The Copyright Act 1957 asks almost nothing of a creator at the moment of creation. There is no application to file, no fee to pay, no certificate to obtain and no mark to affix before the right exists. A novel, a photograph, a song, a building plan and a computer programme are protected from the moment they are made, provided they are original, and they stay protected for periods measured in decades. Yet the disputes that reach Indian courts under this statute are rarely about whether a right exists. They are about who holds it, and on that question the Act gives an answer that surprises the party who paid for the work. The author is the first owner. The client who commissioned the work, funded it and built a business around it owns nothing at all unless an exception applies or a signed assignment moves the right across. That single default, sitting in Section 17, does more practical work than the celebrated rights in Section 14, and it is the organising fact of this article.

The article follows the structure of the Act itself. It begins with the statute and its place in the legal system, then takes the subject matter, asking what kinds of work attract protection and what a work must be before the law will protect it. It then examines the ownership provisions in full, because they decide the commonest and most expensive error in Indian copyright practice, which is the assumption that payment buys the right. The terms of protection come next, stated work type by work type, because the single figure quoted in most summaries is correct for only some works. Assignment and licensing follow, including the default rules that fill the gaps when a deed is silent about duration or territory. The exceptions are treated carefully, because the Indian provision is an enumerated list of permitted purposes rather than an open doctrine of fairness, and that difference misleads users trained on material from other jurisdictions. The article closes with remedies, with the collective licensing machinery of copyright societies, and with the administrative and adjudicatory map after the Copyright Board and the Appellate Board were abolished.

Act 14 of 1957 and the architecture of the statute

The statute is the Copyright Act, 1957, Act 14 of 1957. It received the assent of the President on 4 June 1957 and came into force on 21 January 1958. It replaced the Indian Copyright Act of 1914, which had applied the imperial copyright legislation of the United Kingdom to British India with modifications, and it was the first copyright code Parliament enacted for the independent republic. Its long title describes it as an Act to amend and consolidate the law relating to copyright, and consolidation is the right word for its method: it gathers the subject matter, the rights, the ownership rules, the terms, the machinery for transferring rights, the exceptions, the remedies and the collective administration of rights into a single code of seventeen chapters.

The chapters matter because they show where the answers live. Chapter III states in which works copyright subsists and what the right consists of. Chapter IV deals with ownership, assignment and licences. Chapter V fixes the term for each class of work. Chapter VI provides for licences for works withheld from the public and related compulsory mechanisms. Chapter VIII and Chapter IX create the register and the office of the Registrar of Copyrights. Chapter XI defines infringement and its exceptions. Chapter XII and Chapter XIII provide the civil and criminal consequences. A reader who knows this map can locate almost any proposition in the Act within a minute, and the examinable propositions cluster exactly where the map suggests: Sections 13, 14, 17, 19, 22 and 52 carry the great majority of the questions the statute is asked.

Section 16 gives the code its exclusivity. It provides that no person is entitled to copyright or any similar right in any work, published or unpublished, otherwise than under and in accordance with the Act or any other law in force. Copyright in India is therefore a wholly statutory right. There is no parallel common law copyright waiting behind the statute for a work that fails the Act’s conditions, and a claimant whose work falls outside Section 13 has no fallback. The converse is equally important: because the right is statutory and automatic, it does not depend on the pleasure of any office or on the completion of any formality, a point the registration machinery examined further on confirms rather than contradicts.

The legislative competence for the code sits in Entry 49 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution, which assigns patents, inventions and designs, copyright, and trade marks and merchandise marks to Parliament. Copyright is therefore a wholly central subject: there are no state copyright statutes, no state registers and no regional variation in the term, the rights or the ownership rules, and a work protected in one state is protected on identical terms in every other, with the courts applying a single national text. The centralisation is not an administrative convenience but a design assumption of the Act itself, visible in its single Register of Copyrights, its single Registrar, and its connecting conditions, which treat India as one territory for publication, qualification and exhaustion purposes. A publisher’s Indian edition, a society’s Indian tariff and an owner’s Indian assignment all presuppose the one market the Entry creates, and the territorial default of Section 19, which presumes an unstated assignment extends within India, is simply the conveyancing expression of the same fact.

Parliament has amended the Act repeatedly, in 1983, 1984, 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2012, and each amendment answered a technology or a trade pressure: videocassette piracy in the nineteen eighties, computer programmes and satellite broadcasting in the nineteen nineties, and the digital network environment in 2012. The 2012 amendment, which among other things rewrote parts of the ownership settlement for authors whose works are used in films and sound recordings, is large enough to have its own article in this series, and this pillar treats it at headline level wherever it appears, returning to it in the ownership discussion because the provisos it added qualify Section 17 itself.

Chapter II builds the administration that the rest of the Act assumes. Section 9 requires a Copyright Office to be established for the purposes of the Act, under the immediate control of a Registrar of Copyrights, who acts under the superintendence and direction of the Central Government, and Section 10 provides for the Registrar and Deputy Registrars to be appointed by the Central Government. The Registrar is no mere clerk of the register: the Act gives the office the conduct of registration, the holding of enquiries in the registration process, the importation jurisdiction under Section 53, and the share in compulsory licensing that Chapter VI assigns, and Section 74 deems the Registrar to be a civil court for the purposes the section names when holding such enquiries. The remainder of the machinery described in this article, the Board’s former jurisdiction and the courts’ present one, hangs on this small chapter, and the departmental move described at the end of the article changed the Registrar’s reporting line without touching the office’s statutory powers.

From the Indian Copyright Act 1914 to the code of 1957

The statute Parliament replaced explains the shape of the one it enacted. Copyright in British India rested on the Indian Copyright Act of 1914, which applied the Copyright Act 1911 of the United Kingdom to India with a schedule of modifications. That arrangement imported a code written for another country’s publishing trade, construed by another country’s courts, and it left India without its own machinery for the questions its own statute had to answer, most visibly the licensing of works that owners withheld from the Indian market and the adaptation of the law to Indian conditions of authorship, language and price. The 1957 Act answered by building a complete domestic code: it created the Copyright Board as a standing tribunal for the licensing and royalty questions, it restated the subject matter and the terms in Indian provisions, and it provided the register, the Registrar and the compulsory licence machinery in sections that owed their structure to Indian administrative practice rather than to the imperial template.

The later amendments show the code being maintained rather than reconceived. The amendment of 1984 was an anti piracy measure: faced with the videocassette trade in films, Parliament raised the criminal stakes, and the mandatory minimum terms of imprisonment and minimum fines in Section 63 date from that phase of the Act’s life. The amendment of 1992 lengthened the terms of the production classes, bringing photographs, cinematograph films and sound recordings to the sixty year pattern that the author’s works already had. The amendment of 1994 introduced the performer’s right, added the commercial rental right that Section 14 carries for computer programmes, films and sound recordings, and recast the provisions on copyright societies. The amendment of 1999 lengthened the performer’s term from twenty five years to fifty. The amendment of 2012, the most contested of the series, addressed the digital environment and the position of authors in the film and music industries, and it is handled in its own article in this series. Through all of this the architecture of 1957 survived intact: subsistence in Section 13, rights in Section 14, ownership in Section 17, terms in Chapter V, transfer in Chapter IV, exceptions in Section 52. A code whose chapters have needed no rearrangement across six decades of amendment is a code whose original drafting allocated its questions well, and it is also a warning to readers of summaries: a proposition taken from an old commentary may be wrong about the detail while the section it cites is the same, because the amendments have worked inside the sections rather than by replacing them.

What copyright protects: the six classes of work

Section 13(1) states the subject matter in one sentence. Copyright subsists throughout India in three groups: original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works; cinematograph films; and sound recordings. The first group is held together by the word original. The second and third groups are not described as original in the section, because a film and a recording are protected as productions in their own right, as the organised result of investment and arrangement, even though the works inside them must separately qualify. Six classes of work therefore carry the right, and each has a definition in Section 2 that fixes its boundaries.

A literary work is defined inclusively. Section 2(o) provides that literary work includes computer programmes, tables and compilations including computer databases. The prose sense of literature is not required; a railway timetable, a headnote to a law report, a question paper and a database structure can all be literary works if they are original, and software is protected as a literary work rather than through any separate software code. A dramatic work, under Section 2(h), includes any piece for recitation, choreographic work or entertainment in dumb show, the scenic arrangement or acting form of which is fixed in writing or otherwise, but does not include a cinematograph film. A musical work, under Section 2(p), is a work consisting of music and includes any graphical notation of such work, but it does not include words or action intended to be sung, spoken or performed with the music. The consequence is that a song ordinarily contains at least two copyrights: the lyrics as a literary work and the tune as a musical work, held by two different people unless a contract or an employment rule moves them.

An artistic work, under Section 2(c), means a painting, a sculpture, a drawing including a diagram, map, chart or plan, an engraving or a photograph, whether or not any such work possesses artistic quality, and it extends to a work of architecture and to any other work of artistic craftsmanship. The statutory indifference to artistic quality matters in practice: an engineering drawing and a child’s sketch are tested for originality, not for merit. A cinematograph film, under Section 2(f), is any work of visual recording on any medium produced through a process from which a moving image may be produced by any means, and includes a sound recording accompanying the visual recording. A sound recording, under Section 2(xx), is a recording of sounds from which the sounds may be produced, regardless of the medium or the method by which the sounds are produced. The definitions are technology neutral by design, which is why a statute written before the cassette has been able to absorb the download and the stream without a change to its subject matter provisions.

The treatment of the computer programme as a literary work has consequences that deserve to be drawn out, because software is the class of work most often litigated under the Act in the technology economy. Copyright subsists in the programme as written: in the source code as text, in the object code as a reproduction of that text in machine readable form, and in the original structure, sequence and organisation in which the author has expressed the solution, because each is the expression in which the author’s skill and judgment reside. It does not subsist in the functionality of the programme, in the algorithm or mathematical method it implements, or in the idea of the task it performs, because those are ideas and methods, and the R.G. Anand boundary assigns them to everyone. A competitor may therefore lawfully write a different programme that does the same thing, and commits infringement only when the new programme reproduces the protected expression of the earlier one, in its code or in the original expressive structure that code embodies. The distinction decides the software cases, and it is the same distinction the Act applies to a plot, a formula and a recipe. Preparatory design material for a programme, the manuals that accompany it and the screen displays it generates are protected, if at all, as literary or artistic works in their own right, each tested on its own originality, which is why a software dispute is ordinarily pleaded as a bundle of claims in the code, the documentation and the interface artwork rather than as a single claim in the product.

Authorship follows the same pattern of definition. Under Section 2(d), the author of a literary or dramatic work is its writer, of a musical work the composer, of an artistic work other than a photograph the artist, of a photograph the person taking the photograph, of a cinematograph film or a sound recording the producer, and of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer generated, the person who causes the work to be created. The producer-centred rule for films and recordings is the hinge of the entertainment industry’s ownership structure: the company or person who takes the initiative and responsibility for making the film is its author for the purposes of the Act, while the director, the scriptwriter and the composer hold rights in their own contributions, a layering Section 13(4) preserves expressly.

