New Delhi | The Delhi High Court has asked search engine Google LLC to make an endeavour to ensure that misleading and deepfake content infringing the personality rights of Isha Foundation's Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev are removed and similar material is taken down through its technology.
The high court directed Google and Sadhguru to have a mutual meeting, where he can specifically identify the contents that fall within the exception of the Google Ads policy under which they cannot be removed, after the counsel for the company submitted that it was willing to have a collaborative approach with him to address concerns.
"...thereafter, defendant no. 45 (Google) must make an endeavour to ensure that the identical or similar content is removed through its technology so as to obviate the plaintiff's (Sadhguru) onus of looking out for such URLs and further to obviate the necessity of the plaintiff making an endeavour to identify such misleading representation and approaching defendant no. 45 for take down," the court said in its October 14 order.
The court said if Google has any technological limitations or reservations on this direction, it can take instructions and file an affidavit.
The counsel for Sadhguru said in view of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, Google ought to endeavour to bring in place a technology, which identifies identical content to obviate the necessity of the plaintiff to repeatedly approach the defendant for the taking down of identical content.
To this, the counsel for Google submitted that it was willing to have a collaborative approach with the plaintiff to address their concerns and would actively cooperate in taking down any further links pointed out to them.
Earlier, Sadhguru and Isha Foundation approached the high court seeking protection of their personality rights and to direct various channels and social media intermediaries to remove fake and misleading videos, posts and advertisements.
In its May order, the high court had passed an interim order granting protection to Sadhguru's personality rights and directed Google to suspend, take down, and disable such infringing channels and content.
New Delhi | The Delhi government is planning to send its bureaucrats to an "inner engineering leadership" programme at Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev's Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore, officials said on Tuesday.
The government's services department has sought heads of departments to notify "eligible" IAS officers about the training programme and nominate their names, they said.
The inner engineering leadership programme offers "powerful tools" derived from the "yogic sciences" to achieve one's "full potential", a post on Isha Foundation's website says.
The programme has been specially designed for senior government officials of the central and state governments, who stand to gain "enormously" from "timeless wisdom", with insights into leadership, it says.
The programme has been devised by Sadhguru and is conducted by trained instructors, the note says.
Earlier this year, the Centre's department of personnel and training wrote to the states and union territories about the programme, to be held during January 5-9, officials said.
"The programme is supposed to hone the leadership skills of the senior IAS officers thereby improving governance and service delivery to benefit the people at large," a senior Delhi government official said.
Chief Minister Rekha Gupta earlier said that her government is working on training its senior bureaucrats and other officials to enhance their public grievance-redressal skills.
The services department has sought data of officers from the Indian Administrative Service, DANICS cadre, Delhi Subordinate Services, Steno cadre, as well as ex-cadre, who have not received any training in the past five years.
The Directorate of Training, Union Territory Civil Services (UTCS), has mandated carrying out foundation courses, in-service training, and refresher programmes for officers and staff of the Delhi government, as well as those in its local bodies and autonomous corporations.
