A little over a week ago, we wrapped up the 2nd edition of our SpicyIP Summer School – and what a fantastic edition it was! With its roots planted in conversations with Shamnad close to a decade ago, it was always going to be a tall order to try to take a small group of IP enthusiasts and up-end commonly held assumptions, whether it’s faith-based or the dodgy dogma, in just a few days. For years, the idea was parked due to piling uncertainties. After all – this type of pedagogical experiment had not been tried before, to my knowledge. Thanks to some encouragement from Dr Zakir Thomas last year, we decided to just start and hope for the best. With the quick generosity of supporters and various experts around the country, we’ve not only managed to pull it off successfully last year and now this year, but are now confident that this pedagogical experiment is one that could and should be replicated more frequently, if possible! Not only that – and I say this fully cognizant that our low capacity may mean this takes a long while – but we would love to take this more intentionally beyond just the legal fraternity as well. Before diving into the Event Report itself, written by one of our participants this year, I thought it would also be useful to lay out some of the conscious steps we took in approaching this event, should others want to try something similar or give us ideas for improvement. After all, the approach itself is not limited to IP, or even to law, and its utility could perhaps be a reflection of the general lacunae in Indian education today.
The Overall goal: We did not want a programme that was simply another addition to someone’s CV, nor did we want participants who were only coming for CV value. We also did not want to merely convey information – there are enough sources and courses for that. We wanted to have an impact on the way people thought about this area – and more specifically on how strong a role unspoken assumptions played in the general IP discourse. IP, after all, is meaningless without the context in which it is embedded, yet it is often taught and talked about as if it operates in a silo.
Pedagogy: To achieve this goal, we adapted Shamnad’s T-FLIP methodology (more below in the Event Report). Regardless of name or label, this approach to learning ultimately served as the central crux for the Summer School, and if anyone, in a formal or informal setting, would like to experiment with a new approach, I would strongly recommend trying this out. In an earlier book chapter on Shamnad’s contributions, I had expanded a bit on this method:
“Frequently lamenting on the silo-ed, unilateral approach to learning and thinking, Basheer pushed this technique to approach learning as approaching a story, with different parts connected and inter-linked rather than top-down or bottom-up. Giving the example of studying the theme of ‘Artificial Intelligence and Creativity’, he gave the examples of different ‘centres’ of enquiry (Polycentrism) such as authorship, personhood, and policy inquiries as to the purpose of AI and creatorship. Then, rather than only looking at this through the eyes of the law, to also look through the lens of science and technology, psychology, philosophy, culture, etc (Interdisciplinarity). Then instead of limiting the domain of enquiry to the subject matter identified, to also link other issues and domains – such as parallels between machine-authorship questions, and authorship of other non-human agents, such as animals. Finally, taken altogether, is the idea of Flipping the approach to learning as well. Explained in the context of a classroom, this refers to focusing on shifting the learner from a passive one, to an active one. This involves the learners doing lower levels of cognitive work (gaining knowledge and comprehension) outside of class, and higher levels of cognitive work (application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, etc) inside class with the support of peers and the instructor. As he explained, this T-FLIP model also lends itself to collaborative, as well as experiential learning.“
Using this approach, Praharsh and I jotted down our thoughts to come up with what would become our guiding draft. We knew that for this format to work, it would need an approach which accounts for a continuous learning process, and not just classroom discussions. So our next most important factor here was knowing that the volunteer team we bring in would make all the difference. It’s one thing to ask a question to an expert in class. No matter how kind and approachable the expert may be (and they all were!), it’s a completely different thing to have informal conversations after hours, with your peers checking in on you, discussing different strands of thoughts stemming from earlier discussions. The deep-rooted sense of hierarchy present in much of our country poses an invisible hurdle to the free-exchange of thoughts, and we knew that was a gap only an amazing peer-volunteer team could fill. Taking this, we built our team, and approached different experts we thought would be best suited to executing different parts, and we just had to sit back, watching them showcase their mastery. Looking back at it now, I’m fairly pleased to say that not only were we actually able to execute much of the initial vision, we’ve also been able to slowly improve, with input from our speakers and participants. And with that, we’d like to extend our gratitude to the following:
- Firstly – all our expert speakers of course! (Maneesha has detailed them out in the event report below, so I won’t take more space here but really could not thank them enough for the time and energy that they spent with us!). In particular: Dr Zakir Thomas and Murali Neelakantan for their ideas and input in preparing the programmes as well as for the extraordinary amount of time they spent with the participants, with Dr Thomas being present nearly the whole Summer School last year, and Murali Neelakantan being present nearly the whole Summer School this year!