Section 13 then imposes conditions and negatives that a summary often drops. Copyright does not subsist in a work unless the qualification conditions of Section 13(2) are met, which connect the work to India through the author’s citizenship or domicile for unpublished works, or through first publication in India or the author’s status at first publication for published works. Section 13(3) denies copyright in a cinematograph film if a substantial part of the film infringes the copyright in another work, and denies copyright in a sound recording made in infringement of the copyright in a literary, dramatic or musical work. Section 13(4) provides that the copyright in a cinematograph film or a sound recording is not to affect the separate copyright in any work in respect of which the film or recording is made. A successful film therefore contains a stack of rights: the producer’s film copyright, the scriptwriter’s literary copyright, the composer’s and lyricist’s rights, and the recording producer’s sound recording right, each separately owned, separately assignable and separately capable of infringement.

One qualification inside the subject matter is regularly missed in practice. Section 13(5) provides that, in the case of a work of architecture, copyright subsists only in the artistic character and design of the work and does not extend to processes or methods of construction. An architect therefore owns the design as expressed in the building and the drawings, and can restrain the copying of that design, but cannot use copyright to monopolise a method of building, a structural technique or a functional arrangement that any builder may adopt. The line is the idea and expression line drawn inside a single class of work, and it is why architectural disputes under the Act are about copied designs and reused drawings rather than about similar buildings arrived at independently.

How does Indian law protect a work created abroad?

Through Section 40 and the International Copyright Order made under it. Section 40 empowers the Central Government to extend the Act to works of foreign origin, and the Order applies the Act to works first published in, or made by citizens of, the countries it names, on terms that give foreign authors treatment of the kind the international conventions require.

India belongs to the Berne Convention, and the Order’s country list follows the convention membership. A novel first published in London by a British author is therefore protected in India without any registration or filing here, and an Indian court applies the Act to it as it applies to a work published in Delhi. The protection is not unlimited: the term given to a foreign work cannot exceed the term it enjoys in its own country where the Order so provides, and works from countries outside the named list receive nothing under this route.

The foreign work takes one further qualification with it, the rule of the shorter term. The provisos to Section 40 allow the Order to confine the protection of a foreign work in India so that it does not exceed the term the work enjoys in its country of origin, and the Order proceeds on that footing for the classes it covers. A work from a country that protects for the author’s life and fifty years is not to be stretched to the Indian sixty in an Indian court; the comparison of terms is built into the extension machinery, and it is the reason the term of a foreign work in India is a two country question although the term of an Indian work is a one country question.

Section 41 completes the connecting picture for a special class. Where a work is made, or first published, by or under the direction or control of an international organisation to which the section applies, copyright subsists in the work on the terms the section lays down, on the footing that such an organisation is the national of no member state and would otherwise fall outside both the domicile route and the publication route of Section 13(2). Section 29 then gives the work its term. The provision is little used in litigation but completes the code’s map: every work that reaches India is located by author, by place of publication, by treaty or by the section’s special rule, and none is left unlocated.

A work must also be fixed before it can be protected in any realistic sense, and the subsistence provisions assume it. The Act does not protect an improvised speech that was never recorded, an idea described over a telephone call, or a dance that was never written down or filmed, because there is no work in a durable form to which the right can attach and against which copying can be measured. The dramatic work definition makes the point explicit by requiring the scenic arrangement or acting form to be fixed in writing or otherwise, and the infringement provisions confirm it by asking what was reproduced. Creators who work improvisationally, in the kitchen, the rehearsal room and the comedy club, hold rights in their recorded and written material; the unrecorded performance itself is the territory of the performer’s right, which the Act grants in a separate chapter and for a shorter period, rather than of copyright in a work.

The connecting conditions: which works the Act takes up

Section 13(2) fixes the connection a work must have with India before the Act will protect it, and it does so separately for unpublished and published works. For a work that has not been published, the author must, at the date of the making of the work, be a citizen of India or be domiciled in India. For a published work, the work must be first published in India, or, where it is first published outside India, the author must at the date of publication be a citizen of India, or, if the author is dead at that date, must have been a citizen of India at the date of death. In the case of a work of architecture, the work must be located in India. Section 5 adds that a work published in India is treated as first published in India notwithstanding that it has been published simultaneously in another country, unless that country provides a shorter term of copyright for such a work, in which case the shorter connection governs. These conditions are the domestic side of the system whose international side is the International Copyright Order described above: between them, they mean that the Act protects the work of an Indian author wherever first published, the work of any author first published in India, and the work of foreign authors from listed countries, while the unpublished work of a foreign author neither domiciled in India nor connected to a listed country falls outside.

Publication is a defined event, and its definition in Section 3 matters wherever the term provisions turn on it. A work is published when copies of it are issued to the public or when it is communicated to the public, and Section 4 adds the negative rule that a work is not to be deemed published or performed in public if it is published or performed without the licence of the owner and in contravention of the Act, so that a pirate edition starts no clocks and earns its maker nothing. The issuing of copies of a work in a quantity sufficient to satisfy the reasonable requirements of the public, having regard to the nature of the work, is the measure the older case law used for the issue limb, and the communication limb has absorbed the digital release: a work posted for streaming or download is published on the day it is made available, and its term, where the class is a publication based one, runs from that year. An unpublished work is not an unprotected work. It is protected on the citizenship and domicile conditions, it is dealt with by the posthumous term in Section 24 when its author dies, and if its author dies, disappears or cannot be traced, Section 31A provides a compulsory licence route by which the work can be brought before the public on terms settled by the Commercial Court, which is the Act’s answer to the orphan work problem worked out long before that phrase became fashionable.

Originality: from sweat of the brow to skill and judgment

The word original in Section 13 has carried two different doctrines in Indian law, and knowing which one governs is the foundational question in every compilation and database dispute. The older doctrine, inherited from English authority, rewarded the sweat of the brow: a work was original if its maker had expended labour, skill and capital in producing it, even if the result was a compilation of unoriginal material arranged in the obvious way. On that doctrine, a telephone directory, a list of examination results or a timetable compiled with effort attracted copyright because the effort was the maker’s own and the material had not been copied from a predecessor.

The Supreme Court displaced that doctrine in Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, decided in 2008. The case concerned copy-edited law reports: the publisher edited judgments of the Supreme Court, added headnotes, paragraph numbers and cross references, and claimed copyright in the edited text against a rival who had copied the edited version. The Court held that the product of the skill and judgment of the editor, exercised with a minimal or modicum of creativity, could attract copyright, but that the raw text of a judgment, being material in the public domain, could not be monopolised by the labour of copying it. The test the Court adopted asks two things of a work: that it originate with the author rather than be copied, and that its making involve the exercise of skill and judgment which is not so trivial or mechanical that it lacks any creative element. Inputs of labour and capital alone, without that element of judgment, do not suffice.

The Modak standard explains a wide range of results. A database is protected in India as a literary work by the express words of Section 2(o), but the protection attaches to the original selection, coordination or arrangement of its contents, and the effort of merely collecting every item in a field, in the order the field dictates, earns nothing. A headnote that states the ratio of a case in the writer’s own compressed language is protected; a verbatim rearrangement of the judgment’s own sentences is protected weakly or not at all. A translation is protected as an original work of the translator even though every idea in it belongs to another book. And an examination paper is protected although its questions state facts and propositions that belong to everyone, because the choosing and framing of the questions is the examinable skill the test rewards.

Originality also has a boundary that the same case law draws on the content side. Copyright protects expression and not ideas. The Supreme Court stated the principle in R.G. Anand v. Delux Films, in 1978, in a dispute about a film said to copy a play: there can be no copyright in an idea, a subject matter, a theme, a plot or historical or legendary facts, and infringement is a matter of the expression, the form, the manner and the arrangement in which the idea is worked out. Two authors who take the same historical episode, the same moral or the same plot skeleton and express each in their own language infringe nothing. The principle is what keeps copyright from becoming a monopoly over knowledge: facts, news, discoveries and theories are free for everyone to restate, and the right bites only when the restatement follows the original closely enough in its expression that a reader or viewer senses the copying.

Short material tests the boundary from both sides. A headline, a slogan, a name or a title standing alone will seldom carry the quantum of original expression the Act requires, and Indian courts have not treated titles of works as copyright subject matter in themselves; they are protected, if at all, through the law of trade marks and passing off, which is a different enquiry. At the other end of the scale, taking a small part of a large work can still infringe if the part taken is qualitatively the heart of the work, because the Act protects the work against reproduction of the work or a substantial part of it, and substantiality is measured by quality as much as by page count. Both propositions follow from the same idea: the right protects the author’s expressive choices, wherever they are concentrated, and nothing else.

Protection without paperwork: the register and its limits

Because subsistence is automatic, the register maintained under Chapter IX is an evidentiary device, not a mint. Sections 44 and 45 provide for a Register of Copyrights, in which the names and addresses of owners, authors and publishers and other prescribed particulars may be entered on the application of the author, the publisher of, or the owner of the copyright in a work. Section 48 states the register’s legal effect with care: the Register of Copyrights is prima facie evidence of the particulars entered in it, and documents purporting to be copies of entries, or extracts from the register, purporting to be certified by the Registrar of Copyrights and sealed with the seal of the Copyright Office, are admissible in evidence in all courts without further proof or production of the original. Section 49 provides for the correction of names, addresses and particulars, and Section 50 for rectification of the register, a power that the 2021 tribunal reforms moved from the abolished Appellate Board to the High Court.

Three consequences follow for practice, and each contradicts a statement that circulates widely. Registration is not a condition of protection: an unregistered novel is as fully protected on the day it is finished as a registered one, and a plaintiff in an infringement suit does not lose for want of a certificate. Registration is not a condition of suing: no provision of Chapter XII makes a certificate a precondition of a plaint, and courts entertain suits on unregistered works as a matter of routine. And registration is not proof that concludes the matter: because the entry is prima facie evidence only, a defendant may displace it by showing that the claimant did not write the work, wrote it later than claimed, or took it from the defendant, which is why contested authorship cases are fought on drafts, correspondence and witnesses rather than on certificates.

The register also follows the right when it moves. A transfer of copyright by assignment is an event the register can record, and the parties to a transfer application may have the particulars of the new ownership entered so that the public record keeps pace with the deeds. The record is worth maintaining for the same evidentiary reason as the original entry, with one addition: because Section 48 makes the entry prima facie evidence, a stale register that still names a long departed owner invites a defendant to dispute the claimant’s title and forces the true owner to prove the chain by documents, which the entry, if kept accurate, would have spared. Estates and catalogue purchasers, who deal in rights created decades earlier, are the usual casualties of an untended register, and the discipline of recording a transfer is the conveyancing equivalent of the assignment clause: a small formality whose absence is invisible until it is expensive.

The register earns its keep in the ordinary run of disputes rather than in the dramatic ones. Where a work is old, the author dead, and the chain of title disputed between a publisher and an estate, an entry made near the date of creation is often the only dated public record of who claimed what, and it fixes the particulars against later revision. Where a infringer says the claimant’s work is itself a copy, the sequence of entries helps a court test the story. Practitioners exchange the applications, the entries and the certified extracts in ordinary office file formats, and a tool such as an office file viewer for Excel, DOCX and PPTX documents is the sort of utility used to read those papers on a machine that does not carry the suite in which they were drafted. None of this changes the legal effect: the register records claims to a right that exists independently of the recording, and the Copyright Office, through the Registrar, administers the recording rather than granting the right.

