s story about obsession, guilt, and loss. Turning it into a romantic twist flattens the narrative and the characters. Art isn’t meant to evolve like app updates. It reflects a moment, a vision, and the people behind it. When we treat it as endlessly editable, we lose both its soul and our respect for those who shaped it. Ambikapathy isn't just a case study. It’s a red flag.

It’s easy to frame this as a debate between art and technology, but that’s not the heart of it. The real issue is that AI lacks the one thing that gives stories their meaning: human memory. It cannot remember the silences between two characters, or the weight of a line delivered with a trembling voice. It cannot feel the ache of a long-held gaze, or the kind of grief that sits with you for days after the credits roll. AI can mimic patterns, but it cannot feel purpose. That purpose comes from creators. From flawed, feeling, frustrated humans who take risks, who fight over final cuts, who live inside their stories for years before sharing them with the world.

That’s why human intervention will always be necessary, not just in the making of art, but in its preservation. Stories are not puzzles to be solved by machines. They are living things, carried by people, remembered differently by everyone, but bound together by the stories they tell. And those stories cannot be edited without consequence. It’s a reminder that in an industry increasingly shaped by data, the compass still needs to be emotional. We cannot lose sight of the human intention that gave a work its shape in the first place. AI may assist. But it cannot, and must not, replace.

So, let Kundan rest. Let creators remain custodians of their vision, even when the ownership has changed hands. Let copyright law evolve not just to protect revenue, but to safeguard meaning. And above all, let stories live and die as they were meant to, not because a machine decided otherwise, but because a human once believed that this was the only way the story could end.

Most antibiotics come from soil, and the one that Gerry Wright’s research team recently discovered in Hamilton, Ontario was no exception. The lasso-shaped string of molecules came from a microbe living in the garden soil of one of Wright’s lab technicians. Its name: lariocidin.

Wright, a chemical biologist at McMaster University, has for decades made concerted efforts to collect soil, often on a shoestring. Despite his standing — he is a well-known figure in the field of antibiotic discovery — funding is scarce. “You cannot write a grant that says, ‘I’m going to go and collect a bunch of environmental samples, and then something good might come of it,’” he said. “You just can’t.” One time, a student’s father, who worked for the Bank of Montreal, which has locations in every hamlet in Canada, sent out a nationwide request, and account holders mailed him small bags of soil. But the effort to find new antibiotics, like lariocidin, required larger quantities, hence the backyard excavation.

Turning a discovery like lariocidin into a drug stocked at pharmacy counters usually takes millions of dollars. For this particular antibiotic, even the first step — coaxing something new out of the soil — took over a year. It involved a novel method of essentially starving the microbes of nutrients, then growing them in Petri dishes.

The next step involved characterizing its chemistry, For lariocidin, the funding to do that work leveraged a portion of hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding that went to Wright’s collaborators at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago. (Wright had planned on applying for additional NIH funding to improve the compound’s antibiotic properties.)

When the discovery of the new antibiotic was announced in the journal Nature in March, it represented a major break: Lariocidin represented a whole new class of antibiotics that works differently than other previously discovered drugs, which may help treat drug-resistant infections. In the spring of 2025, Wright remained optimistic about lariocidin’s development and expressed high hopes of a continued cross-border collaboration.

Then came the funding cuts.

In May, U.S. officials terminated all NIH applications for grants with foreign subawards — the type of grant that applies to Wright’s work. The agency previously approved some 3,600 grants that awarded about $400 million to support researchers working at institutions outside the U.S. in fiscal year 2024. But now, as a Canadian researcher, Wright told Undark, his involvement in any U.S. grants to turn lariocidin into a viable drug are now a no-go.

His situation is perhaps reflective of broader trends in antibiotic research, and it may be poised to get worse. Earlier this year, 41 organizations pressed federal officials on the status of a meeting of the President’s Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, which, so far, hasn’t happened. The Trump administration proposed $18 billion in cuts to the NIH. The primary agency funding antibiotic research and development, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH — showed the single largest dollar amount of terminated grants. The NIH budget would be slashed by more than 40 percent.

NIAID did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding exactly how much those funding cuts will affect antibiotic research. (Its public budget states the agency supports “critical long-range priorities with funds carefully aligned to key research on infectious diseases,” including antibiotic resistance.)

“With cuts to NIH overall, there will be a disproportionate effect on research into antibiotics compared to other drug classes, just because that field is so dependent on government funding.”

