The Delhi High Court’s decision in Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. v. Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. revisits the perennial question of territorial jurisdiction in copyright infringement suits. Analysing the decision, Arshiya Gupta highlights how the Court appears to depart from its own recent reasoning in Vikrant Chemco, prompting closer scrutiny of how the cause of action is assessed in online copyright infringement cases. Arshiya is a second-year law student at National Law University, Delhi, with a keen inclination towards PIL, IPR, and criminal law.
Redefining the Digital Perimeter: The Delhi High Court’s Expansive Stance on Copyright Jurisdiction in Zee Entertainment v. Mohalla Tech
By Arshiya Gupta
In Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. v. Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd., the DHC once again faced the much-contested question (see previous posts by Srishti Gaur, and Divij Joshi (and here)) of jurisdiction in a copyright infringement dispute. The Court was seen assuming jurisdiction in a dispute where neither party has an office in Delhi, with no actual proof of cause of action. The Court deviated from its own record in a recent trademark case of Vikrant Chemico, on what counts as a cause of action and how it is to be applied in terms of the evidentiary rigour required, noting the difference between trademark cases and copyright cases (even though there is no basis for this, as will be explored in detail).
The dispute emerged after the breakdown of a previous licensing relationship. Zee, a major copyright owner in music and audiovisual works, had long permitted Mohalla Tech, operator of ShareChat and Moj, to host and allow user-generated content incorporating its repertoire through two agreements: a User Content & Revenue Sharing Agreement and a License Agreement governing the use of Zee’s sound recordings and underlying works. Both arrangements ended by mid-July and early August 2023.
Yet, in August, Zee discovered that Mohalla Tech’s platforms continued to offer its copyrighted works through their in-built music libraries, enabling users to incorporate Zee’s songs into short-form videos without authorization. After issuing legal notices and receiving denials premised on intermediary immunity, Zee filed a suit in Delhi seeking a permanent injunction. Mohalla Tech responded with an Order VII Rule 10 application, arguing that the Delhi High Court lacked territorial jurisdiction and that the territorial jurisdiction lies before the courts in Bombay, thus presenting this jurisdictional contest to the Court. This post examines how the Court addressed this jurisdictional challenge, the standards it applied in assessing cause of action in online copyright infringement, and the implications of this reasoning for future digital IP disputes.
The Court’s Reasoning
The Court first rejected Mohalla Tech’s reliance on the Mumbai jurisdiction clauses as per their (now expired) license agreements, holding that the dispute was not contractual in nature, but rather a fresh claim of statutory copyright infringement arising after the agreements had expired. The Court held that since the cause of action in any case stemmed from unauthorized exploitation of works, not from the terminated contracts, the contractual forum-selection clauses were held to be irrelevant by the Court.
With this contractual barrier removed, the Court proceeded to test jurisdiction exclusively under Section 20(c) CPC, which allows a suit to be filed where the defendant carries on their business or where the cause of action, wholly or in part, arises. The plaintiff, Zee Entertainment, invoked jurisdiction on the ground that the defendant was carrying on its business and targeting customers/users in Delhi through its accessible platforms, which were ShareChat and Moj.
The Court firstly, emphasized that the term “carries on business” is broad, extending beyond the principal place of business to wherever business activity occurs. It relied on the fact that Mohalla Tech’s platforms, including the in-built music library used for generating infringing content, were accessible to users all over India, including Delhi. It cited cases like Icon Health and Fitnes, Inc. v. Sheriff Usman, and held that merely offering apps accessible and operable from Delhi made it user targeting indeed constituted carrying on business or working for gain at Delhi.
The Court then secondly, grounded its jurisdiction on there being proof of cause of action, that is, treating accessibility as substantive participation in the infringement. Delhi users could download Mohalla Tech’s apps, access the in-built music library, and create or view content allegedly containing Zee’s repertoire. Under Section 51 of the Copyright Act, copyright is infringed when a person, without a license, does anything that is the exclusive right of the owner, or permits a place (for profit) to be used for the communication of the work to the public, where such communication infringes copyright (unless the person was unaware). Therefore, a “part of the cause of action” arose in Delhi, and the mere ability of Delhi users to exploit Zee Entertainment’s works through the platform was enough.
