Music composers win a 13-year battle against radio broadcasters

The ruling comes in a 13-year-old case involving the Indian Performing Right Society Ltd., which was representing music composers and lyricists, and Music Broadcast Ltd., which runs the FM channel Radio City.

Composers vs. broadcasters 
In 2011, a single-judge bench of the Bombay High Court held that authors of original literary and musical works on sound recordings cannot interfere with the rights of the owners of such recordings to broadcast them to the public. This included the right to broadcast through radio stations.

Then, in 2020, the Intellectual Property Appellate Board fixed rates of royalties to be paid to authors for using their sound recordings for public broadcast.

Soon after, the broadcasters appealed the IPAB decision, saying the royalties should be fixed as per the provisions of Section 31D of the Copyright Act. The provision says royalties are to be paid in accordance with the territorial coverage of the broadcaster and the duration for which that musical work would be used.

However, the IPAB was dissolved soon after, and the power to deal with such cases came to the Delhi High Court under its Intellectual Property Division.

The IPRS used an entity called ‘AirCheck’, which revealed that a large number of songs belonging to their repertoire were played by radio stations, which prompted the suit before the Bombay High Court.

Music composers vs. broadcasters: The Bombay High Court view
After a series of litigation, the high court has observed that there has been a substantial change in the rights of authors of original musical or cinematographic works after the 2012 amendment to the Copyright Act.

The amended provisions, the high court noted, should be interpreted to mean that if literary and musical works are utilised in any form other than in a cinema hall, the authors are entitled to receive royalties.

“…Communication of the sound recording to the public on each occasion, amounts to utilisation of such underlying literary and musical works, in respect of which the authors have a right to collect royalties,” the Bombay High Court said.

The high court observed that if broadcasters use the sound recordings and communicate them to the public without making payments of royalties to the authors, it would amount to an infringement of the author’s rights in that work.

The court has ordered that such royalties have to be paid to IPRS, in accordance with the 2020 decision of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board, within a period of six weeks. Failing to do so would lead to an interim injunction against the broadcasting of music made by members of IPRS on private FM radios. Bloomberg