Still, the recent cuts affect nearly all areas of science, and any uncertainty surrounding government funding for antibiotics stands in marked contrast to history and the field’s continued reliance on federal money. Eighty years ago, a massive influx of U.S. government funding underwrote the production of penicillin, the first commercially available antibiotic drug derived from natural sources.

Several experts told Undark that federal funds play a critical role in antibiotic discovery. One reason: The drugs are not typically profitable — in part because most people only need them for a short period of time. Because antibiotics don’t make much money, the pharmaceutical industry focuses research and development on more profitable drugs to treat chronic diseases. Mark Blaskovich, a member of the Center for Superbug Solutions at the University of Queensland, Australia, is among those who saw all of that dramatically diminishing. “With cuts to NIH overall, there will be a disproportionate effect on research into antibiotics compared to other drug classes, just because that field is so dependent on government funding,” Blaskovich told Undark.

And when the well runs dry, people die. Without effective antibiotics, Blaskovich said, common surgical procedures like hip replacements and C-sections will be much more dangerous: “They all become untenable because the risk of infection is so high.” Before the discovery of antibiotics, Blaskovich added, “40 percent of people ended up dying from infections.”

Ten days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 17, 1941, a committee overseen by Vannevar Bush, then head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, convened a meeting at the University Club in New York to spur the industrial-scale production of commercial antibiotics. It would be one of the first times government officials met with executives from major players in the pharmaceutical industry, including Merck, Squibb, Pfizer, and Lederle. As Pfizer’s president at the time reportedly put it, the penicillium mold, the basis for the drug, was “as temperamental as an opera singer.” Industry leaders seemed to think scaling up penicillin production was a waste of time. The outlook was dismal.

But, under Bush, the U.S. federal government persisted, bankrolling the penicillin project, a top priority just behind the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The strain of penicillin that would go on to mass produce the drug, NRRL 1951, came from a government lab in Illinois. By some accounts, commercial firms overspent and overbuilt, prompting at least one critic to wonder “whether they have heard a war is being fought.” But the project undeniably laid a foundation for the modern pharmaceutical industry. “And that became an important exemplar for governmental funding of science,” wrote Scott Podolsky, the author of “The Antibiotic Era,” in an email to Undark, adding that the project manifested in the golden era expansion of the NIH.

The times have since changed. Michael Baym, at Harvard Medical School, who studies antibiotic resistance, said his lab had five federal grants terminated earlier this year, as a result of the Trump administration’s ongoing standoff with the university. He compared what’s happening — the scale of cuts to basic research on evolutionary biology to payments for janitorial services — to “a natural disaster.” Baym argued the federal grants should not be thought of as gifts from the government to wealthy, elite institutions. “I think of university research as almost like a distributed national lab system,” Baym said. “This is the system laid out by Vannevar Bush three quarters of a century ago.”

Seen this way, the wholesale defunding of the U.S. scientific infrastructure affects many areas of research, some more than others. As Blaskovich put it: “Even if cuts are applied evenly across all the programs, they’re going to have a much greater impact on reducing the ability to do antibiotic research, which we desperately need.” Federal officials have targeted infectious diseases, for instance, citing unfounded claims to undermine vaccine research or invoking allegations that a lab leak spawned the Covid-19 pandemic as justification to halt research. Antibiotics did not seem to be explicitly targeted, but rather collateral damage for anti-scientific ideologies. “It seems like they are looking for every excuse to deny science funding,” Baym said.

This has highlighted another undeniable fact: the reliance on public funding. (NIH contributed to all but two of the 356 drugs approved between 2010 to 2019, excluding antibiotics and other antimicrobials.) In recent years, all but very few major companies had largely given up on antibiotic discovery. “Large pharmaceutical companies have abandoned antibiotic research, not just because it is extremely challenging, but because it cannot be justified economically,” Blaskovich and a co-author wrote in a 2025 review. “The direct net present value of an antibiotic is close to zero.” Another 2023 article from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases made a similar point: “The lack of investment in antibacterial development from large pharmaceutical companies leaves a significant void that requires federally supported intervention.”

Experts say that the need for this support stems from a stark financial reality: An antibiotic that proves curative has little market value. Unlike drugs for chronic diseases, which people take — and pay for — long term, when antibiotics are effective and work as intended, the drugs provide a cure. (That is, the drug clears the acute infection it’s been prescribed to treat.) The current model for antibiotics means any newly approved drug is often used as a last resort. Since the newer drugs are more expensive than older ones, insurance companies don’t always approve them as a first option; new antibiotics are typically classified as “reserve” to help combat antibiotic resistance. The situation, as Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, put it at a meeting nearly a decade ago, is sort of like a salesman who sells a car and then explains that it can only be driven on Sundays between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.

