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The latest copyright amendments enacted by Parliament requires “that the business of isuing or granting license in respect of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works incorporated in a cinematograph films or sound recordings shall be carried out only through a copyright society duly registered under this Act”. The provision therefore aims at ensuring that all music companies, including T-Series which used to previously operate independently of copyright societies, are also forced to operate within a copyright society.
Strangely the law does not prescribe any sanctions for music labels which refuse to comply with this provision of law. What happens if T-Series and other music labels continue to operate outside the purview of any copyright society? What can the Registrar of Copyrights do about it? Presumably nothing!
But let us presume that even companies like T-Series are willing to function within a copyright society, it would be interesting to see whether they are going to function within the existing copyright societies or will they form their own copyright societies.
Currently the Copyright Act has a proviso which states “Provided that the Central Government shall not ordinarily register more than one copyright society to do business in respect of the same class of works.” The wording of the provision is no way mandatory and the Government certainly has the leeway to register more than one copyright society in the same category.
Should the government allow for more than one society in a certain segment? I think the Government should just process applications for how many ever copyright societies that it gets without trying to creating a super-copyright society which functions like a draconian monopoly. If companies like T-Series do not want to be part of a copyright society known to be in the control of certain thugs, they should not be forced to do.
From a consumer perspective, having more than one copyright society is always better as the competition between multiple copyright societies will keep in check any abusive behaviour by either one of the two societies.
This issue of multiple copyright societies is all the more importance for South Indian music labels. Given that the market and the players for South Indian music is distinct from Bollywood, should the member companies of the South Indian Music Companies Association (SIMCA) be forced to be a part of either IPRS or PPL when in all likelihood they will always be in a minority with no effective say in the functioning of either copyright society. Isn’t it better for these music companies to just form their own copyright society? Should the government be putting spokes in the process? I hope not.
Dear ALl,
I agree that the new amendment laws have broughtin many new issues which needs quick action. But I think the major issue which needs urgent attention is fixing of final royalty rates for all kinds of exploitation of content.
For eg – While SIMCA is not a member of PPL or IPRS, but they are tentatively acepting the final rates prescribed by the Copyright Board for radio broadcast i.e. 2% of net revenues. Thus, from the broadcaster’s point of view, it doesnt matter whether the content providers belong to one society or not; but whether all provide content on one single rate. This will prevent monopolistic situations created by some content owners like Tseries.
I believe that the real challenge before our judiciary is to confirm and close the rates for various forms of exploitation; on priority and parallely determine issues of registering copyright societies.
Dear Prashant, this post is pointless on several counts.
First, the existing Act makes room for only one Society per class of works, so there is no latitude to create competing Societies.
Second, it is not the Societies but the Copyright Board that will determine the rates; so there is no benefit in setting up competing Societies.
Third, from a consumer perspective, less Societies is far better than more Societies: ask iTunes, Google, or Indian broadcasters who clamour for a single-window clearance as they feel reporting statements to IPRS and PPL is proving too much! The same picture emerges if you look at the rise of pan-European licensing: who pushed for it if not the consumers?
Fourth, the advent of streaming services like Spotify and Deezer, and new tools like TuneSat, we have seen a dramatic increase in both the accuracy of the data and in micro payments. The exploding volume of data to process royalties is saturating the systems of even the largest Societies like PRS and GEMA or ASCAP; SACEM alone invested euros 71 million (INR 495 crores) over 7 years in its IT systems just to cope with this data revolution on which the accuracy for collecting the author’s royalties depends.
Fifth, the more Societies you have for one class of works, say literary and musical works, the more companies a publisher has to set up and operate just to collect what he could have collected with one company had there been only one Society.
In the coming years, smaller Societies will continue to do the “dirty job” – licensing small local users such as shops and hotels – but they will have no option but to abandon the essence of their power – royalties processing – to bigger Societies. Of course, they can also remain opaque, where a few cronies pocket most of the revenues, but that is not an alternative that we sould consider.