On 15 May 2026, a Single Judge of the Delhi High Court passed an ex parte ad-interim order in Ivy Entertainment v. Rahul Singh restraining the defendants from making any use of one line of lyric, jaane meri janeman bachpan ka pyar bhool nahi jaana re, on the footing that this fragment is the “distinctive hook line” of a song in which the plaintiff, an acquisition vehicle that purchased a portfolio of 1,250 songs in November 2025, claims copyright.
The order does not pause to ask whether the hook line, considered on its own, is original or whether the impugned songs, considered as wholes, are substantially similar to the suit song or whether a fragment of this length can sustain a freestanding claim of authorship at all, distinct from the larger composition of which it is a part. The hook is treated as a complete and self-contained work, and that is the end of the inquiry.
This is a predictable output of a doctrinal logic that has been quietly inserting itself into Indian copyright doctrine since 2008, treating every recognisable fragment of an expressive work as a potential unit of exclusionary rights. I, inspired from Oren Bracha’s work (see here also), would call this logic fragmentation of the work. It is doctrinally indefensible, structurally biased against entire genres of expressive practice, and now, in Ivy, the basis of an injunction against nine uploaders on the strength of one line of lyric, with no filtration and no comparison of works as wholes.
The Work as a Whole?
The test for copyright infringement in India remains the test set by R.G. Anand v. Delux Films. The “surest and safest test”, the Court held, is whether the spectator, after seeing both works, as a whole, gets an “unmistakable impression that the subsequent work appears to be a copy of the original”. Where similarities are accompanied by “material and broad dissimilarities which negative the intention to copy”, no infringement arises. The substantial-part inquiry, where it appears, is anchored to the work taken as a whole. As Lord Reid in Ladbroke v. William Hill had observed in a passage that R.G. Anand approvingly quoted, “a wrong result can easily be reached if one begins by dissecting the plaintiff’s work and asking, could Section A be the subject of copyright if it stood by itself, could Section B be protected if it stood by itself, and so on”.
Ram Sampath and the imported “hook”
This binding test was significantly watered down by the Ram Sampath order of 2008. The dispute concerned a six-second segment of four bars, of a one-minute advertisement jingle, reproduced four to five times in two songs of a feature film. The Bombay High Court accepted that the copied portion was “small” and “only of 6 seconds”. It granted injunction nonetheless. The reasoning rests almost entirely on one long extract from an American copyright treatise, set out at paragraph 15 of the order, which supplied a vocabulary that has been travelling across pleadings ever since: “vital or essential part of the work”, “short refrain or hook line”, “the catch part”, “the hook part”, “the soul of a musical work”, and the maxim that “what is worth copying is worth protecting”.
What the order did not do is just as important. It did not test whether the fragment, in isolation, met the originality threshold. It did not consider whether the fragment sat within a genre with its own structural prescriptions. It did not distinguish R.G. Anand. The result was the substitution, in operation, of a test anchored to the work as a whole, with a doctrine borrowed from an American treatise that asks instead whether a fragment is the “soul”.
R.G. Anand asks whether the work, as a whole or a substantial part thereof (this bringing in substantial similarity as the test, as against virtual identity). The hook doctrine asks whether the popular or recognizable fragment has been copied. The first builds in tolerance for broad dissimilarity, parallel inspiration, and the existence of common sources. The second does not. The two tests are not different framings of the same idea. They are different ideas.
What is “the work”?
A great deal has been written about how copyright has ballooned outwards, in subject matter, in duration, in the bundle of rights conferred, and in the steady dilution of the “substantial similarity” threshold. Far less attention has been paid to a parallel movement that runs the opposite way i.e., the steady shrinking of the slice of expression that can itself be claimed as a freestanding object of property. The two movements have a common engine, namely the constant pressure within any exclusionary-rights system to identify, lock down, and price every distinct stream of market value that the protected output can be made to generate. They produce the same downstream damage too, i.e., the gradual loosening of the conceptual scaffolding on which the entire field rests.
That scaffolding rests, ultimately, on a single concept – the “work”. The “work” is what we are asking after when we ask whether something is original enough to be protected. The “work” can be the song, or the verse, or the line, or the hook, or the riff, or the four-note opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, or the first paragraph of a novel, or a named character lifted out of a longer fictional universe. In each case, the most attractive small piece will be the most market-relevant. The most market-relevant will be the piece around which the claim is framed. And the claim, once framed at that level, will tilt the comparison towards the claimant. The “work”, in other words, ceases to be a fixed subject and becomes an infinitely adjustable concept that takes whichever shape the case before the court demands.
Two consequences of this inward movement matter most. The first is practical. Small slices of works are rarely valuable in themselves, their value lies in being folded into new works, a song that picks up a familiar refrain, a film that quotes a recognisable motif, a recording that samples a four-bar phrase. When each slice is treated as a freestanding property right, the next creator who wants to draw on several is forced through a multi-party clearance process, with the transaction costs and hold-out risks this involves. The cost is not what the audience pays to enjoy the original. It is the cost imposed on producing the downstream output. The second consequence is conceptual. The outward expansion of copyright has stretched the scope of the right but left the underlying idea of the “work” more or less intact. Inward fragmentation attacks that underlying idea itself. The ideological backstop is the same for both: the unspoken assumption, never seriously defended on its own terms, that copyright should let the owner capture every rupee of social value the work can be made to generate. Once that is admitted, every recognisable slice of expression becomes a potential source of unclaimed value that the property right is invited to enclose, and the concept by reference to which the law actually operates quietly empties out, under the guise of so call ever expanding incentives.