- Our wonderful volunteer OC team assisting Praharsh and myself on the ground: Ambika Aggarwal, Arnav Kaman, Deepali Nayak, Gnanapriya, Shivam Kaushik, Sonisha Srinivasan, Sunidhi Das, Vishnu Sudheendra and Yogesh Byadwal. And Anjali Tripathy, Gaurangi Kapoor and Akshat Agrawal who could not join us in person but helped virtually.
- Our supporters who made this edition possible! EMC Limited, ALG India Law Offices LLP, Rajshekhar Rao, Zoheb Hossain, Srijan Realty Pvt. Ltd., Jayeesh Logistics Pvt. Ltd., Rajesh Madhira, KRIA Law, Bhamini Shenoy, and one sponsor who has chosen to remain anonymous.
- Last but not least – our wonderful participants! Hailing from universities all across the country, their enthusiastic participation and willingness to dive into this experiment with us is what makes this the joy that it is!
Finally – the biggest unexpected opportunity that has come out of the Summer School: loading up our podcast arsenal! This year, in addition to our English language podcasts, we were able to get a group of our fantastic SpicyIP-IDIA fellows together to sit together and chat with each other as well as some of our expert speakers in Hindi! Couldn’t be a better start to our regional language initiative! Editing still takes us amateurs a lot of time, but we can’t wait to bring it out!
And with that, over to one of our star participants – Maneesha Gupta, a 5th year student at NMIMS Bengaluru – for her experience of the 2026 edition of the SpicyIP Summer School!
SpicyIP Summer School 2026 – Event Report
By Maneesha Gupta
Having followed SpicyIP for a while, I knew a Summer School organized by them would be challenging and definitely not traditional. On top of that, having attended WIPO Summer School in Geneva last year, I was eager to see how this one would play out. And much to my delight, the SpicyIP approach to a Summer School simply smashed it out of the park. The planning, the pedagogy, the people; this was much more than just Intellectual Property! The nerd in me kept a record of all happenings in and outside sessions. So, here is my deep dive into the Second Edition of SpicyIP Summer School.
Part 1: Orientations, Introductions and the Pharma Stack
All participants checked in at the Ecumenical Christian Centre (ECC) on 20th June, and the Summer School adventure started. The vast, green, peaceful piece of land in the heart of Bengaluru was about to become an IP Gurukul. Each participant was given a single room in the housing quarters aptly named the ‘Dialogue House.’ The Dialogue House was a universe in itself, with each room lined up one after another, circling a green courtyard enclosure, ensuring both personal space and a sense of belonging.
On to the orientation. We did not start by referring to statutes, but by taking the first step to understand how our thinking evolves. Mr Swaraj Barooah, the convenor of the Summer School, opened the orientation by discussing the TFLIP methodology with us. Theme-based, “Flipped Learning”, Interdisciplinary, and Poly-centric exploration. This approach is in stark contrast to how we, or at least I, have studied all my life. Often, in classrooms, it can feel like law is isolated, but not here. For example, not once did a session start with ‘patent law’ or ‘copyright law’; rather, it would start with the field of what that law is embedded in. Often, sessions would also start with hypotheticals to challenge one’s opinions by craftily presenting contrasting stakeholders’ stories. We would present our binaries and then end up puzzled and stuck when questioned about ‘why, why, why’. Be it Philosophy, History, Statistics, Science, or Civil Procedure, IP attracted all. After this introduction, Mr Barooah asked us to write our thoughts on a deceptively simple question: “why does IP exist at all?” Not to take us through the answer, but for us to keep revisiting it, through the rest of that week. The unsaid part of that question, as we realised, was “If so and so is the purpose, is that actually happening?”
Though our campus tour was cut short by unexpected rain, we took shelter in the ECC’s refectory, little knowing that here too we would have an IP puzzle to ponder over. One painting hung before us as we entered the Refectory (pic below). At first glance, it resembled ‘The Last Supper’. But a closer look revealed it was quite a creative take on Da Vinci’s Renaissance painting, filled with famous persons from modern Indian times. Ms Ambika Aggarwal got our minds ticking here with her questions and counter-questions: Who enjoys the bundle of rights in this art? Was it the artist? Why not ECC? What about the people in the painting? Did they have any claims here? What about ‘copyright and personality rights’ clashes? The questions went on. Ms Aggarwal would continue to take this role with us over the next few days as well. Pushing us to think harder, no matter what our answers were- a difficult but invaluable exercise that taught me not to rest just because I assumed I knew an answer.
