[This post is authored by Nilisa Majumder. Nilisa is a third-year student at The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. She has a keen interest in Intellectual Property Law, Public International Law, and Corporate Law.]
On 11 June 2026 the Registrar of Copyrights registered Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) as a copyright society for sound recordings (here). The registration is under Section 33(3) of the Copyright Act, 1957, and comes on a Form X certificate.
This development comes after years of tryst that PPL has had with the copyright society application process. PPL was the original copyright society for sound recordings from 1996 to 2014. The 2012 Amendment and 2013 Rules then required every existing society to re-register. PPL applied, but later asked to withdraw the application (see here). As pointed out by Divij Joshi, the Registrar had initially rejected the withdrawal by the PPL on the grounds that the matter of registration affects various rights owners. (This rejection was communicated to PPL privately and was pointed out as an argument by PPL before the Delhi High Court). Subsequently PPL filed a fresh application in 2018 which was rejected by the Registrar on the grounds that PPL had withdrawn the 2014 application(?!) and the 2018 application was belated (since as per the 2012 amendments and 2013 rules organizations were supposed to get re-registered within 1 year from the date of commencement of the Act.) Shortly after rejecting the application, the Registrar registered RMPL as the copyright society.
PPL approached the Delhi High Court against this and the High Court directed the Government to reconsider PPL’s application and also rejected RMPL’s registration. The rejection was later stayed by a division bench as a pro tem measure in 2022 while also directing the Registrar to consider PPL’s application during the pendency of appeal.
With this registration, now there are two copyright societies for sound recordings. Why does this matter? A copyright society is the body that licenses works on behalf of owners and collects royalties. Whoever holds the registration decides who the music industry has to deal with and two societies for one type of work might result in confusion among the interested parties and the members.
It also cuts against how the Act is usually read. Most people assume only one society can be registered per class. That is close, though the statute is more precise as the proviso to Section 33(3) says the government shall not “ordinarily” register more than one society for the same class of works. The key word is ordinarily. It sets a default that the government can move away from in a fit case.
However, this begs the question of what, exactly, made this case extraordinary? What circumstances were sufficiently exceptional to justify departure from the one-copyright society norm contemplated by the Act? Interestingly, the DB in the above 2022 order noted that by granting the registration to RMPL in hot haste, the GOI created a muddle which got both the organizations into fray. So, was this registration granted consequent to this muddle created by the government itself and could this be avoided back in 2014 or 2018?
This is not the only set of litigation this registration may bring closure to. Readers may recall that since 2025 PPL has been in the midst of other set of litigations over its authority to charge royalties. Ambika Aggarwal has written a detailed post on these litigations and interested readers can take a look at it here.
Put differently, was the extraordinary circumstance the Government’s prolonged inaction, the practical need for collective licensing of PPL’s vast repertoire, or the fact that PPL had continued to dominate the market while operating outside the copyright society framework? If the latter, the case presents a paradox: the very market power built outside the statutory regime may have later justified departure from its one-society norm.
With this registration, a few questions are now open. Does RMPL’s registration survive alongside PPL’s, or does one have to go? Will the new registration be challenged under the proviso? And for businesses that need licences, two societies in one class bring back the very problem the proviso was meant to prevent. That means overlapping tariffs and confusion over who controls which repertoire.
Pasting a comment on behalf of Mr. Achille Forler
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A well-written effort. Let me add the market perspective.
After the boards of both IPRS and PPL formally wrote to the Government surrendering their status as copyright societies in May 2014, India was left without a registered music copyright society. The vacuum cut off Indian rights-holders without a global footprint from international royalty flows and placed the Government of India in an embarrassing position at WIPO.
When smaller labels affected by the 2014 surrender formed RMPL, and a further collecting agency subsequently entered the field, the market fragmented from two licensed bodies to five claimants: IPRS, RMPL, PPL, Novex and ISRA. The resulting litigation, rather than settling the relationship between Sections 30 and 33 of the Copyright Act 1957, compounded the uncertainty. The confusion spilled from the market into the courts.
Through the efforts of the author members, led by Mr Javed Akhtar, and with the Government’s support, IPRS was regularised in India and readmitted to the global network of authors societies by the end of 2018. A neighbouring-rights society remained necessary in parallel: the performers had, by then, formed their own body (ISRA, now ISAMRA) and required a society to collect their performance royalties, as PPL does in the United Kingdom.
RMPL and Novex have not established themselves at scale: building a functioning collecting society demands vast repertoire, substantial capital, and global expertise. Fragmenting the repertoire is like fragmenting the roads you can use after you paid the road tax. PPL, having undertaken a thorough reform, is now arguably best-in-class in its category.
Throughout this episode, the Government cannot be faulted; at every step, it did what it had to do, and went the extra mile when required. This episode also shows that multiplying societies in a developing market is inefficient. Judging by the success of IPRS, the better direction, in my view, is a return to a single society in this class of works as well.
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