On the face of it, this sounds intuitive because copyright infringement is committed wherever the work is communicated to the public. But this reasoning reveals a larger structural problem. If accessibility were to equal infringement, and infringement were to equal jurisdiction, then jurisdiction would end up existing everywhere and nowhere at the same time because every digital platform is accessible pan-India, and every copyrighted work uploaded on any popular platform becomes instantly viewable across the country (as discussed previously, by Divij Joshi). If that alone were to be enough to confer jurisdiction, then every High Court simultaneously would become the correct forum. This effectively turns Section 20(c) CPC into a blank cheque in digital copyright disputes and makes it lose its purpose. The result is a jurisdictional landscape where plaintiffs can always choose their preferred forum, rendering defendants vulnerable to litigating in states with which they have no meaningful connection.
The Analysis of this Reasoning
As noted above, this decision marked an important departure from the Delhi High Court’s own reasoning in Vikrant Chemico, where the Court insisted that bare accessibility of a website does not establish jurisdiction unless supported by evidence of an actual, territorially linked transaction or a demonstrable impact within the forum State. This strict standard, which is rooted in the Banyan Tree Holding v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy and News Nation Networks decisions, mandates that for a cause of action to arise online, the plaintiff must prove that a commercial transaction was concluded in the forum state, or that the defendant purposefully targeted the forum state.
The above cases deal with trademark infringement, which became the exact basis for the Court in the present case to undertake an alternative approach, considering the present case was one of copyright infringement. This is because trademark cases establish jurisdiction based on the need to show consumer confusion and commercial harm resulting from a transaction. However, copyright infringement under Section 51 of the Copyright Act simply requires an unauthorized act that is the exclusive right of the owner. It does not require showing confusion among the customers.
Therefore, the Court concluded that the tests laid down in trademark cases requiring proof of concluded commercial transactions were inapplicable. Instead, the “looming presence” of a website in a geography and the ability of the customers therein to access the website were held to be sufficient to characterize it as targeting and confer jurisdiction. As can be seen, thus, the Court’s reasoning rests on a false premise.
This is because, firstly, Banyan Tree, Vikrant Chemico, and News Nation’s approach did not impose a heightened jurisdictional standard, only because of the substantive ingredient that trademarks require consumer confusion. It did so because online accessibility alone is territorially meaningless because it does not show that any part of the cause of action has occurred within the forum. The requirement of a concluded transaction or purposeful targeting was a territorial nexus test and not a trademark-specific substantive test. The Court, in the present case, mistakenly treats the earlier standard as if it were tied to the elements of trademark law, rather than to the geographical facts as are required by Section 20(c) CPC, 1908.
Then secondly, the Court’s shift to a mere-accessibility standard for copyright collapses the distinction between facts establishing infringement (a substantive requirement) and facts establishing where the infringement occurred (a territorial jurisdictional requirement). Copyright infringement under Section 51 may not require consumer confusion, but it still requires an act of reproduction, communication, or distribution that can be located somewhere in the territory of jurisdiction. That act occurs where the infringing communication reaches the public, not wherever the website is theoretically viewable or accessible at large, just as the requirements of intentional targeting and purposeful availment demand. By treating the “looming presence” of a website as enough, the Court effectively adopts a borderless, omnipresent model of infringement, under which the status of the infringing act becomes “everywhere” the internet exists, as was mentioned before as well. This interpretation renders Section 20(c) totally and entirely meaningless in online copyright cases, because the cause of action would automatically arise in every district in India.
Finally, it is to be noted that by treating website accessibility as “targeting,” the Court also ends up reversing the logic of Banyan Tree. In that case, purposeful targeting required evidence that the defendant directed activities specifically toward the forum state. Here, however, the Court treats the forum state’s people’s passive ability to access a website as equivalent to the defendant actively targeting the forum. This is a categorical error because targeting is supposed to describe the defendant’s conduct, and not the plaintiff’s capacity to observe it.
Conclusion
In the decision in Zee Entertainment v. Mohalla Tech, by diluting the requirement of a meaningful territorial nexus and equating mere accessibility with targeting in copyright cases, the Court departs from its own well-reasoned jurisprudence on internet-based causes of action. This distinction between trademark and copyright, grounded neither in statutory text nor in principles of territorial jurisdiction, risks rendering Section 20(c) CPC toothless in the digital context. If left uncorrected, the reasoning opens the door to unchecked forum shopping and a borderless conception of infringement, underscoring the urgent need for doctrinal consistency in how Indian courts approach jurisdiction in online IP disputes.