At this moment, I saw the challenge I claimed to know of- We would not often arrive at unanimous answers; rather, we would frequently challenge binaries. A cohort for the next 8 days would look at the same facts, see different perspectives, create friction, and ask questions. I also realized that if I looked closely, IP was not only all around us, but our lives were embedded in how this set of legal tools was utilized.
Over the next three days, three expert faculty members took us for a ride into the world of Pharma Stack– from the lifecycle of a drug to the scalability of it; from the nuances of the Generic Pharma Industry to the practicalities of Patent Litigation. We developed a multifaceted understanding of IP, not just as subjects, but as part of the toolkits of different stakeholders and how they approach other stakeholders in the same domain.
This frequently required questioning statutes and not taking them as they are. Why? Why? Why? Inquire into the earlier legislation. Understand the provisions in hand. Look out for debates and documents behind the law. Best thing? We had people who substantially impacted how IP interacts with the world, on campus, to interact with our curiosity. Not only in class, but I was amazed by how much time they kindly spent with us outside of class as well.
Mr Murali Neelakantan and Mr Sandeep Rathod together explained how a drug is not merely a product of science: for some, it is a commercial product, for some, it is a regulatory issue. A few stakeholders view it as a public health necessity, and a few look at it as an IP asset. Prior to delving into the practicalities before both the innovators and the generics pharma industry, our binary-based tendency was to see the lifecycle of a drug in isolation. We also witnessed creative ways to look at the Patents Act, 1970, learning how crucial the proper application of interpretation of statutes was. Mr Rathod with all his interesting takes, made this a fun exercise for us. He also rewarded those who tried to decipher certain wordings in the Act. Here’s to creativity! (Token of appreciation: 5-star chocolate)
The Seminar Hall turned into a courtroom as we tried to solve a patent litigation suit issue-by-issue during the session led by Mr Adarsh Ramanujan. In his session, we had to apply what we had learnt so far as he presented nuanced real-time issues in the form of explorable hypotheticals. Each time we skipped the “why” before making an assertion to a question thrown by Mr Ramanujan, and felt unsettled, Mr Neelakantan would remind us that we knew enough from the previous sessions. All we needed was to think through and apply it to the problem at hand. This way, Mr Ramanujan took us through a (literally) minute by minute breakdown of how such a case would play out in court. Such a rich course gave us a new appreciation for the spectrum of calculations that need to go into even 5 minutes of strong courtroom litigation!
After the mind-drill session on Patent Litigation, Mr Ramanujan also sat down with the cohort to chat. Many asked him for advice on navigating IP Litigation, while some enquired about a work-life balance. I absorbed most of the key lessons, but one line he mentioned left a lasting impression: “Credibility matters more than winning or losing a case.”
The SpicyIP team then offered us a key takeaway during an open session: the art of writing reflections. We were to ponder: Has anything changed within us or our understandings? With each day of the Summer School showering us with new perspectives and questions, participants were advised to set aside 20-30 minutes a day to write reflections. Traces of learning and unlearning. We documented our interrogations of our own beliefs.
After sessions were done for the day, back in the Dialogue House, participants, experts, and the SpicyIP team would gather to dissect everything under the sun. No curiosity was unwelcome, and no topic was too niche. We would start by debating whether doctors and lawyers should be allowed to advertise and somehow end up navigating episodes of sleep paralysis. The conversations would refuse to end. Learning rarely came to a halt at the Summer School.
Day 4 saw a series of sessions via the Patent Workshop organised by Third World Network, with Ms Pratibha Sivasubramanian, Ms Chetali Rao, and Ms Jyotsna Singh showing us how patent law is shaped not just within courtrooms but also by activity and coordination at the grassroots level. I understood that there are no easy villains or heroes, but stakeholders with competing priorities. A Policy Memo Drafting Simulation with Ms Rao enabled us to step into the shoes of each stakeholder- innovator, generic companies, and patients. We read enough on the plights of innovators and the generic pharma industry, but it is through these interactions that we are able to look at the plight of those hoping for access to medicine. In the Patent Workshop, instead of choosing one side, we looked carefully at the priorities of each. This brought me back to questioning binaries.
Also, let’s not forget that the cohort is not feeling even a bit weary as they step out of the Seminar Hall. I loved that about this experience. It was ensured that each participant felt seen. We freely shared our experience of student life. That was where we all bonded. Whether it was me sharing my bittersweet experience of a new country, or an expert narrating stories of fighting the Delhi cold, clutching suitcases full of memorials. At the end, we were all students of life sharing our journeys of staying afloat.
