As expected, India’s revolutionary copyright amendments seeking to foster social justice by providing mandatory royalty payments to music composers and lyricists has been challenged as unconstitutional. (For those interested, a text of the amendment is available here). A writ petition was first filed before the Supreme Court of India sometime last week by leading music labels, T Series and Venus Records, challenging interalia sections 17,18, 19, 30 and 33 of the amended Act. A bench comprising Justice Aftab Alam and Justice Ranjana Desai declined to hear the matter, asking that the writ be filed before the High Court.
We are given to believe that a fresh writ petition was filed today before the Delhi High Court and is expected to come up tomorrow. My guess is that the amendments have been challenged as violative of Article 14 (vague, arbitrary etc) and violative of the right to trade/contract etc (Article 19). We’ll keep you posted.
Tomorrow, can there be such “revolutionary” amendments in our patent laws to save “poor inventors” from “greedy companies”? For example, employee of a company suing a company to get royalties on an invention that was commercialised by the company, should patent law make it mandatory to share benefits with the inventors after assignment of patent to the company? I still do not get the need of these amendments. If lyricists, song writers, etc. want a stake in future sales of their work, why not just license it instead of selling it? Does old copyright laws prohibit artists from doing so?
Some countries actually have laws to protect inventors and provide them with a mandatory share of royalties.
As for not getting the purpose of these amendments, I would highly recommend you read our previous posts on this issue where we have discussed the impetus for these amendments.
Regards,
Prashant