The procedure for entering a work in the register is set by the Copyright Rules, which prescribe the application form, the particulars to be supplied for each class of work and the fee payable for each application, a separate application being required for each work. On receipt, the Registrar’s office allots a diary number to the application, and the rules build in a waiting period of thirty days for objections to be received before the entry is made, so that a person who disputes the claim has a window in which to be heard. The register itself, and the indexes maintained with it, are open to inspection, and certified copies of entries and extracts may be obtained on payment of the prescribed fee, which is the route by which the prima facie evidence Section 48 creates is put before a court. Errors are handled inside the same machinery: the Registrar may correct names, addresses and particulars under Section 49, and a person aggrieved by an entry made, or wrongly omitted, applies for rectification under Section 50 to the High Court, whose order the Registrar then gives effect to.

Nor does anything else have to be done to keep the right alive across its long term. There is no renewal of copyright, no periodic fee, no maintenance filing and no forfeiture for non-use of the kind that exists in the trade mark system. A work protected on the day it was made stays protected until the statutory term for its class expires, whether its owner exploits it daily or forgets it entirely. The practical risks to an owner are not administrative lapses but evidential ones: losing the ability to prove authorship and date decades later, which is the gap the register and the habit of keeping dated drafts exist to fill.

The rights themselves, stated work by work

Section 14 defines what copyright means, and it does so separately for each class of work, because the bundle of acts that can be controlled differs with the nature of the thing protected. Presenting the rights as one uniform list is the commonest structural error in summaries of the Act. The definition is also exhaustive in form: copyright means the exclusive right to do or authorise the doing of the acts the section specifies in respect of the work or a substantial part of it, and an act outside the list is not controlled by copyright however much the owner dislikes it.

For a literary, dramatic or musical work, other than a computer programme, Section 14(a) confers the rights to reproduce the work in any material form, including storing it in any medium by electronic means; to issue copies of the work to the public, not being copies already in circulation; to perform the work in public or communicate it to the public; to make any cinematograph film or sound recording in respect of the work; to make any translation of the work; and to make any adaptation of the work, with the right extending to each of those acts in relation to a translation or adaptation as well. Reproduction in material form is the core, and the storage clause makes clear that a copy held in a memory, a server or a drive is a reproduction although nothing is printed. Communication to the public, defined in Section 2(ff), means making the work available for being seen or heard or otherwise enjoyed by the public directly or by any means of display or diffusion, and it includes making a work available in a manner that lets members of the public access it from a place and at a time individually chosen by them, which is the statutory language that captures on-demand streaming and downloading.

For a computer programme, Section 14(b) confers the same bundle and one right more: to sell or give on commercial rental, or offer for sale or commercial rental, any copy of the programme, regardless of whether such copy has been sold or given on commercial rental on earlier occasions. The rental right is the software industry’s answer to the rental shop problem, and its closing words deliberately displace the exhaustion principle for hired copies. For an artistic work, Section 14(c) confers the rights to reproduce the work in any material form, including the depiction in three dimensions of a two dimensional work and the depiction in two dimensions of a three dimensional work; to communicate the work to the public; to issue copies; to include the work in any cinematograph film; and to make any adaptation. The dimensional language is what connects a drawing to the object built from it and a building to the photograph of it.

For a cinematograph film, Section 14(d) confers the rights to make a copy of the film, including a photograph of any image forming part of it and including storing the film in any medium by any means; to sell or give on commercial rental any copy of the film, regardless of earlier sale or rental; and to communicate the film to the public. For a sound recording, Section 14(e) confers the rights to make any other sound recording embodying it; to sell or give on commercial rental any copy, again regardless of earlier circulation; and to communicate the sound recording to the public. The pattern across the classes is consistent: the rights track the ways in which each kind of work is commercially exploited and copied, and Parliament has added a limb whenever a new mode of exploitation, from the photocopier to the rental library to the stream, has made an omission worth closing.

One word in the issue of copies right carries a doctrine. The right is to issue copies not being copies already in circulation, and an Explanation to Section 14 provides that a copy which has been sold once is deemed to be a copy already in circulation. The first sale of a genuine copy therefore exhausts the distribution right in that copy: the buyer of a book may lend it, give it away or resell it, and the copyright owner cannot use the issue right to control the second hand market in genuine copies. The exhaustion is in the copy, not in the work; the buyer acquires no right to print further copies, to upload the text, or to perform it, and a copy imported in breach of the importation provisions is not rescued by having been sold somewhere in the world, because the importation limb of infringement operates on copies whose making in India would have infringed.

Can an authorised adaptation earn a copyright of its own?

Yes, where the adaptation is itself original. An authorised translation, arrangement or dramatisation involves its maker’s own skill and judgment, and the resulting work attracts its own copyright in the new material, which the adapter owns unless a contract says otherwise.

The new copyright is layered over the old: it does not free the adapter from the underlying owner’s right, it does not extend the underlying term, and an unauthorised adaptation acquires nothing, because a work made in infringement of another’s copyright cannot be asserted against the owner of the work it takes from.

Adaptation itself is defined, and the definition shows the section’s exactitude. Under Section 2(a), an adaptation means, in relation to a dramatic work, the conversion of the work into a non dramatic work; in relation to a literary or artistic work, its conversion into a dramatic work by way of performance in public or otherwise; in relation to a literary or dramatic work, any abridgement, or any version in which the story or action is conveyed wholly or mainly by pictures in a form suitable for reproduction in a book or periodical; in relation to a musical work, any arrangement or transcription; and in relation to any work, any use of the work involving its rearrangement or alteration. The comic book version of a novel, the film of a play, the orchestral arrangement of a tune and the abridged school edition are all adaptations in this sense, and the right to make them is the owner’s, which is why the adaptation right is the point at which the economics of a successful work are decided: the original market is seldom the largest market, and the sequels, versions and formats that follow a success are all reached through this limb of Section 14 or not at all.

The independent term of an adaptation carries a commercial consequence that users of old works meet often. A translation may remain in copyright for decades after the original work has entered the public domain, and the reader who wants that translation must deal with the translator’s successors, although anyone is free to translate the original afresh. The same arithmetic governs an arrangement of music whose composer died centuries ago and an edited edition of a text written in another era: the new layer of authorship is protected for its own author’s life and sixty years, and the expiry of the underlying work is the beginning of a permissions enquiry about the layers above it, not the end of the enquiry altogether. Publishers of classics live inside this arithmetic, pricing editions by the layers they own and commissioning new translations precisely because the old ones are not yet free.

Design is where the copyright map overlaps another statute, and Section 15 draws the boundary. Section 15(1) provides that copyright does not subsist in any design which is registered under the Designs Act, 2000. Section 15(2) provides that copyright in any design which is capable of being registered under that Act, but which has not been registered, ceases as soon as any article to which the design has been applied has been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process by the owner of the copyright or, with the owner’s licence, by any other person. The provision is a deliberate anti-overlap device: an artistic work such as a fabric pattern, a cartoon character or a furniture shape gets full copyright while it is exploited as art, but once its maker chooses to mass produce articles from it, the law pushes the maker toward the shorter, registration based protection of the Designs Act and ends the copyright after the fiftieth industrial reproduction. The boundary, and the litigation it generates over garments, furniture and jewellery, is developed in the article on the Designs Act 2000 and industrial design.

Who owns it first: Section 17 and the default that catches buyers

Section 17 opens with the rule and then qualifies it. In the absence of the cases the section lists, the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in it. Everything else in the section is an exception, and the exceptions are narrower than the commercial world assumes. Each is expressed to operate in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, so each is a default that a contract can displace, and each is confined to the situation it names.

The first exception, in clause (a), concerns works made for the press. Where a literary, dramatic or artistic work is made by the author in the course of employment by the proprietor of a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical under a contract of service or apprenticeship, and is made for the purpose of publication in that periodical, the proprietor is the first owner of the copyright in the work in so far as the copyright relates to the publication of the work in any newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, or to the reproduction of the work for the purpose of its being so published. In all other respects the author is the first owner. The split is precise: the newspaper owns what it needs to print and reprint the piece in periodical form, and the staff columnist owns the book rights, the film rights and every other use of the same words, unless the contract takes them. The Kerala High Court applied this architecture in V.T. Thomas v. Malayala Manorama, the dispute over the cartoon character created by the cartoonist known as Toms while employed by the newspaper: the cartoons drawn in the course of that employment belonged, for the newspaper’s purposes, to the proprietor, a result that turned entirely on the employment relationship the parties had chosen.

The second exception, in clause (b), is the commissioning exception, and its list is closed. Where a photograph is taken, or a painting or portrait drawn, or an engraving or a cinematograph film made, at the instance of any person for valuable consideration, that person, the one who gave the instance and paid, is the first owner. A wedding photographer therefore does not own the copyright in the wedding photographs; the client who commissioned them for consideration does, subject always to an agreement to the contrary, and a film producer who commissions a cinematograph film owns the film copyright as the person at whose instance it was made, a rule that sits consistently beside the definition that makes the producer the film’s author. Outside the list, commissioning transfers nothing. A logo, a website, a training manual, a jingle written to order, a software build and a book commissioned from a ghostwriter are not in clause (b), and the person who commissioned and paid for each of them owns the physical or digital deliverable and an implied permission to use it for the purpose commissioned, but not the copyright.

The third exception, in clause (c), is the employment rule in its general form. Where a work is made in the course of employment under a contract of service or apprenticeship, and clauses (a) and (b) do not apply, the employer is the first owner. The statutory phrase is contract of service, and it excludes the contract for services under which an independent contractor works. The distinction between the two contracts is drawn by the general law of employment, through considerations of control, integration into the organisation and the economic reality of the relationship, and it is the distinction on which most ownership litigation turns: parties who described their arrangement as consultancy, freelancing or retainer have, by that choice, usually also chosen the ownership result, whether or not they appreciated it. An employee who writes code, reports, designs or manuals within the job gives the employer the copyright by operation of the section. An external agency that produces the identical deliverables keeps it.

Two refinements of the employment rule matter in practice. The first is that the work must be made in the course of the employment: an employee’s private work, made at home, outside the duties of the job and without the employer’s materials, is not captured by clause (c) merely because its maker has a job, and the boundary is litigated where an employee builds a product in the evenings that the employer’s business later claims. The second is that the contract of service is identified by the substance of the relationship and not by its label. The classic exposition is the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Dharangadhara Chemical Works v. State of Saurashtra, which treated the employer’s right to control the manner of the work, and not only its result, as the primary test, supplemented in the later cases by considerations of integration into the organisation, payment pattern, exclusivity and economic reality. A start up that engages its core developer on a document headed consultancy agreement, seats the developer in its office, pays a monthly sum, directs the work daily and forbids outside engagements has, in substance, very likely employed the developer, and clause (c) may give it the copyright it failed to take by assignment; the reverse case, the organisation that calls a genuine outside supplier an employee in its paperwork, gains nothing from the label. The section rewards the truth of the arrangement, which is a further reason the drafting stage is where ownership is honestly settled.