From “the copy” to “any form”
The drift is much older than the 2008 order. The 1710 Statute, the first statutory copyright in the Anglo-American legal world, gave the owner only the “sole liberty of printing and reprinting” the particular book the copyright covered. English courts across the next century read that right narrowly. The core was verbatim reproduction. The only thing extending the core was a small penumbra against what the courts called “colourable” evasions, the cases where a second printer had varied the text just enough to dress up what was at heart an unauthorised reprint. Outside that core and its small penumbra, secondary uses of the work, taken in good faith, sat outside copyright altogether.
As late as 1853, Justice Robert Grier of the United States Supreme Court in Stowe v. Thomas, applied that old framework to dispose of an action by Harriet Beecher Stowe complaining that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been published without her consent. The only property the author held in her novel, Grier wrote, was “the exclusive right to multiply the copies of that particular combination of characters” that the printed book itself contained. The translation, on that view, was an independent work, and not an infringement.is, by some distance, the last serious judicial defence of the narrow understanding of what the law actually protected, namely the printed text and its evasive reproductions, and nothing else. It is also the position that the courts and the statutes of the next generation set about taking apart.
The treatise writers of the mid-nineteenth century led the way. The author’s entitlement, on the new account that George Ticknor Curtis advanced in his 1847 treatise, ran to “all the profits of publication which the book can, in any form, produce”. Those three words, “in any form”, did almost all the heavy lifting. They allowed the law, gradually and case by case, to detach the property right from the particular printed book and re-attach it to every new revenue line that the publishing, recording, broadcasting and now streaming industries learnt to identify, translation, abridgement, dramatisation, public performance, mechanical reproduction, broadcast, adaptation, sampling, and now the fragment and the hook. Each one is the same operation repeated, stretching the right from the printed text to one further commercial opportunity that the industry of the day had learnt to monetise.
Seen this way, the Ram Sampath order, and Ivy in its wake, are not departures from the trajectory. They are the latest Indian step in it. The “hook” / “catch part” / “soul of a musical work” vocabulary the Bombay court borrowed in 2008 is a direct descendant of the “in any form” formula. It performs the same operation the older expansions did: it identifies a piece of an existing work whose value the law had not yet locked down, and proposes that the property right ought to expand to lock it down.
The cross-genre cost
The defragmentation of the work is not a complaint at the level of pure form. It produces asymmetric distortions in cultural practice. Once a fragment is protected, the cost of downstream creative engagement rises, and investment shifts towards forms of expression whose appropriability is highest, the catchy, the short, the genre-conforming. Expression that is structurally dialogic, derivative, or built out of public-domain raw material gets either priced out, pushed out, or pre-empted by an interim injunction at the threshold.
The asymmetry plays out wherever genres are built on shared structural material – in classical, folk and devotional repertoires, in qawwali and kirtan, in oral traditions, and in contemporary popular forms whose compositional grammar rests on the reuse of recurring motifs, hip-hop foremost among them. To extract a hook and treat it as the soul of a composition is, in these genres, to misread a participation in a shared form as a discrete original product.
The vocabulary that the Bombay High Court borrowed in 2008 is drawn from a tradition whose structural inclination is towards expansion. In the United States in particular, the recent direction of travel has been to extend protection from the work to its motivic fragments. It is what a highly excludable, capital-intensive cultural industry tends to produce when copyright is left to evolve under the pressure of repeat institutional litigants.
The corrective
The infringement inquiry must begin with the work as a whole. Originality must be asserted, and tested, in respect of the unit the plaintiff seeks to protect after the genre’s mandatory material is filtered out. The comparison must be of the impugned work and the suit work as wholes, asking, in the language of R.G. Anand, whether the unmistakable impression is one of copying, and whether material and broad dissimilarities negative the inference. The unit of protection should be the work as the listener, reader, or viewer actually receives it, the complete aesthetic experiences the song or film or book is composed and circulated to deliver. The reproduction right should reach only those later works that step into the place of that experience for that audience, that is, only those that substitute for the original in the market the original was made for. On that test, the question in Ivy is not whether the defendants have reproduced the hook line. It is whether their songs occupy, for a listener of the suit song, the place the suit song is meant to occupy, thus displacing its complete market value and hence de-incentivizing the expressor due to the lack of security associated with copying.
On the facts of this case, the answer is almost certainly no. The impugned uploads are long-circulating Bhojpuri songs with their own audiences, their own arrangements, and their own creative inputs. They are not substitutes for the suit song. They are independent songs that happen to share a hook line. That is exactly the situation in which copyright, properly understood, has nothing to say as a statement otherwise would curb dialogic speech.
What the Ivy order does is the opposite. It takes the most attractive small piece of a song acquired only through a portfolio purchase six months before suit, and turns it into a freestanding object of property. It treats the hook as the work. It substitutes a slice for the whole. That is not what the “work” has ever meant, and is not the social compromise with the concept of dialogic expression that the copyright act is viable for. The Ivy order is not an exception to a longer direction of Indian copyright doctrine, but rather is its illustration. And the direction is a billowing white goo.
