This is what Nikhil Pahwa’s post at contentsutra.com seems to suggest, with the Delhi High Court having given the two parties time to settle their copyright infringement dispute. The next hearing is slated for July, but the general mood at the hearing in late-February gave the impression that the two would prefer dealing outside the confines of the Indian judicial system. Notwithstanding the irony of T-Series suing for copyright infringement, if the settlement were to go through, it would deny us the precedent that some of us were waiting for; although it would not be entirely surprising.
Late last year, T-Series had won an unexpected ex parte interim restraining order against YouTube/Google from the court, citing that the defendants had made available web-content of copyrighted material owned by it, in the form of music videos, song clip, etc., without license or permission. Readers can access SpicyIP’s earlier posts in this case here and here.
The arguments appear to have been fairly obvious. According to Pahwa, Arun Jaitley, appearing for YouTube/Google, besides referring to the absence of intermediary liability (which Indian law anyway does not consider), argued that his client would remove any violating content the instant it was reported, as per the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Representing T-series, Pravin Anand appears to have parried with the argument that the DMCA was not applicable in India, and that lack of technological competence was no defence.
(In this context, recall also Ram’s comment to our earliest post on this case which drew SpicyIP’s attention to YouTube beta-testing a copyright-filtering tool, details of which can be found here. At first glance, this does not entirely absolve the internet intermediary of all liability, but certainly lessens the burden in cases such as this.)