The remaining exceptions are institutional. Under clause (cc), where a person delivers an address or speech in public, that person is the author and first owner although the person or organiser who arranged the occasion provided the platform. Under clause (d), in the case of a Government work, the Government is the first owner. Under clause (dd), a work made or first published by or under the direction or control of a public undertaking belongs first to that undertaking. Under clause (e), works of certain international organisations belong first to the organisation. Joint authorship stands on a different footing: a work of joint authorship, defined in Section 2(z) as a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of one author is not distinct from the contribution of the other author or authors, is owned by the collaborators together, and the term and the dealings in the right are computed on that footing, a position the decision table below records alongside the other defaults.

The provisos to Section 17 that Parliament added in 2012, protecting authors of literary and musical works incorporated in cinematograph films against assignments that would strip them of royalty rights in uses beyond the film itself, qualify the operation of the section in the entertainment industry and are the subject matter of the article on the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012, which owns them. What belongs here is the older and wider point about moral rights, which condition every ownership discussion. Section 57 confers on the author, independently of the author’s copyright and even after its assignment, the right to claim authorship of the work and the right to restrain or claim damages for any distortion, mutilation, modification or other act in relation to the work if it would be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation. Assignment moves the economic rights; it does not move the author’s standing to object to a mutilation of the work, and a purchaser who plans to edit, recolour, truncate or recontextualise a work needs to reckon with Section 57 alongside the deed.

The decision table states the six defaults a business or a creator needs before signing anything.

Situation	Default owner	Provision	Contractual step that changes the result
A work made by an employee in the course of employment under a contract of service	The employer	Section 17(c)	A written agreement reserving the copyright, or specified rights, to the employee
A work made by an independent contractor or freelancer	The freelancer as author	Section 17, opening rule	A written assignment of copyright signed by the freelancer in favour of the client
A commissioned photograph, portrait, painting, engraving or cinematograph film made for valuable consideration	The person who commissioned it	Section 17(b)	An agreement recording that the maker retains the copyright and licenses the use
A work made for publication in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical by its employee	The proprietor, for publication and reproduction for that purpose; the author otherwise	Section 17(a)	A contract reallocating the reserved uses, such as book and film rights, between proprietor and author
A work that does not exist yet, to be created under a present bargain	The author, until an assignment of the future copyright takes effect when the work comes into existence	Sections 17 and 18	A present assignment in writing of the copyright in the future work, specifying rights, duration and territory
A work created jointly by two or more authors with indistinct contributions	The joint authors together	Section 2(z) read with Section 17	An agreement fixing shares, authority to license, and the course to be followed on disagreement

Read the table as a set of warnings. Every row is a default, every default can be displaced by a signature, and every dispute in the case law began with a party who assumed the row said the opposite of what it says. The commonest error is in the second row: a business pays a freelancer’s invoice in full, receives the files, and believes the transaction complete, when in law it has bought the files and a licence to use them for the purpose in hand, and nothing else. The business cannot then stop the freelancer from licensing the same logo, code or text to a competitor, cannot assign the right to a purchaser of the business as an asset, and cannot sue a copier in its own name, because the right never moved. The remedy is a single signed clause of assignment, and the series thesis of this article is exactly that disproportion: a default rule allocates the right, and one sentence of drafting moves it, so the provision is at once simple and constantly litigated.

How long the right lasts: the terms in Section 22 and its companion provisions

Chapter V states a term for every class of work, and the pattern is more uniform than the summaries suggest. For the author’s own works, the Act gives sixty years counted from a defined event, and for every other class it also gives sixty years. What changes from class to class is the event from which the sixty years run, and getting that event wrong is the usual source of error.

Section 22 governs literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works other than photographs, published within the lifetime of the author. The copyright subsists during the lifetime of the author and until sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the author dies. Two features of the formula deserve attention. The term is counted in whole calendar years beginning on the January after the death, so the exact date of death within its year does not shorten or lengthen the protection. And the measuring life is the author’s, so the fortunes of publishers, assignees and estates are irrelevant to the calculation. For a work of joint authorship, the Explanation to Section 22 construes the reference to the author as a reference to the author who dies last, so a jointly written work is protected until sixty years from the January following the death of the survivor of its authors.

Section 23 deals with anonymous and pseudonymous works. Where the author’s identity is not disclosed, the term is sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the work is first published. If the author’s identity is disclosed before the term so computed expires, the work moves onto the Section 22 footing and is measured by the author’s life. Section 24 deals with posthumous works, meaning literary, dramatic or musical works, or engravings, in which copyright subsisted at the author’s death but which, or any adaptation of which, had not been published before that death: the term is sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the work is first published, or in which an adaptation is first published, whichever is earlier. The unpublished manuscripts of a dead author are therefore not protected forever in a drawer; publication, however late, starts the only clock the section gives.

For the classes where a life cannot be the measure, the Act counts from publication. Section 25 gives photographs, which the Act places inside the artistic class but with a publication based term, sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the photograph is published. Section 26 gives cinematograph films sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year of publication. Section 27 gives sound recordings the same sixty years from the calendar year next following publication. Section 28 gives Government works sixty years from first publication, Section 28A gives the works of public undertakings the same period, and Section 29 gives the works of international organisations to which the chapter applies the same sixty year term from publication.

The calendar year mechanic repays a worked example, because its two consequences are not intuitive. An author who dies in March 1980 leaves a novel whose copyright runs until sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following 1980, that is, from 1 January 1981, and so until 31 December 2040, although the death was in the first quarter of its year; an author who dies in December of the same year produces the identical expiry date, the nine months between the deaths having no effect on the term at all. A cinematograph film published in 1975 is protected until 31 December 2035 whoever made it and however long any of them lived, and a sound recording published in the same year expires on the same day, although the composer of the music recorded on it, dying in 2010, leaves a musical copyright that runs until the end of 2070 and will control the use of that music in any new recording for thirty five years after the old recording has fallen into the public domain. The layers of a single album can therefore enter the public domain a generation apart, and a reissue programme that clears only the recording layer has cleared the first of them.

The uniformity is deliberate and has consequences a reader should hold onto. Because every class runs for sixty years, the examinable question is never the number, which is settled, but the starting event and its year. Because the term is statutory and fixed, it cannot be extended by contract, renewed by registration, or revived after expiry: when the sixtieth year closes, the work enters the public domain, and anyone may reproduce, adapt and sell it, subject only to rights in later material layered on top of it, such as a modern translation, an edited text or a recording of a public domain composition, each of which carries its own term measured from its own event. Because the measuring events are publication and death, both of which are matters of record, the expiry date of most works can be computed exactly by anyone who can establish two dates, and the recurring practical disputes concern proof of those dates rather than the arithmetic.

The sixty year uniformity also invites a comparison that students are asked about and summaries garble. The Berne Convention’s minimum term for the author’s works is the author’s life and fifty years, and many jurisdictions sit at that floor or at seventy. India chose sixty in 1957 and has kept it, so the Indian term is longer than the convention floor and shorter than the longest national terms, and because of the rule of the shorter term in the extension machinery, a foreign work protected for seventy years at home may still end in India when its home term ends. The production classes show the same pattern in reverse: a cinematograph film in India is measured from its own publication for sixty years, not from the death of its director or any other participant, which makes the Indian film term computable on the day of release and indifferent to the longevity of everyone who made it, a deliberate simplicity that life based systems cannot offer.

Moving the right: assignment and licensing

Copyright is property, and Chapter IV provides the conveyancing. Section 18 permits the owner of copyright in an existing work, or the prospective owner of copyright in a future work, to assign the copyright, wholly or partially, either generally or subject to limitations, and either for the whole term of the copyright or for any part of it. An assignment of the copyright in a future work takes effect only when the work comes into existence, which is the provision that makes commissioning contracts workable when they are drafted as assignments rather than as bare promises. On an assignment, the assignee is treated as the owner of the copyright for the rights assigned, and the assignor remains the owner of the rights not assigned, so a single work can be held in slices: the print publisher owns the book rights for a term of years, the producer owns the film right, and the author keeps everything else.

Section 19 prescribes the mode, and its requirements are conditions of validity rather than courtesies. An assignment has no effect unless it is in an agreement in writing signed by the assignor or by the assignor’s duly authorised agent. The agreement must identify the work and must specify the rights assigned and the duration and territorial extent of the assignment, and it must specify the amount of royalty or other consideration payable for the rights assigned. The section then supplies three defaults for deeds that are silent, and the defaults are the provisions by which careless drafting is judged. If the assignee does not exercise the rights assigned within one year from the date of assignment, the assignment in respect of those rights is deemed to have lapsed, unless the agreement otherwise specifies. If the period of assignment is not stated, it is deemed to be five years from the date of assignment. If the territorial extent of the assignment is not stated, it is presumed to extend within India. A deed that signs away “all rights forever throughout the universe” in one line and says nothing more is safe on two of these defaults and exposed on the third; a deed that says nothing at all about duration delivers five years where the parties spoke of a lifetime. A party drafting or signing such a deed needs advice on its own facts, and the defaults described here explain the cost of silence rather than substitute for that advice.

Section 19A routes disputes about assignments to the Commercial Court, which may revoke an assignment shown to work undue hardship on the assignor and may settle the terms on which an assignment that has lapsed for non exercise is to be dealt with. Section 20 governs transmission by operation of law: where, under a bequest, a person is entitled to the manuscript of a work, or to any interest in the copyright, the bequest is construed, unless a contrary intention appears in the will, as including the copyright in so far as the testator owned it when the will was made. The rule produces the recurring estate puzzle of the letters and the diary: the paper belongs to one person as a chattel, and the copyright in the writing travels with the manuscript under this construction unless the will separates them, so the recipient of the bundle may also hold the right to publish it, while the owner of a bought manuscript of a living author’s work holds the paper and no right in the text at all.

Assignments also end, and the ending is part of the conveyancing. Where copyright is assigned for a part of the term, the assignee is owner of the assigned rights for that period and the rights revert to the assignor when the period closes or the assignment otherwise determines, which is the mechanism that returns a book to its author at the end of a ten year publishing assignment and lets it be placed again. Where the assignment is of some rights only, the unassigned residue never leaves the assignor, and the assignee of the residue, if the author later assigns it, takes a different slice of the same work. The practical consequence is that title to a mature work is often a stratigraphy: a film right assigned in one decade and spent, a print right assigned in another and running, a digital right that no early deed mentioned because the use did not exist, each held by a different person for a different period, and the work of the lawyer asked who owns a work is to read the stratigraphy deed by deed against the defaults of Section 19. A deed that fails the section’s requirements, unsigned, oral or unidentifiable as to its work, transfers nothing at all, and a party who performed in reliance on it is remitted to contract and estoppel arguments outside the Act, which is the hardest of the section’s lessons and the one its words state plainly.

Licences are the lesser instrument and the commoner one. Section 30 permits the owner of copyright in an existing work, or the prospective owner in a future work, to grant any interest in the right by a licence in writing signed by the owner or the owner’s duly authorised agent, and Section 30A applies the Section 19 provisions on specification and default to licences with the necessary adaptations. The difference between the two instruments is the difference between selling a house and letting it: an assignment transfers the ownership of the rights assigned, and the assignee can sue infringers, assign onward and deal with the right as property, while a licence grants permission and leaves the title with the licensor. The Act treats an exclusive licensee as within the meaning of owner of copyright for the remedial provisions, so an exclusive licensee is not left remediless, but a non exclusive licensee holds a permission, not an asset, and parties who use the words interchangeably discover the distinction in litigation. Licences of future works, like assignments, take effect when the work comes into existence.

