Copyright Protection in India : IPR
After covering a varied number of concepts on Trademarks and concepts related to that, we present this write up on Copyright Protection in India.
COPYRIGHTS
A copyright subsists in
COPYRIGHTS
The other day we received a call from one of our long time clients congratulating us on starting to post our write ups and website content on another website. We did not know anything about this and went to that website to find that, to our surprise, all our content including research material and articles were posted on that website by another person we did not know.
We, as a firm, dear readers, invest time and research in creating these write ups and research works and convert our ideas into words. By doing so, we inherently create a copyright in such matter and write ups. It is a different issue that we went against the person infringing on our copyright, but this brings us to the topic for this classroom post this time- Copyrights.
Simply put, a copyright is a right given by the law to creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works and producers of cinematograph films and sound recordings. Within its ambit is also covered, a range of other rights such as the right to reproduce the work, translate the work, etc. In India, the law relating to copyrights is governed by the Indian Copyright Act, 1957. Primarily, the Act provides that a copyright subsists in a work and not in an idea per se.
Unlike patents, the registration of a copyright in a work is not necessary and its acquisition is in fact automatic. A copyright in a work is created as soon as the work comes into existence. However, the registration of copyright in a work entitles one to a certificate for registration of the copyright which serves as a prima facie evidence in a court of law in case of any dispute relating to the ownership rights in the work.
OWNER OF COPYRIGHT IN A WORK
The ownership of copyright in a work depends on a number of factors. Physical possession of ownership will not always necessarily result in ownership of copyright as well. A small example of this can be a poet who writes her poems and gives them to a publishing house for publishing them in a book. The poet here, being the author, owns the copyright in the literary work, even though the book may be owned by the publishing house (unless the poet in this case has assigned her copyright to the publishing house). A copyright subsists in
- original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works
- cinematograph films; and
- sound recordings
Where a copyright subsists in a work, there exist a bundle of other rights as well. These rights include the right to reproduce the work, to issue copies of the work, to perform the work in public, to make translations of the work, to make adaptations of the work, etc. However, these rights may vary depending on the type of work in question.
To SUM UP…
With the introduction of the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, the entire landscape of copyright laws in India has seen a paradigm change in scenario. Then there is also the issue of rampant online piracy which also to an extent, is intermingled with the concept of copyright protection, taking the concept from a conventional mode to a more modern mode. The issue of protecting the content and copyright in a work is an important one as it protects the hard work and originality of a work.
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