Part II: Application!
Have you ever felt your passion for law waver, for you felt powerless in the face of the world’s affairs? Day 5 reminded us that there are meaningful ways to contribute to society. Dr. Zakir Thomas conducted the session on Policy Making in Government. I realised I need not necessarily be stuck or show years of expertise to have agency. Though it may not be easy, contributing to public policy could be possible by staying actively informed and having discussions around things that truly matter.
I am a wishful thinker, but I hardly ever imagined a fictional mouse initiating a discussion on intangible labour that would go on to regulations concerning GenAI! A 1967 children’s story about a mouse named Frederick: opened for Mr Sunil Abraham’s session on Openness and Power Platform. The positive shift in energy mustered during Dr Thomas’s session was inevitably noticeable in this one. In part of a live exercise shown by Mr Abraham, a participant casually downloaded “Qwen”, an LLM, on their device, as if they were browsing Pinterest. Not just that, we brainstormed 19 possible regulation trigger points for platforms vis-a-vis copyright infringement. Now that was something charging.
Thanks to a session on Civil Procedure Argumentation and Client Communication, we all fell in love with the Code of Civil Procedure. Who would’ve thought?! Ms Kruttika Vijay’s ways with the statute transformed something in us. When we sit with CPC, we have a common notion around it being not that interesting. In her sessions though, we learnt to be creative with CPC instead of just following it. While this newfound love was the common theme of Day 6, I often look back at Ms Vijay’s reminder that there is no arguing a case in front of a vacuum, but a judge who is also a human, and so the advocate needs to put in work beyond just reading their documents, to argue effectively. Her session not only focused on making sense of the procedural aspects of IP Litigation but also reaffirmed that there is no substitute for hard work done smartly.
Throughout Summer School, I appreciated the intentional sequencing of sessions. Right after examining the role of a lawyer in advancing her clients’ best interests before the court, we next had the privilege of hearing Justice Prabha Sridevan speak on the essence of Public Interest in Patent Law. The lecture offered a rare privilege of learning how a judge navigates competing rights, interests, and stories. Justice Sridevan has helped shape some of the most crucial decisions on pharmaceutical patents and access to medicine, making this session – and the time she gave us to chit-chat – extra special for us. Her quote in the context of updating positions, “It’s not a confession that you don’t know the law; it’s only an admission that you’re always learning,” reminded me that the pursuit of law remains the willingness to learn more and more. Her session was also special to me because just before I left for the Summer School, my mother had spoken to me about her landmark “Homemaker Judgment”. And so hearing Justice Sridevan reflect on her judicial journey, mentioning this, made the experience an empowering memory.
In Mr Ishupal Singh Kang’s session on Commons, Degrowth, Progress, and Technology, we confronted our assumptions around innovation and technology. He made us look for our biases around innovation by an exercise, requiring us to ‘draw’ the answer to the question, “What is Innovation to you?” Inspired by the SpicyIP logo, I drew a chilli transforming into a chilli paste can with a label on it, ready to be sold. And a ‘why’ immediately hit me- why did I so instinctively associate innovation with its ability to be marketed? This session was fueled with participation, and I liked how Mr Kang treated everyone’s input as important in order to help us uncover assumptions we did not know we held.
Dr Aakanksha Kumar’s Personality Rights Workshop had a lot of personality. It started with Aditi Rao Hydari’s viral “Moon Moon Moon Khagina” cooking video and ended with the ingredients on a “Salad Platter”. Now I have prepared Khagina and can confirm that it is indeed delicious, but the Salad Platter here is not the edible kind. It is the Personality Rights Salad made of legal ingredients, such as copyright, trademark, passing off, privacy, and more. In Dr Kumar’s session, we asked: what exactly is the law protecting? Is it the recipe? The ingredients? The presentation? Or the personality?
From here, a musical journey awaited with Mr Siddharth Abraham, Ms Mae Mariyam Thomas, Mr Shaun Fanthome, and Ms Sandhya Surendran. Mr Abraham turned the Summer Schoolers into musicians, where he ‘crowd-sourced’ lyrics and music from the audience (us), and put it all together!. We made a release-worthy, catchy song about the “5 Star” brand of chocolates. Giving us no time to think of a career switch, he posed a question: Who owned the 5-star song? Was it him? The cohort? ECC? SpicyIP? Are there any royalties? Where do they flow?