Compulsory licences: the Act’s answer to the work withheld from the public

Chapter VI is the code’s safety valve, and its existence shapes negotiations far beyond the small number of licences granted under it. Section 31 addresses the work that is withheld from the public. Where, in the case of a work published or performed in public, a complaint is made to the Commercial Court that the owner of copyright has refused to republish or allow the republication of the work, or has refused to allow the performance in public of the work, and that by reason of such refusal the work is withheld from the public, the Court may, after giving the owner a reasonable opportunity of being heard, if it is satisfied that the grounds for the refusal are not reasonable, direct the Registrar of Copyrights to grant the complainant a licence to republish the work or perform it in public, on payment of compensation to the owner on terms the Court settles. The scheme extends to communication by broadcast. The provision is not a general power to override pricing or taste: the complainant must show a refusal, a withholding from the public as its consequence, and grounds for the refusal that are not reasonable, and the licence that follows is paid for at a rate the Court fixes, so the owner’s property is converted into a royalty rather than confiscated.

Section 31A supplies the parallel route for works whose owners cannot act at all: the unpublished work, and the published work, of an author who is dead, unknown or untraceable. Any person may apply to the Commercial Court for a licence to publish such a work or a translation of it, after advertising the proposal in the prescribed manner and satisfying the Court that the author is dead or unknown or cannot be traced, or that the owner cannot be found, and the Court may direct the Registrar to grant the licence on terms, including the royalty to be held for the owner if the owner appears. Section 32 opens a narrower and older channel for translations: after the expiry of stated periods from first publication, a person may obtain a licence to produce and publish a translation of a literary or dramatic work in a language in general use in India, on the conditions the section lays down about the translation being unavailable, the owner having been sought, and royalty being paid, a provision rooted in the Berne system’s concern that works enter the languages of countries where translations are scarce. Section 32A does the analogous work for reproduction: where copies of an Indian work, or of a translation of it, are not made available in India or have not been put on sale at a price reasonably related to the price charged for comparable works, a licence to reproduce and publish the work for systematic instructional activities may be granted on the section’s conditions. Each of these provisions has its own thresholds, waiting periods and royalty mechanics, and each runs to the Commercial Court, which inherited the jurisdiction from the Copyright Board through the Appellate Board on the path the forum section below describes. The rate fixing power within these provisions has produced the jurisdiction’s best known determination. In the proceedings between the radio industry and the owners of sound recordings and musical works, concluded by the Copyright Board in 2010 in Entertainment Network (India) Ltd. v. Super Cassette Industries Ltd. and the connected applications, the Board fixed the royalty payable by FM radio stations for the broadcast of recorded music at two per cent of the net advertisement earnings of each station, after an enquiry into the economics of the stations, the value of the repertoire and the rates prevailing elsewhere. The determination mattered less for its figure than for its method: it showed the licensing jurisdiction working as the chapter intends, converting a refusal or an unaffordable demand into a supervised price, and it framed the questions the Commercial Court, which holds the jurisdiction after the tribunal reforms, will be asked in the disputes that follow the same pattern in streaming and other media.

Their practical importance is disciplinary: an owner who prices a work out of the Indian market, refuses republication or vanishes entirely is on notice that the Act contains a public interest bypass, priced and supervised, and licensing conduct in the shadow of Chapter VI is usually more reasonable than it would be without it.

The permitted acts: an enumerated list, not a general fairness doctrine

Chapter XI defines infringement in Section 51 and then, in Section 52, lists the acts that do not amount to infringement. The architecture is the opposite of the better known American design. Indian law does not begin with a general standard of fairness and illustrate it; it enumerates purposes and situations, and a use that is fair in the abstract but falls outside an enumerated head is unprotected. That is the single most consequential difference between fair dealing in India and fair use elsewhere, and the article’s treatment of the contested cases below returns to it, because the Indian courts have worked within the enumeration rather than dissolving it into a general doctrine.

Section 52(1)(a) is the fair dealing provision proper. It protects a fair dealing with any work, not being a computer programme, for the purposes of private or personal use, including research; for criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work; and for the reporting of current events and current affairs, including the reporting of a lecture delivered in public. Two conditions are built into the text. The use must fall within one of the purposes, and the dealing must be fair, which the courts assess by the quantity and quality of what was taken, the character of the use, and whether the use competes with the work in its market. The exclusion of computer programmes from the clause is deliberate, and programmes are dealt with separately, by provisions that permit a lawful possessor to make the copies and adaptations needed to use the programme as supplied and to keep backup copies, and permit copies from a personally legally obtained copy for non commercial personal use. The transient and incidental storage of a work in the technical process of electronic transmission, and the storage undertaken for providing links, access or integration where the owner has not expressly prohibited it, are separately declared not to infringe, which is the copyright side of the intermediary question whose liability side is governed by the safe harbour of the Information Technology Act handled in the guide to the Information Technology Act 2000.

The rest of Section 52 is a schedule of specific permissions, and its categories are more instructive than its length. It protects reproduction of a work for the purpose of a judicial proceeding or a report of one. It protects the reproduction or publication of Acts of a legislature, of reports of committees and commissions laid before a legislature, and of judgments and orders of courts, tribunals and judicial authorities, unless prohibited. It protects the reading or recitation in public of reasonable extracts from published literary and dramatic works. It protects the publication of collections bona fide intended for the use of educational institutions, consisting mainly of material in which no copyright subsists, with limited passages from published literary and dramatic works under the conditions the clause states. It protects libraries: a public library may make up to three copies of a book, including a pamphlet, sheet of music, map, chart or plan, for the use of the library if such book is not available for sale in India, and libraries, museums and archives may store and reproduce unpublished works held in their custody for research and preservation purposes. It protects performance in the course of the activities of an educational institution by its staff and students before a limited audience of staff, students, parents and guardians and persons connected with the institution’s activities; performance before a non paying audience by an amateur club or society; and performance of works in the course of religious ceremonies, including marriage processions and the social festivities associated with them. Each permission is bounded by its conditions, and the boundary is where the litigation lives.

One cluster of the specific permissions carries a treaty behind it and deserves separate notice. The 2012 amendment added permissions for the benefit of persons with disabilities, permitting the adaptation, reproduction, issue of copies and communication of works in accessible formats by persons and organisations working for their benefit, and Chapter VI gained a matching compulsory licence provision for such works in Section 31B. India was the first country to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty, the instrument of the World Intellectual Property Organization that requires such exceptions so that books can move into accessible formats and across borders for print disabled readers, and the Indian provisions were framed to operate with it. The cluster is the exceptions chapter at its most purposive: the permitted act is defined by the beneficiary and the format rather than by a general plea of fairness, and an organisation that converts a book into an accessible format under the provision and supplies it beyond the class of beneficiaries leaves the protection of the clause behind, which is the enumeration discipline asserting itself even here.

The educational provisions carry the contested case. Section 52(1)(i) protects the reproduction of any work by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction, or as part of the questions to be answered in an examination or in answers to such questions. In the Rameshwari Photocopy litigation, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor and Francis sued a photocopy shop operating on the University of Delhi campus and the University itself, alleging that course packs compiled from their books infringed. The publishers’ case, at its strongest, was that systematic copying of assigned chapters substitutes for purchase and for the licensed market for excerpts, that universities abroad license such copying through collecting societies, and that an exception read wide enough to cover course packs removes the incentive to produce the expensive academic books on which Indian higher education depends. The University’s case, at its strongest, was that the exception’s words cover reproduction in the course of instruction without a quantity limit, that Indian students cannot buy every book from which a chapter is assigned, that the copies were confined to the syllabus and the course, and that education is the use the Act itself singles out. The Delhi High Court accepted the University’s reading in 2016, holding that the photocopying of excerpts for course packs fell within the educational exception, and a division bench dismissed the publishers’ appeal later that year. The court’s route is the point of principle: it resolved the tension through the language of the specific exception, asking what reproduction in the course of instruction means, rather than by weighing fairness at large or adopting any general fair use doctrine. The publishers’ market argument and the students’ access argument are both still made, in India and in the commentary of writers such as Shamnad Basheer, who defended the access reading, but the operative law is the construction of clause (i), and a use that no clause reaches gains nothing from being called fair.

The fairness limb of Section 52(1)(a) deserves a word of its own, because it is the only place in the provision where judgment displaces enumeration. A dealing is not fair merely because its purpose is listed, and the courts examine the dealing itself: how much was taken, measured against the whole work and against the importance of the part taken to the work’s appeal; why it was taken, and in particular whether the taking served the stated purpose or merely saved the taker the trouble and price of making or buying material; and what the taking does to the work’s market, since a use that supplies the demand the work exists to meet weighs against fairness however worthy the purpose. A reviewer who quotes the passages under attack, a researcher who copies the chapter being studied, and a news programme that shows the clip being reported on all stand in a different position from a compiler who reproduces the whole of a short work under the cover of reviewing it, and the clause has been applied to draw exactly that line. The burden of the provision, read as a whole, is that the purpose opens the door and the fairness of the dealing decides whether the defendant walks through it.

Two cautions belong with the exceptions. The exception protects the act it describes, and no more: the shop that photocopies a syllabus extract for a course acts within clause (i) through the University’s instruction, while the same shop compiling and selling complete books does not. And the exceptions do not touch the author’s Section 57 rights or convert a permitted copy into a right to attribute falsely, mutilate the work or present it as one’s own; a student may reproduce an extract for instruction and may not submit it as original work, the first being a copyright question and the second a matter of academic discipline that copyright law does not need to solve.

A small provision at the end of the chapter does quiet anti piracy work and is examinable in its own right. Section 52A requires that every sound recording, and every video film, display on the recording or film and on its container the name and address of the person who has made it, the name and address of the owner of the copyright in the work embodied, and the year of its first publication, and a video film must also display the certificate of the Central Board of Film Certification where one is required and a declaration by the person making the film that the necessary licence or consent has been taken from the owner of the underlying works. The particulars are the first thing an enforcement officer, a platform or a court looks for, and their absence on a commercial recording is both a contravention of the section and, in practice, the visible signature of an unauthorised copy.

Infringement, and what it costs

Section 51 states when copyright is infringed: when any person, without a licence from the owner or the Registrar under the Act, does anything the exclusive right to do which belongs to the owner, or permits for profit any place to be used for communicating the work to the public where the communication constitutes an infringement, unless that person was not aware and had no reasonable ground for believing the communication would infringe. Infringement also lies where a person makes for sale or hire, sells or lets for hire, exhibits in public, offers for sale or hire, distributes for trade, or imports into India, infringing copies of the work. An infringing copy, under Section 2(m), is a reproduction made or imported in contravention of the Act, and Section 53 empowers the Registrar, on the application of the owner satisfied that infringing copies made outside India would infringe if made in India, to order that copies of the work shall not be imported.