“I think of university research as almost like a distributed national lab system.”

In recent years, an alphabet soup of nonprofits and initiatives, with acronyms such as ND4BB, JPIAMR, and CARB-X emerged to address the problems. The EU poured billions into funding. For-profit startups stepped into the space. But, Baym said, that does not necessarily obviate the need for public investment: With antibiotics, “it’s one of the very clear examples of a place of research that clearly benefits humanity as a whole.”

The basic research and collaboration that has historically gone into making these life-saving therapeutics seemed emblematic of the kind of science that didn’t have a specific financial interest. “No one has a personal incentive to develop new antibiotics, but everyone has a benefit from them existing,” Baym said. “Not to get too philosophical, but this is why we form governments — to make decisions that are in everyone’s good, even if they are not in any individual’s, like, this is literally the role of government.”

The search for solutions continues in earnest. In June of 2025, in Boston’s Seaport District, inside a massive 500,000-square-foot conference center, BIO, one of the world’s largest biotechnology and life sciences conferences, drew thousands of attendees. Squirreled away in a small meeting room on the second floor, about 80 people gathered to hear a panel discussion about antibiotics. It was hardly the headline event. But the mood seemed both urgent and dour. The moderator, Steve St. Onge, an executive with Clarametyx Biosciences, a private biotechnology company involved in later stages of drug development, such as the work leading up to clinical trials, began by reiterating that antimicrobial resistance remains one of “the most pressing global challenges.”

“Without reshaping our current thinking, we’re at risk of returning to the pre-antibiotic era. And I don’t say that lightly,” he said. “This has an impact on things that we take for granted in everyday modern medicine: elective surgeries, patients that are receiving chemotherapies, patients that are receiving organ transplant, and I think the list goes on.”

The panelists spoke about the challenges: One described how surgeons routinely replace patients’ surgically-implanted heart valves rather than trying to treat back bacterial infections caused by biofilms — a problem that extends to other implantable devices. Others spoke about the lack of financial opportunity and the field’s subsequent brain drain. One company successfully developed, tested, and trialed a new antibiotic only to have their estimated worth crater upon the drug’s approval. (Data suggest, according to one 2024 review paper in Nature Medicine, “Of the last ten antibiotics reaching market, seven of the companies that launched them have either gone bankrupt or succumbed to a distressed sale.”) Another mentioned how insurers made patients take low-cost but ineffective medications before getting effective antibiotics, meaning they got worse before getting better.

From his vantage, Wright, the scientist whose team recently turned up lariocidin in Ontario, sees a catastrophic loss.

There was no mention of federal funding cuts. Perhaps the situation seemed dire enough already. At the federal level, some infectious disease experts suggested there were other, larger challenges afoot, such as the purge of vaccine advisers, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Many funding issues predated the current administration, and, while important, these challenges tended to fly under the radar. One BIO panelist, Maud Eijkenboom, the managing director of Lixa, an Australian biotechnology company, suggested that the problems are large enough that solutions will get funded. Erin Duffy, chief of research and development at CARB-X, a government-and-foundation-funded nonprofit dedicated to combatting antibiotic resistant bacteria, said that funding for the initiative comes, in part, from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which might make it somewhat insulated from the NIH cuts.

Amalia Corby, director of federal affairs at the American Society for Microbiology, said the proposed cuts are going to decimate scientific research but some federal supports remained intact. For instance, she said, one of the few parts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that appears to have avoided massive reorganization is its National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. “However, there will be impacts just because the entire agency is being impacted,” Corby said in an interview with Undark. “But it does seem like from this administration, there may be some understanding that infectious disease threats, because they are global and have the potential to threaten national security, that they should remain a priority of the U.S. and of our federal science funding.”

From his vantage, Wright, the scientist whose team recently turned up lariocidin in Ontario, sees a catastrophic loss. In Canada, he said the government alternately stifles or enriches research, depending on which party is in charge. Unlike the U.S., where, at least until recently, in his view, both sides of the political spectrum tended to support fundamental research.

Wright anticipates that the damage from the recent NIH cuts will persist for years, and he said that he isn’t sure any entity could step in to fill the void: “No one has the capacity to take up that slack.”

In recent months, the Gates Foundation announced an initiative to help fund antibiotic research, and its ultrawealthy founder, Bill Gates, claimed he would donate $200 billion for work in Africa over the next 20 years. “Gates has said he’s going to give away all his money,” Wright said. “But even if he did, it’s still not the budget of the NIH. It’s a crater that is almost impossible to fill.”

