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Monopolistic nature of Copyright Societies in India
Copyright society is a concept which involves collective administration of copyrighted work by a society of authors and other such owners of protected work through government regulation. If a given country is part of international conventions, they can have corresponding agreements with other such societies internationally to license and collect royalties for the use of the owner’s work. Therefore, it is in the interest of copyright owners to join such societies for deriving added value to their work.
Section 33 of the Copyright Act, 1957 deals with the registration of a said society of collective administration management. According to the Act, the minimum number of members required is seven and only one society is registered with respect to a type of work mentioned under Section 13 of the Act. There are currently three such Copyright collection societies registered in India which are, namely, the Indian Performing Rights Society Ltd (IPRS) for musical works, the Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) for sound recordings and the Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation for authors of literary any literary work.
The Copyright (Amendment) Act, 1994 added Section 33 to the Act which gave exclusive power to copyright societies to grant licence to protected works. This monopolistic approach led to corruption in Indian copyright societies and allegations of patently unfair contracts being thrust onto Indian composers and lyricists. In an attempt to regulate this unbalanced monopolism, the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012 was brought into place with an objective of establishing an equitable and unprejudiced and added Section 33 (3A) which laid down a new guideline that any copyright society carrying out the business of granting or issuing copyright licence must register itself again within the period of 12 months from the date of the amendment. Therefore, any copyright society which existed prior to the amendment has to re-register itself within the given time frame. But on the other hand, the objective of this section has failed due to the fact that there is no prescribed punishment if this section 33(3A) was not complied with.
Effective enforcement of competition law to regulate copyright societies is a requirement in order to protect the freedom of right-holders to assign different parts of his ownership rights to different societies or directly license his work to users. While these societies make it easier to obtain license from owners and reduce the cost of individual management of copyright which is expensive and impartial they must not hold a monopoly in doing so to the extent of restricting the right-holder’s freedom over his work. Moreover, the internet has enabled the owner of copyrighted works to make autonomous decisions on the way in which an individual would want to assign his work. The approach taken by the Indian government towards copyright societies defeats its purpose of these societies protecting authors and performers in enforcing their own rights. In order to create a balance and a solution to this problem, copyright societies must continue to hold power in order to restrict unauthorized use and enable a cost effective way to license, but not be given absolute power over an individual’s right to directly license work.