The importation limb of Section 51 has its own controversy, and its resolution shows the Act preferring the owner’s territorial bargain to the buyer’s bargain abroad. Copies of a work that are lawfully made and sold in a foreign market are, when brought into India for trade without the Indian owner’s licence, capable of being infringing copies, because the definition in Section 2(m) looks to whether the making of the copy in India would have contravened the Act, and the Indian owner is frequently a different person from the foreign owner who authorised the foreign edition. Parliament considered the contrary position in 2012, when a proposed amendment to the definition would have taken a copy lawfully made abroad outside the infringing copy net, and did not adopt it. The Indian rule therefore remains territorial: exhaustion, as described in the rights discussion above, operates on copies sold within the owner’s Indian distribution, and the parallel import of genuine foreign copies is a risk the importing trader carries, a settlement that publishers defend as the protection of the low priced Indian edition and that booksellers and librarians criticise as a restraint on the movement of lawful goods. Section 53’s order procedure, under which the Registrar directs that copies of a work shall not be imported, is the administrative face of the same settlement, and customs practice at the border gives it effect.

How much copying counts as infringement?

Enough that a substantial part of the work’s expression has been taken, judged by quality before quantity. Copying two pages that contain the heart of a short work may infringe where copying twenty pages of routine descriptive material does not.

Courts ask whether the part taken embodies the author’s skill and judgment in a concentrated form, whether an ordinary reader or viewer recognises the source, and whether the defendant’s work competes with the original by supplying what the original supplies. There is no percentage threshold in the Act or in the case law, and any summary that states one is inventing it.

The civil remedies are in Section 55. Where copyright has been infringed, the owner is entitled to all such relief by way of injunction, damages and accounts of profits as may be conferred by law for the infringement of a right. The section then protects the genuinely innocent defendant: where the defendant proves that at the date of the infringement the defendant was not aware and had no reasonable ground for believing that copyright subsisted in the work, the plaintiff is entitled only to an injunction and to a decree for the whole or part of the profits made by the defendant by the sale of the infringing copies as the court considers reasonable. Section 58 deems infringing copies and the plates used for making them to be the property of the owner of the copyright, who may accordingly take proceedings for the recovery of possession of them or in respect of the conversion of them, which is why an infringement suit is usually accompanied by applications for seizure and delivery up of stock, plates, files and the means of reproduction.

The treatment of the innocent infringer is asymmetric between the two systems of remedies, and the asymmetry is instructive. In the civil system, innocence reduces the relief: the defendant who proves there was no awareness and no reasonable ground for believing that copyright subsisted recovers the position described above, an injunction and a measured share of profits, and no damages. In the criminal system, innocence is not a mitigation but a defence, because Sections 63 and 63B punish only the person who acts knowingly, and a defendant without knowledge has committed no offence at all. Between those poles sits the defendant who knew of the copyright but honestly believed the use was permitted, a case the criminal law answers through the knowledge requirement read with the act’s circumstances and the civil law answers by treating belief as relevant to the relief rather than to liability. Owners plead the criminal provisions for the seizure powers and the settlement pressure; courts, by holding the prosecution to its burden on knowledge and title, keep the machinery pointed at the deliberate trade the sections describe.

The criminal provisions sit beside the civil ones, and their severity is a stated policy choice rather than an oversight. Section 63 makes it an offence knowingly to infringe or abet the infringement of the copyright in a work or of any other right conferred by the Act, other than the resale share right: imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than six months but which may extend to three years, and a fine which shall not be less than fifty thousand rupees but which may extend to two lakh rupees, with a proviso allowing the court, for adequate and special reasons recorded in the judgment, to impose a lesser sentence where the infringement was not made for gain in the course of trade or business. Section 63A enhances the penalty on a second or subsequent conviction under Section 63 to imprisonment of not less than one year extending to three years and a fine of not less than one lakh rupees extending to two lakh rupees. Section 63B creates the end user offence for software: knowingly making use on a computer of an infringing copy of a computer programme carries imprisonment of not less than seven days extending to three years and a fine of not less than fifty thousand rupees extending to two lakh rupees, again with a proviso for use not made for gain or in trade or business. Section 64 authorises a police officer not below the rank of sub inspector, satisfied that an offence under Section 63 is being or is likely to be committed, to seize without warrant the infringing copies and plates, which must then be produced before a magistrate as soon as may be practicable.

The word knowingly, common to Sections 63 and 63B, is doing real work, and it frames the standing argument about these provisions. The case for the criminal machinery is that commercial piracy is organised, profitable and unresponsive to damages claims against judgment proof distributors, so deterrence requires imprisonment and seizure powers, and Parliament strengthened the penalties in 1984 precisely when video piracy made the civil route look inadequate. The case against is that a mandatory minimum sentence and warrantless seizure are instruments built for pirates and are available in every dispute, including small scale and genuinely contestable ones, where the threat of a criminal complaint can extract settlements that the civil merits would not support. Both cases describe real features of the same text. The courts’ insistence on knowledge and on the complainant’s proof of title is the mechanism by which the text is confined, and a prosecution of a user who neither knew nor had ground to know fails on the section’s own terms rather than on any indulgence.

The neighbouring rights: performers and broadcasting organisations

Chapter VIII gives two rights that are not copyright in a work but stand beside it, and a complete account of the Act has to place them, because recordings and broadcasts are the form in which most works reach the public. Section 37 confers the broadcast reproduction right. Every broadcasting organisation has a special right in respect of its broadcasts, subsisting for twenty five years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the broadcast is made, and during that period it is an infringement of the right, without the broadcaster’s licence, to rebroadcast the broadcast, to cause it to be heard or seen by the public on payment of charges, to make a sound or visual recording of it, to reproduce such a recording where the original was unlicensed, or to sell or hire such a recording commercially. The right belongs to the organisation that made the broadcast and is independent of the copyrights in everything the broadcast carried.

Section 38 confers the performer’s right. Where any performer appears or engages in any performance, the performer has a special right in relation to the performance, subsisting for fifty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the performance is made. Section 38A gives the right its content: without the performer’s consent, it is an infringement to make a sound recording or visual recording of the performance, to reproduce such a recording, to issue copies of it, to communicate it to the public, or to sell or give it on commercial rental. The section carries an important qualification for the film industry: once a performer has, by agreement, consented to the incorporation of the performance in a cinematograph film, the performer cannot object to the enjoyment by the film’s producer of the performer’s right in the film, subject to the contract and to the royalty protections the 2012 amendment added for commercial exploitation, which belong to that amendment’s article. Section 38B gives the performer moral rights of the same family as the author’s: the right to be identified as the performer of the performance, except where the omission is dictated by the manner of its use, and the right to restrain or claim damages for distortion, mutilation or other modification prejudicial to the performer’s reputation, with an explanation that cuts the right to the realities of broadcast production by excluding modifications made purely for technical reasons. Section 39 then lists the acts that do not infringe the broadcast reproduction right or the performer’s right, travelling with the Section 52 pattern: recordings made for private use, for bona fide teaching or research, and uses consistent with fair dealing in excerpts in reporting and review. Section 39A applies the ownership, assignment, licensing and remedial provisions of the Act to these rights with the modifications it specifies, so that a broadcast reproduction right or a performer’s right can be assigned and licensed on the same conveyancing pattern as a copyright, and enforced with the same remedies.

The neighbouring rights explain puzzles that the six classes of work leave behind. A live concert, as a performance, attracts no copyright in the playing as such; the performer’s right is what the bootlegger infringes when the concert is recorded without consent. A broadcaster that commissions a programme owns rights in its broadcast distinct from the producer’s rights in the programme. A singer whose voice is on a film soundtrack holds a performer’s right alongside the composer’s musical copyright, the lyricist’s literary copyright and the producer’s sound recording right, and each of those rights must be cleared, licensed or assigned separately, which is why the credit block of a film soundtrack is a small cadastre of the Act’s categories.

The civil remedies described above operate in litigation in a pattern worth recording, because it explains the remedies’ real distribution. An owner who proves infringement must generally elect between damages measured by loss and an account of the profits the infringer made from the infringement; the two measures compensate different things, and a plaintiff chooses the account where the infringer’s gains exceed the owner’s provable loss, as they often do in piracy, and damages where the harm is to price, exclusivity or reputation beyond the units sold. Interim relief dominates outcomes: because the term of a film’s commercial life or a season’s fashion can be shorter than a suit, the Act’s injunction is usually sought at the outset on a prima facie showing of title and copying, and courts support it with orders for the seizure of infringing stock and materials so that the subject matter survives the suit. In the piracy litigation of the film and software industries, the Delhi High Court has developed the practice of orders against persons unknown, the John Doe or Ashok Kumar orders, which allow seizure and blocking action against infringers whose identity the plaintiff cannot plead in advance. None of this machinery adds a remedy to Section 55; it is the ordinary civil process of the courts applied at the speed the subject matter requires, and it is the reason the remedial chapter, short as it is, supports an enforcement practice of considerable sophistication.

Copyright societies: the collective machinery

Individual licensing collapses when a work is used by thousands of broadcasters, venues, platforms and establishments, each owing a small sum. Chapter VII answers the problem with the copyright society. Section 33 provides that no person or association of persons may, after the coming into force of the 1994 amendment regime, commence or carry on the business of issuing or granting licences in respect of any work in which copyright subsists, or in respect of any other rights under the Act, except under or in accordance with a registration granted under the section. A copyright society is registered by the Central Government on the conditions the Act and the rules prescribe, and the Government’s practice under the section is to register, ordinarily, one society for one class of works, so that a user faces a single licensing counter for each repertoire.

What a society licenses is the right to perform, communicate and otherwise use the works in its repertoire, and what it collects is the licence fee charged to users, from broadcasters and streaming platforms through hotels, restaurants, event organisers and airlines, which it distributes to its member authors, composers, publishers and producers after deducting its administration charges according to its distribution scheme. In India the Indian Performing Right Society administers the performing and communication rights in literary and musical works for authors, composers and publishers, and Phonographic Performance Limited administers rights in sound recordings for the recording industry. Section 33A requires a registered society to publish its tariff scheme and gives a person aggrieved by the scheme an appeal to the Commercial Court, which may fix an interim tariff and settle the scheme, a provision that has become the main forum for disputes about what a repertoire licence should cost.

The one society per class pattern cuts both ways, and the argument about it is the standing debate of the collective system. For users, a single counter is a convenience of real value: a broadcaster or a hotel chain takes one licence for the repertoire of a class and is done, instead of tracing thousands of owners for thousands of small uses. For owners and for competition, the same pattern creates a monopoly counter whose tariff the user cannot refuse without abandoning the repertoire, and the only discipline the Act applies is the tariff scheme’s publication and the appeal to the Commercial Court under Section 33A, supplemented by the Government’s registration control and the owners’ collective control of the society itself. Both descriptions are accurate, and the Act’s settlement is visible in the design: it accepts the single counter because the alternative fails in practice, and it spends its regulatory effort on the counter’s price and governance rather than on multiplying counters that users would have to visit in turn.

A society’s power has limits that its tariff controversies sometimes obscure. A society can license only the works and rights committed to it by its members and by the reciprocal arrangements of the international system; it owns no copyright by reason of registration; it cannot license a work whose owner has kept the right back; and a user who needs a work outside the repertoire must still find the owner. The collective is an agency machine laid over the ownership rules of Section 17, not a replacement for them, and the disputes that reach the Commercial Court are about price and repertoire rather than about whether copyright exists at all.