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an everyday part of lives. Many of us use it without even realising, whether it be writing emails, finding a new TV show or managing smart devices in our homes.

It is also increasingly used in many professional contexts – from helping with recruitment to supporting health diagnoses and monitoring students’ progress in school.

But apart from a handful of computing-focused and other STEM programs, most Australian university students do not receive formal tuition in how to use AI critically, ethically or responsibly.

Here’s why this is a problem and what we can do instead.

AI use in unis so far

A growing number of Australian universities now allow students to use AI in certain assessments, provided the use is appropriately acknowledged.

But this does not teach students how these tools work or what responsible use involves.

Using AI is not as simple as typing questions into a chat function. There are widely recognised ethical issues around its use including bias and misinformation. Understanding these is essential for students to use AI responsibly in their working lives.

So all students should graduate with a basic understanding of AI, its limitations, the role of human judgement and what responsible use looks like in their particular field.

We need students to be aware of bias in AI systems. This includes how their own biases could shape how they use the AI (the questions they ask and how they interpret its output), alongside an understanding of the broader ethical implications of AI use.

For example, does the data and the AI tool protect people’s privacy? Has the AI made a mistake? And if so, whose responsibility is that?

What about AI ethics?

The technical side of AI is covered in many STEM degrees. These degrees, along with philosophy and psychology disciplines, may also examine ethical questions around AI. But these issues are not a part of mainstream university education.

This is a concern. When future lawyers use predictive AI to draft contracts, or business graduates use AI for hiring or marketing, they will need skills in ethical reasoning.

Ethical issues in these scenarios could include unfair bias, like AI recommending candidates based on gender or race. It could include issues relating to a lack of transparency, such as not knowing how an AI system made a legal decision. Students need to be able to spot and question these risks before they cause harm.

In healthcare, AI tools are already supporting diagnosis, patient triage and treatment decisions.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in professional life, the cost of uncritical use also scales up, from biased outcomes to real-world harm.

For example, if a teacher relies on AI carelessly to draft a lesson plan, students might learn a version of history that is biased or just plain wrong. A lawyer who over-relies on AI could submit a flawed court document, putting their client’s case at risk.

How can we do this?

There are international examples we can follow. The University of Texas at Austin and University of Edinburgh both offer programs in ethics and AI. However, both of these are currently targeted at graduate students. The University of Texas program is focused on teaching STEM students about AI ethics, whereas the University of Edinburgh’s program has a broader, interdiscplinary focus.

Implementing AI ethics in Australian universities will require thoughtful curriculum reform. That means building interdisciplinary teaching teams that combine expertise from technology, law, ethics and the social sciences. It also means thinking seriously about how we engage students with this content through core modules, graduate capabilities or even mandatory training.

It will also require investment in academic staff development and new teaching resources that make these concepts accessible and relevant to different disciplines.

Government support is essential. Targeted grants, clear national policy direction, and nationally shared teaching resources could accelerate the shift. Policymakers could consider positioning universities as “ethical AI hubs”. This aligns with the government-commissioned 2024 Australian University Accord report, which called for building capacity to meet the demands of the digital era.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s decision-makers. If they don’t understand the risks of AI and its potential for error, bias or threats to privacy, we will all bear the consequences. Universities have a public responsibility to ensure graduates know how to use AI responsibly and understand why their choices matter.

About Authors

Rachel Fitzgerald

Associate Professor and Deputy Associate Dean (Academic), Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, The University of Queensland

Caitlin Curtis

Research Fellow, Centre for Policy Futures, The University of Queensland

To me, this was how science worked: What you expect to happen is clear and concrete. And if it doesn’t happen, you’ve done something wrong.

If only it were that simple.

It took me many years to realize that science is not just some series of activities where you know what will happen at the end. Instead, science is about discovering and generating new knowledge.

Now, I’m a psychologist studying how scientists do science. How do new methods and tools get adopted? How do changes happen in scientific fields, and what hinders changes in the way we do science?

One practice that has fascinated me for many years is replication research, where a research group tries to redo a previous study. Like with the crystals, getting the same result from different teams doesn’t always happen, and when you’re on the team whose crystals don’t grow, you don’t know if the study didn’t work because the theory is wrong, or whether you forgot to put the salt in the solution.

The replication crisis

A May 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump emphasized the “reproducibility crisis” in science. While replicability and reproducibility may sound similar, they’re distinct.

