Digital song giant Spotify, which entered the Indian market earlier this year, has already opened its account in neighborhood courts. Music behemoth Warner Music, a former investor in Spotify, has sued the business enterprise to rely on that guarantee to send ripples through India’s highbrow property regime. Specifically, Spotify lately invoked a statutory licensing provision (Section 31-D) under India’s Copyright Act in an attempt and benefit from access to content owned by Warner Music for redistribution. In turn, Warner Music filed an injunction at the Bombay High Court to save Spotify from having access to its content material in such a way.
Statutory licensing serves as an exception to the unique economic rights of a copyright holder. This makes copyright licensing a minefield of litigation. The Spotify-Warner case will add a nebulous layer of jurisprudence to a monetary region that deserves greater detailed legislative attention.
India’s copyright regime is ostensibly based on the premise that “understanding needs to be allowed to be disseminated.” This public-hobby reason stems from a much-referred-to 2008 Supreme Court judgment. The ruling firmly established that using non-voluntary licenses to decorate purchasers get admission to may be availed of by non-public entities, in addition to public entities. However, the proliferation of facts and communication technology (ICTs) has changed the knowledge-dissemination paradigm. The dominance of digital markets necessitates a relook at the present copyright regime, which isn’t a process for courts.
Historically, music licensing in India has been concerned with bundling the underlying rights for musical composition, lyrics, overall performance, and even synchronization with the copyright for the sound recording. Until a seminal legislative change in 2012, which made such underlying rights “non-assignable,” the wholesale transfer of rights to film producers became a not-unusual practice. Such producers could then transfer those rights to record labels. This gave primary-rights owners, including lyricists, performers, and composers, no claim on destiny royalties. In many methods, the erstwhile regime suited a marketplace where the music industry became mostly financed via the film industry, particularly Bollywood. However, the Bollywood-centricity of tune markets is being disrupted with the aid of internet streaming.
Market disruptions notwithstanding, judicial intervention is never a long way from upending accommodative legislative reform in India. In 2016, in any other court case with big financial ramifications, the pre-2012 practice of switch of rights was re-allowed for sound recordings that aren’t embedded in a cinematograph film. Primary-rights proprietors had been dealt a blow by a judicial intervention that paid inadequate interest in the convert marketplace dynamics. Independent of the legal rigmarole, India’s song enterprise has managed to move the ₹1,000-crore mark in 2018 and wants now not to play second fiddle to films for all time. Through sustained growth of internet streaming sales, the enterprise can end up a force to reckon with in its own right.
A generation has helped several Indian industries overcome demanding situations stemming from static regulatory regimes. For example, TV broadcasters in India have invested closely in online video systems to disseminate new content material. Such investments will assist them in overcoming a legacy of prescriptive economic rules inside the TV marketplace. Similarly, within the case of the track industry, digital platforms will allow the greater consumer to attain, in addition to product and carrier innovation, to maximize industry revenues.
To its credit, the government recognized the untapped exportability of the audio and video industries remaining year and gave them “Champion Sector” status. The earning prospects of audio-visual exports are connected to the increase in digital markets.
Several Indian industries, ranging from telecom to mining, have suffered judicial overreach in monetary matters. As a principle, such interventions ought to be curtailed to instances of discernible market failure. Moreover, virtual markets are terrific on numerous counts, necessitating that judicial interventions be narrow in scope. First, internet streaming does not rely upon the use of the scarce public spectrum, as television or radio broadcasting does. Second, the value of switching between streaming services is negligible because it does not contain a substitute for any system or vendor. And 1/3, in principle, there may be no discrimination between large and small streaming companies at the network level of the net, with community neutrality policies.