The society is not a private club beyond the Act’s reach. Registration is granted and may be suspended or cancelled by the Central Government on the conditions the Act states, including that the society be under the control of the authors and other owners whose rights it administers, and Sections 34 and 35 structure the relationship between the society and the owner: a society may accept from an owner exclusive authorisation to administer a right, on terms that preserve the owner’s power to withdraw the authorisation and to grant licences independently in the circumstances the section allows, and the society functions in that administration subject to the control of the owners collectively. The rules framed under the Act add the governance furniture of annual general meetings, distribution schemes and transparency of accounts. The design is deliberate: the collective must be strong enough to license an entire market from one counter and answerable enough that the owners whose property fills the counter can take their rights elsewhere, and the tension between those two requirements, rather than any dispute about whether collective licensing is legitimate, is what the recurring litigation over particular societies is about.

The forum and the office: administration after the Appellate Board

For most of the Act’s life, its specialised disputes went to the Copyright Board constituted under Section 11, a body that granted compulsory licences, settled royalty disputes and rectified the register. The Finance Act, 2017 abolished the Copyright Board as a separate body and transferred its functions to the Intellectual Property Appellate Board, the tribunal created for trade marks. The Tribunals Reforms legislation of 2021 then abolished the Intellectual Property Appellate Board itself, with effect from 4 April 2021, and distributed the copyright jurisdiction between the Commercial Court and the High Court, in an arrangement the field level map of the intellectual property law guide for India states for all six statutes.

The Board whose disappearance required this distribution was itself an institution of the original 1957 design. As enacted, Sections 11 and 12 constituted a Copyright Board for the whole of India, consisting of a chairman and not less than two and not more than fourteen other members, the chairman being a person who was, had been or was qualified to be a judge of a High Court, and the Registrar of Copyrights acted as its secretary. Its benches sat across the country, its decisions were appealable to the High Court on the questions of law the Act specified, and for five decades it was the forum in which the compulsory licence, the royalty dispute and the rectification application were heard by a body that did nothing else. The 2017 merger into the Appellate Board and the 2021 abolition were driven by a general policy against the proliferation of tribunals rather than by any finding about copyright adjudication, and the profession’s debate about the change mirrors the debate in the other intellectual property statutes: the tribunal offered specialisation and a single national forum, and the courts offer authority, precedent and the ordinary appellate ladder, at the price of distributing a small subject across the dockets of many courts.

The distribution follows a discernible logic. Wherever the Act gave the Appellate Board jurisdiction over licence type disputes, the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021 substituted the Commercial Court: the power to decide whether a work has been withheld from the public under Section 6, disputes between assignor and assignee under Section 19A, the duration question under Section 23, compulsory licences for works withheld from the public under Section 31, compulsory licences in unpublished works and works of dead, unknown or untraceable authors under Section 31A, the statutory and compulsory licensing provisions of Sections 31B, 31C and 31D, translation and reproduction licences under Sections 32 and 32A, tariff scheme appeals under Section 33A, the resale share right under Section 53A and the definition questions under Section 54. For these purposes the Act defines the Commercial Court by reference to the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, so the expression covers both a Commercial Court constituted at the district level and the Commercial Division of a High Court. Two matters went instead to the High Court directly: rectification of the Register of Copyrights under Section 50, and appeals against final decisions and orders of the Registrar, for which the substituted Section 72 gives an appeal to the High Court within three months, to be heard by a single judge with a further appeal to a bench of that court. Ordinary infringement suits were not the tribunal’s business at any stage and remain in the courts of civil jurisdiction, with Section 62 letting the owner sue in the district court within whose limits the owner resides or carries on business, a plaintiff side forum rule that makes the owner’s home court the usual venue.

Where do disputes about licences and the register go after the Appellate Board?

Licence disputes go to the Commercial Court, and register disputes go to the High Court. Applications for compulsory and statutory licences, assignment disputes under Section 19A and tariff scheme appeals under Section 33A are made to the Commercial Court, a term the Act defines to include the Commercial Division of a High Court.

Rectification of the Register of Copyrights under Section 50, and appeals against the Registrar under Section 72, lie to the High Court.

Administration moved as well, and the move affects where applications are filed. The Copyright Office, headed by the Registrar of Copyrights, was administered for decades with the education portfolio of the Union Government, as a subject of the department responsible for higher education. In 2016 the administration of the Copyright Act was transferred to the department responsible for industrial policy, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, since renamed the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, which administers the other intellectual property statutes as well. The transfer aligned the register with the National IPR Policy of 2016 and placed copyright administration in the same department as patents, designs and trade marks, and a party looking for the register, the forms and the Registrar’s orders looks to that department’s copyright administration rather than to the education ministry.

The Act applied: three works walked through the code

The provisions earn their meaning when they are run, in sequence, over a single work. Three short walks show the same code producing three different allocations, and each walk uses only rules already stated.

A novelist publishes a novel in her lifetime. Subsistence is immediate: the novel is an original literary work under Section 13, protected on the day it is finished and without any filing, and its protection does not depend on its merit, its sales or its registration. Ownership starts with the author under Section 17, and her publishing contract then does the real work: if it is an assignment, the publisher owns the rights assigned for the duration and territory the deed states, or, if the deed is silent, for five years and within India, with the unexercised rights lapsing after a year; if it is a licence, she keeps the title and the publisher holds a permission. Everything not assigned stays hers, including the film right, the translation right and the digital right, each of which is a separate slice under Section 14. The term is her life and sixty years from the January after her death, whoever holds the slices by then. A reviewer may quote passages for criticism under Section 52(1)(a) without anyone’s leave, provided the dealing is fair; a rival who lifts her plot alone takes nothing protected, while one who lifts her chapters takes the work. If she dies leaving the book’s manuscript to one legatee and her estate generally to another, Section 20 sends the copyright with the manuscript unless her will says otherwise, which is why literary estates read wills before they read reviews.

A growing company commissions a design studio to create its brand: a logo, a website and the written copy for both. Every deliverable is a work in Section 13: the logo an artistic work, the website’s code a computer programme and so a literary work, the text a literary work, the photographs, if any are commissioned, artistic works that clause (b) of Section 17 alone among these assets sends to the client automatically. The studio is an independent contractor, so the logo, the code and the copy belong first to the studio under the opening rule of Section 17, and the price the company paid bought the deliverables and the right to use them for the purposes commissioned, not the copyrights. The company cannot rebrand a subsidiary with the logo as an owner, cannot stop the studio from suing in its own name if the logo is copied, and cannot list the copyrights among the assets it sells until the studio signs an assignment in writing, identifying the works and specifying the rights, the duration and the territory, for a stated consideration, as Section 19 requires. If the logo is then applied to goods by industrial process and reproduced more than fifty times, Section 15(2) ends the copyright in the design so applied, and the company’s protection for the sign as used on goods rests on the Designs Act route and on trade mark law, which is why brand lawyers register the mark rather than rely on the drawing. The company’s lawyers, brought in after the launch, charge for reconstructing with signatures what a single clause at the commissioning stage would have settled in advance.

A song is recorded for a film. The lyricist’s words are a literary work, the composer’s tune a musical work, each protected for the author’s life and sixty years. The singer holds a performer’s right in the performance for fifty years, subject to the consent given for incorporation in the film. The recording made in the studio is a sound recording, and its producer is its author and first owner, with a sixty year term from publication; the film, when made, is a cinematograph film with its own producer’s copyright for the same publication based term, and Section 13(4) keeps every one of these rights separate from every other, so the film’s ownership settles nothing about the song and the song’s ownership settles nothing about the recording. When a hotel plays the recording in its lobby, a broadcaster airs it or a streaming service lists it, the permissions and the money flow through the collective machinery: the society for literary and musical works licenses the lyricist’s and composer’s rights, the society for sound recordings licenses the producer’s right, and the tariff for each repertoire can be appealed to the Commercial Court under Section 33A. When a film song is remade, the remaker needs the underlying literary and musical rights as well as the recording rights, and the provisos Parliament added in 2012 to protect the original authors’ royalty share in such exploitations qualify what the original assignments could take away, the detail of which sits in that amendment’s own article. Three walks, one pattern: the Act allocates by category and by default, and the parties’ papers, where they exist, rearrange an allocation that was complete without them.

The default rule is the statute’s real engine

The series of which this article forms part has repeatedly found that the provision doing the practical work in a statute is rarely the celebrated right and is usually a default: the rule that applies when the parties have said nothing. The Copyright Act 1957 is the cleanest illustration in the intellectual property cluster. Its rights are generous and its terms are long, but the questions that decide outcomes in studios, agencies, publishing houses and software firms are the defaults: the author owns until a contract speaks; a deed that omits duration gives five years; a deed that omits territory gives India; an assignment unexercised for a year lapses; a registered entry proves the particulars until displaced; a use outside the enumerated exceptions infringes however fair it feels. Each default is a sentence long, each is displaced by a sentence of drafting, and the volume of litigation they generate is the measure of how rarely that sentence is written.

Automatic protection has a price, and the Act pays it knowingly, in the currency of orphan works: works whose owners are dead, dissolved or untraceable, which no one may safely use although no owner will ever be harmed by the use. A registration based system could reduce the class by giving users someone to find, at the price of forfeiting the rights of every creator who failed to file. India chose the other side of that trade in 1957, when the filing burden on a largely unadvised creative class would have been the greater injustice, and mitigated the price through Section 31A’s licence for the works of the untraceable rather than through any general defence of diligent search. The choice is of a piece with the ownership defaults: the Act consistently prefers the party who created or was granted the right over the party who finds the right inconvenient, and it puts the burden of paperwork on the transaction rather than on the creation.

The posture of the Act toward its readers follows from that design. It assumes that creators will create without advice, that buyers will pay without papers, and that both will learn the allocation only when a dispute makes it matter. Its answer is not to require the papers, as a system of constitutive registration would, but to place the loss from their absence on the party who assumed the allocation ran the other way. A business that builds on commissioned work without an assignment, like a publisher that prints without a licence deed that states its duration, has not been caught by a trap: it has been given the default it left standing. Knowing the defaults is therefore not a refinement of knowledge of this Act. It is the substance of it, and it is why the comparison of the Act’s no formality creation rule and its six decades of term with the registration based and shorter regimes of patents and trade marks, which the comparison of patent, copyright and trade mark protection takes up, shows copyright as the outlier on every axis that matters to a founder choosing how to protect what a business makes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What works does copyright protect in India?

Section 13 of the Copyright Act 1957 protects six classes of work: original literary works, dramatic works, musical works and artistic works, together with cinematograph films and sound recordings. A literary work includes a computer programme, a table and a compilation including a computer database, and an artistic work includes paintings, sculpture, drawings including diagrams and charts, engravings, photographs, works of architecture and works of artistic craftsmanship. The first four classes must be original, a test of the author’s own skill and judgment rather than of novelty. A work must also satisfy the Act’s connecting conditions, being the work of a qualified author or first published in India or in a country covered by the International Copyright Order.

Q: Is copyright registration necessary?

