Is it copyright infringment?
Sumon
(Querist) 26 March 2010
This query is : Resolved
i have purchased an cd containing
Supreme Court judgment from 1950 to 2000.
I have had a conversation with the owner of the company who published the cd and he asked me to become his agent in east india.......now my query is wheather such publications of judgements on a commercial basis is an offence on the eye of law or not?if yes then under which act?...please reply to my qyery as soon as possible...........i need to know..........
Thank you in advance
Adv.Shine Thomas
(Expert) 27 March 2010
Yes, it is an offence.Refer Sec.52 of Copyright Act.
Kiran Kumar
(Expert) 27 March 2010
m pasting a link of a judgment here, pls check that, otherwise m not agreeing with Shine.
hopefully the link will clear your doubts.
http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1062099/
Sanjeev Panda
(Expert) 27 March 2010
Mr. Kiran Kumar has quoted a perfect landmark judgment of the Apex Court (2008) 1 SCC which settles the issue asked by you. I salute the expertise of Mr. Kiran Kumar for quoting the judgment which perfectly fits the issue raised by you. In the said landmark judgment of the Apex Court, the Apex Court has laid down the test and standard of “Originality” to qualify for the copyright protection. However, let me clarify the meaning of “Originality” here as understood in Copyright Law. A work would qualify as “Original” means not something new or novel, the test of originality is that the author has devoted time, skill, labor in creation of work and the work should not have been copied.
In the aforesaid case, the Apex Court rejected the “Sweet of the Brow” and the American Creativity Test and adopted a middle path i.e. Canadian test of “skill and judgment with flavour of creativity”. Now many law publishers publish the Copy edited judgments of various courts with various inputs for instance “head notes”, “ratio of the case” made by the publisher to enhance readability and user friendliness of the judgment. The Supreme Court held that such copyedited judgments would not qualify for the copyright merely by reason that the publisher put in some skill, labor or capital to bring the inputs in the judgments. To secure the copyright in such copyedited judgments it is necessary that the labor, skill and capital expended should be sufficient to impart to the copyedited judgments some quality or character which the raw judgments did not possess and which differentiates the Copyedited judgments from the raw judgments. To support copyright in such copyedited judgments, there must be some substantive variation and not merely a trivial variation, not the variation of the type where limited ways/unique of expression available and an author selects one of them which can be said to be a garden variety. Novelty or invention or innovative idea is not the requirement for protection of copyright but it does require minimal degree of creativity.
Thus, the raw judgment is not copyrightable, however the creative inputs which are introduced by the publisher like Headnotes, editorial notes and footnotes which requires sound legal skills so as to make the judgment user friendly, is worth copyright protection.
B K Raghavendra Rao
(Expert) 27 March 2010
Your question is - "whether publication of judgements on a commercial basis is an offence". Mere publication of judgements verbatim is not an offence and judgements are not copyrightable.
But, arrangement of and link to sections under created division of headlines etc., are a creation of an individual and is copyrightable. Copying the CD in such cases as it is, is an offence.
Parthasarathi Loganathan
(Expert) 27 March 2010
I fully agree with Mr.Sanjeev Panda's indepth analysis of the said Judgement.