The ownership curiosity was put to the test on Day 7 when we were tasked with drafting a Music License Agreement for Ms Mae Mariyam Thomas and Mr Shaun Fanthome involving Podcasters, Artists, and Streaming Platforms. I fancied drafting a fancy agreement. But there was something more important. How much these agreements mean! They are not mere legal instruments. They impact humans and creative collaborations, shape the movement of art, and influence the livelihoods of those involved in the creative ecosystem.
Ms Sandhya Surendran then wove these elements into a broader landscape of media and entertainment law in the age of metadata. We explored whether a song can ever truly be a “single”. Or how every single is, in reality, the collective effort of composers, lyricists, performers, producers, labels, and others. I also squeezed in a question that kept me up for years: “Why is Pritam on everybody’s Spotify Wrapped?”
For Day 8, we were joined by Mr Nikhil Narendran, who broke down abstract concepts around AI, LLMs, and machine learning. Mr Narendran’s session left me wondering whether IP has become the modern equivalent of patronage. I took a keen interest in the discussion around the current standing of AI and shared resources, and what the future holds.
We discussed Free and Open Source Software with Dr Kailash Nadh in an outdoor session. Dr Nadh invited us to pause and question technology itself. While we discussed AI “consuming” creative works, egged on by his questions, I found myself imagining a pool of AI-generated stories. Technically readable and coherent. But thousands of them – with no soul. Disconcerted, I knew I wouldn’t want to read even one. I feared a world where (human!) authors put down their pens. How do these worlds survive without burning each other out?
We then had the great privilege to interact with Justice Gautam Patel over a virtual call. Justice Patel, with his wit, clarity, and humour, made the seminar hall lively. Even complex IP disputes felt easy to understand with his illustrations relating to everyday lives. His way of teaching truly transcended the medium. His contextualisation of “IP” being all around us, impacting humans and human creations, did away with a commonly held notion of IP being a matter of luxury litigation. Even on the virtual call, Justice Patel opened out space for us to ask any questions, and his response to one of those has stayed with me: Read everything! From the cereal box label onwards!
Following this, we had Ms Sneha Jain, who introduced participants to Standard-Essential Patents. During the session, “Standards & Innovation”, Ms Sneha Jain took us back to the bricks made during the Indus Valley Civilization, tracing back to the origins of uniformity. And from there, discussions around economic and logistical advantages flowed. I found Ms Jain’s illustrations indeed helpful. The way she explained Standards Essential Patents- something I had earlier found very technical, they now felt much more comprehensible, and tied to something that was rooted in human history – negotiating with one another!
Now that I look back, it strikes me how unusual and powerful this access was. We spent more than a week with some of the most respected IP professionals in the country. Yet their expertise did not feel intimidating or distant- they were warm and easy to approach! . Around a campfire, we wrapped up Day 8, reflecting on the sessions and what the Summer School had come to mean for each one of us. It was beautiful to listen to everyone speak from their hearts. One thing about me is that when I become part of a group, I want to leave carrying at least one memory of every person in it. I replayed all the off-the-wall and weird conversations in my head. After all, nostalgia is a funny feeling. And so, before anyone had a chance to wail, we circled to cut a cake that read “SS 26” and tasted almost-farewell. Though a big mystery is: Who is SS? And did they really turn 26?
For our last day, on 28th June, we had an outdoor session with Mr Prateek Waghre to discuss the now-familiar issues of copyright infringement that have now begun to take new forms due to the disruption caused by AI. What all has changed since we took a convenient leap from Google Search to AI Search? Mr Waghre applied this lens to the work of Journalists- what happens to that journalist whose report is entered in an LLM, and it turns into polished reels? It was interesting, even concerning, to ponder over how IP maximalism in the face of AI disruption could also adversely affect the public’s access to free and fair information.
And just like that, by the last day, we had come full circle to the very first question that welcomed us on Day One- “Why does IP exist”? We were to revisit this question throughout the week. What I came to understand was that I will spend much more time doing just that! And somewhere in the revisiting, I remember the change I went through. Most prominently, I learnt to question my bias around innovation and its ability to be multiplied, packed, and sold: Does innovation always have to look marketable? If not, what have I been overlooking all this time? If community-made tools that change lives never reach markets, do they become any less innovative? These questions are among the many valuable things that I carry back from the Summer School adventure.
With that, we concluded SpicyIP Summer School 2026. I would not say that I moved on, leaving behind warm memories. Rather, any traces of Summer School will continue to make their way into conversations on Discord (office), over coffee tables, in courtrooms, and at weddings and birthday celebrations. No memory would be left behind, and I would definitely not say that I will miss it. For I found a community kind enough not to mind me continuing to annoy them with regular throwbacks from those nine days we spent closely-knit together.