No. Copyright in a work comes into existence when the work is created, and no registration, filing or other formality is required for the right to subsist or to be enforced. Registration with the Registrar of Copyrights under Chapter X of the Act is voluntary. Its value is evidential: under Section 48, the Register of Copyrights is prima facie evidence of the particulars entered in it, so a registration certificate helps a claimant prove authorship, ownership and the date of the work in a dispute. A claimant who has not registered must prove the same facts by contracts, drafts and other records. Registration also records transfers, which keeps the public record of title aligned with the deeds.

Q: How long does copyright last?

For a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work published during the author’s lifetime, Section 22 gives a term of the author’s life and sixty years, counted from the beginning of the calendar year following the year of the author’s death. For joint works, the term is measured from the author who dies last. Anonymous and pseudonymous works, posthumous works, photographs, cinematograph films, sound recordings, works of the Government, works of public undertakings and works of international organisations each receive sixty years counted from the beginning of the calendar year following first publication, under Sections 23 to 29. When the term ends, the work enters the public domain and anyone may use it freely.

Q: Who owns copyright in a commissioned or employed work?

The author is the first owner under Section 17, and payment alone does not change that. Three exceptions redistribute ownership. A proprietor of a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical owns an employee journalist’s work for publication in the periodical and its reproduction for that purpose, the author keeping the rest. A photograph taken, or a painting, portrait, engraving or cinematograph film made, for valuable consideration at a person’s instance belongs to that person. A work made by an employee in the course of employment under a contract of service belongs to the employer. Each exception yields to a contract providing otherwise, and commissioned material outside the stated list, such as software or a logo from an independent contractor, remains the creator’s without a written assignment.

Q: Which uses count as fair dealing under copyright law?

Section 52(1)(a) treats as non infringing a fair dealing with any work other than a computer programme for private or personal use, including research; for criticism or review of that work or of any other work; and for reporting of news and affairs, including the report of a lecture delivered in public. The purpose must be one of those stated, and the dealing itself must be fair, the courts weighing how much was taken, how important the part taken was, the purpose and character of the use, and its effect on the work’s market. Fair dealing is a clause within a long list of specific permitted acts covering education, libraries, judicial and legislative use and religious ceremonies, and a use outside the stated purposes is not rescued by being small or well intentioned.

Q: What remedies does a copyright owner have?

A copyright owner, and an exclusive licensee, may sue in a district court or a Commercial Court for civil remedies under Section 55: an injunction restraining further infringement, damages, or an account of the profits the infringer made, the plaintiff generally electing between the two money measures. The court may also order seizure and delivery up of infringing copies and of the plates used to make them, and infringing copies are deemed to be the owner’s property. A defendant who proves no awareness and no reasonable ground for believing copyright subsisted faces an injunction and a discretionary share of profits rather than damages. Infringement is also an offence under Section 63, punishable with imprisonment of six months to three years and a fine, and police officers may seize infringing copies.

Q: What does a copyright society license and collect?

A copyright society registered under Section 33 administers rights that individual owners cannot license one user at a time. It issues blanket licences for its repertoire, on the pattern of a licence permitting a broadcaster, a venue or a business to use any work in the catalogue, and it collects the licence fees fixed by its published tariff scheme. It monitors use, receives statements of what was performed or played, distributes the collections to the authors and owners whose works were used, after its administration expenses, and pursues unlicensed users. A user dissatisfied with a tariff may appeal to the Commercial Court under Section 33A. Examples include the society for literary and musical works and the society licensing sound recordings for public performance.

Q: Does copyright protect software?

Yes. Section 2(ffc) defines a computer programme as a set of instructions expressed in words, codes, schemes or any other form, capable of causing a computer to perform a task, and Section 2(o) makes a literary work include computer programmes, tables and compilations including computer databases. Software is therefore protected as a literary work for the author’s life and sixty years. The owner holds the Section 14 rights, including reproduction, issue of copies, adaptation and, specially for programmes, selling or giving the programme on commercial rental. Protection covers the code and its original expressive structure, not the functionality or the algorithm as an idea. Section 52 permits limited acts for a lawful possessor, including a backup copy and steps needed for interoperability.

Q: What standard of originality must a work meet to attract copyright in India?

The work must originate with the author and carry a minimal degree of creativity, expressed through skill and judgment that is not purely mechanical. The Supreme Court settled the standard in Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, rejecting both the sweat of the brow doctrine, under which labour and capital alone earned protection, and any test demanding novelty or inventive height. Copy edited law reports qualified because the selection, arrangement and editorial inputs involved judgment, while the raw text of judgments did not become anyone’s property. Labour spent gathering facts earns nothing by itself, since facts belong to all; what is protected is the author’s own expression of them. A compilation qualifies where its selection or arrangement is the author’s own work in this sense.

Q: Does copyright protect an idea, or only the way the idea is expressed?

Only the expression. The Supreme Court in R.G. Anand v. Delux Films held that there is no copyright in an idea, a subject, a theme, a plot or historical or legendary facts; copyright protects the form, manner and arrangement in which the author expresses the idea. Two works may therefore share a plot, a setting and a moral without either infringing the other, while a work that copies the expression, the dialogue, the sequence of scenes as written, or the structure in which the material was selected and arranged, infringes although its plot differs. Infringement is judged by whether the later work reproduces a substantial part of the earlier expression, assessed by its quality and importance as well as its quantity, and not by whether the two works treat the same subject.

Q: What rights does the copyright in a literary work actually give its owner?

Section 14(a) gives the owner of a literary work the exclusive right to reproduce the work in any material form, including storing it electronically; to issue copies of the work to the public, other than copies already in circulation; to perform the work in public or communicate it to the public; to make a cinematograph film or sound recording in respect of the work; to translate it; to adapt it; and to do any of those things in relation to a translation or adaptation. No one else may do those acts, or authorise them, without the owner’s licence, and doing any of them in relation to a substantial part of the work counts as doing it in relation to the work.

Q: How is the copyright term counted for a work written by two authors together?

A work of joint authorship is one produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of each is not distinct from the contribution of the others. Section 22 measures its term by the life of the author who dies last: the copyright runs for sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year following the year in which that last surviving author dies. The contributions are not given separate terms, and the work does not fall into the public domain piecemeal as each author dies. Where the identity of one joint author is unknown, the Act’s provisions on anonymous and pseudonymous works supply the measure instead, by reference to the known author’s life where that author is identified.

Q: What happens if an assignment of copyright does not state how long it lasts or where it applies?

Section 19 supplies the missing terms by default. If the period of the assignment is not stated, the assignment is deemed to last five years from its date. If the territorial extent is not stated, the assignment is presumed to extend within India only. The assignee’s rights also lapse, reverting to the author, if they are not exercised within one year of the assignment, unless the deed states otherwise. These defaults operate only where the deed is silent, so a deed that names its period and territory displaces them entirely. The assignment must still be in writing and signed, identify the work and specify the rights assigned and the royalty or consideration payable.

Q: How does a licence of copyright differ from an assignment of copyright?

An assignment transfers ownership of the rights assigned: the assignee becomes the owner of those rights for the period and territory of the assignment, may enforce them in the assignee’s own name, and may assign them further. A licence transfers no ownership; it is a permission to do acts that would otherwise infringe, and the licensee holds an interest in the right licensed while the licensor keeps the title. An exclusive licensee, whose permission excludes even the owner, may sue infringers in the licensee’s own name under Section 61 and is treated almost as an owner. A non exclusive licensee holds a personal permission and ordinarily cannot sue. Section 30 governs licences, Section 30A applies the assignment formalities to them, and both instruments must be approached with the same precision about which rights, in which works, for how long and where.

Q: Can copyright be inherited, bequeathed or transferred when the owner dies?

Yes. Copyright is movable property that passes on death like other property. An author or later owner may bequeath the copyright by will, assign it during life, or license it, and where no disposition is made it passes under the law of succession to the heirs. Section 20 adds a rule of construction for manuscripts: where a bequest entitles a person to the manuscript of a work that was unpublished at the testator’s death, the bequest is construed, unless a contrary intention appears in the will, as including the copyright in the work so far as the testator owned it immediately before death. Partial assignments and bequests can split the rights in one work among several successors, each holding a separate slice for the rest of the term.

Q: Does the owner of copyright control the resale of a genuine copy after it has been sold once?

Generally no. The right to issue copies to the public does not extend to copies already in circulation, on the Explanation to Section 14: a copy sold once is treated as a copy already in circulation, so its buyer may resell it, lend it or give it away without the copyright owner’s consent. The principle, called exhaustion or first sale, keeps copyright in the work from becoming a control over every physical copy in the world. It has stated exceptions: the owner keeps the separate right to sell or give a computer programme, a cinematograph film or a sound recording on commercial rental, so a rental business cannot be built on first sale alone, and exhaustion does not permit making new copies, which remains the reproduction right.

Q: Are databases and compilations protected by copyright in India?

Yes, as literary works. Section 2(o) provides that a literary work includes computer programmes, tables and compilations including computer databases, so a database is protected as a compilation where its selection or arrangement of contents is the author’s own, judged by the Eastern Book Company standard of skill and judgment with a minimal degree of creativity. The underlying facts and data are not protected: a rival may take the same facts from the sources and build a competing database, and infringes only by copying the protected selection or arrangement, or by lifting the data in a way that reproduces that expression. India has no separate database right of the kind some jurisdictions created; protection for the investment in gathering data, beyond the originality threshold, must be found in contract, confidence or other law, not in this Act.

Q: How do the copyrights in a film and in the works inside the film relate to each other?

They are separate and independent. Section 13(4) provides that the copyright in a cinematograph film or a sound recording does not affect the separate copyright in any work in relation to which the film or recording is made. The producer owns the film as a film; the lyricist keeps the literary work, the composer the musical work, the author of the screenplay the dramatic or literary work, and the producer of a recording the sound recording right, each with its own term and its own owner. Making or using the film therefore requires clearing each layer, and owning the film confers no right to remake the song, publish the lyrics or issue the soundtrack album beyond the agreements under which the underlying works were incorporated.

Q: Is an unpublished work protected by copyright in India?

Yes. Copyright subsists in works whether or not they have been published, and Section 13(2) supplies the connecting conditions for unpublished works by reference to the author’s domicile or citizenship when the work is made. The private letter, the unfinished manuscript and the unreleased recording are protected, and their unauthorised publication is itself an infringement, since issuing copies to the public is one of the owner’s exclusive acts. Publication has defined consequences rather than being the source of the right: it starts the sixty year publication terms for the production classes and for anonymous and posthumous works, engages the price and availability conditions of some exceptions, and, where the owner is dead, unknown or untraceable, opens the Section 31A route to a licence for others to publish.

Q: What rights does a performer have in a performance under this Act?

Chapter VIII gives a performer a special right in the performance, lasting fifty years from the beginning of the calendar year following the year of the performance. Under Sections 38 and 38A, no one may, without the performer’s consent, make a sound or visual recording of the performance, reproduce such a recording, issue copies of it to the public, communicate it to the public, or sell it or give it on commercial rental. Section 38B adds moral rights: to be identified as the performer, apart from omissions dictated by the manner of use, and to restrain distortion or mutilation of the performance prejudicial to the performer’s reputation. A performer who consents by agreement to a performance being incorporated in a film cannot object to the producer’s enjoyment of the right in the film, and Section 39 permits private, teaching, research and fair dealing uses of performances as it does of broadcasts.