Reproducibility is the ability to use the same data and methods from a study and reproduce the result. In my editorial role at the journal Psychological Science, I conduct computational reproducibility checks where we take the reported data and check that all the results in the paper can be reproduced independently.

But we’re not running the study over again, or collecting new data. While reproducibility is important, research that is incorrect, fallible and sometimes harmful can still be reproducible.

By contrast, replication is when an independent team repeats the same process, including collecting new data, to see if they get the same results. When research replicates, the team can be more confident that the results are not a fluke or an error.

The “replication crisis,” a term coined in psychology in the early 2010s, has spread to many fields, including biology, economics, medicine and computer science. Failures to replicate high-profile studies concern many scientists in these fields.

Why replicate?

Replicability is a core scientific value: Researchers want to be able to find the same result again and again. Many important findings are not published until they are independently replicated.

In research, chance findings can occur. Imagine if one person flipped a coin 10 times and got two heads, then told the world that “coins have a 20% chance of coming up heads.” Even though this is an unlikely outcome – about 4% – it’s possible.

Replications can correct these chance outcomes, as well as scientific errors, to ensure science is self-correcting.

For example, in the search for the Higgs boson, two research centers at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, ATLAS and CMS, independently replicated the detection of a particle with a large unique mass, leading to the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.

The initial measurements from the two centers actually estimated the mass of the particle as slightly different. So while the two centers didn’t find identical results, the teams evaluated them and determined they were close enough. This variability is a natural part of the scientific process. Just because results are not identical does not mean they are not reliable.

Research centers like CERN have replication built into their process, but this is not feasible for all research. For projects that are relatively low cost, the original team will often replicate their work prior to publication – but doing so does not guarantee that an independent team could get the same results.

When projects are costly, urgent or time-specific, independently replicating them prior to disseminating results is often not feasible. Remember when people across the country were waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine?

The initial Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine took 13 months from the start of the trial to authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. The results of the initial study were so clear and convincing that a replication would have unnecessarily delayed getting the vaccine out to the public and slowing the spread of disease.

Since not every study can be replicated prior to publication, it’s important to conduct replications after studies are published. Replications help scientists understand how well research processes are working, identify errors and self-correct. So what’s the process of conducting a replication?

The replication process

Researchers could independently replicate the work of other teams, like at CERN. And that does happen. But when there are only two studies – the original and the replication – it’s hard to know what to do when they disagree. For that reason, large multigroup teams often conduct replications where they are all replicating the same study.

Alternatively, if the purpose is to estimate the replicability of a body of research – for example, cancer biology – each team might replicate a different study, and the focus is on the percentage of studies that replicate across many studies.

These large-scale replication projects have arisen around the world and include ManyLabs, ManyBabies, Psychological Accelerator and others.

Replicators start by learning as much as possible about how the original study was conducted. They can collect details about the study from reading the published paper, discussing the work with its original authors and consulting online materials.

The replicators want to know how the participants were recruited, how the data was collected and using what tools, and how the data was analyzed.

But sometimes, studies may leave out important details, like the questions participants were asked or the brand of equipment used. Replicators have to make these difficult decisions themselves, which can affect the outcome.

Replicators also often explicitly change details of the study. For example, many replication studies are conducted with larger samples – more participants – than the original study, to ensure the results are reliable.

Registration and publication

Sadly, replication research is hard to publish: Only 3% of papers in psychology, less than 1% in education and 1.2% in marketing are replications.

If the original study replicates, journals may reject the paper because there is no “new insight.” If it doesn’t replicate, journals may reject the paper because they assume the replicators made a mistake – remember the salt crystals.

Because of these issues, replicators often use registration to strengthen their claims. A preregistration is a public document describing the plan for the study. It is time-stamped to before the study is conducted.

This type of document improves transparency by making changes in the plan detectable to reviewers. Registered reports take this a step further, where the research plan is subject to peer review before conducting the study.

If the journal approves the registration, they commit to publishing the results of the study regardless of the results. Registered reports are ideal for replication research because the reviewers don’t know the results when the journal commits to publishing the paper, and whether the study replicates or not won’t affect whether it gets published.

About 58% of registered reports in psychology are replication studies.

Replication research often uses the highest standards of research practice: large samples and registration. While not all replication research is required to use these practices, those that do contribute greatly to our confidence in scientific results.

Replication research is a useful thermometer to understand if scientific processes are working as intended. Active discussion of the replicability crisis, in both scientific and political spaces, suggests to many researchers that there is room for growth. While no field would expect a replication rate of 100%, new processes among scientists aim to improve the rates from those in the past.