[toomuchtodo]

A lawyer in India sent a cease and desist email to a developer (in, I'm assuming, India) for posting javascript that's being used as an injection attack (for a mobile network provider) against insecure http requests, under the guise of "service enhancement".

https://github.com/thejeshgn/airtel-3g-script-injection

"The said code is closed source software and our client is sole proprietor of the same. Therefore, no one can use the said code without obtaining license from our client against payment of fees and/or royalties and on commercial and legal terms acceptable to our client. Your aforementioned actions constitute a blatant violation of our client's copyrights and other proprietary rights in the said code."

[userbinator]

The said code is closed source software

They can invoke the proprietary/copyright claims, but saying that JS is "closed source" just doesn't make sense when the source code is what gets distributed. IMHO it's the same situation with HTML and CSS.

(IANAL, etc.)

[DasIch]

Unless you have the right to do so because you are the copyright holder or have a licence you can't distribute code no matter whether you have access to the code or not.

[toomuchtodo]

How does copyright work in India? Any fair use exemptions?

[AxisOfEval]

There are fair-use exemptions, but when it comes to computer software, these exemptions suddenly become zero. Making a disclosure and proving a security/privacy flaw becomes extremely difficult.

[jitix]

I don't think you can copyright code in india as abstract concepts are not patentable as per constitution.