BY TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, DEC 08, 2015: THE issue is: Whether editorial comments/case head notes developed by qualified and skilled professionals qualify as 'literary works' and therefore entitled to copyright protection under the Copyright Act. YES is the answer.

Facts

The plaintiff is a leading publisher in the field of tax, corporate and commercial laws. The plaintiff uses on-line electronic medium for publishing and selling its publications. Since 2010, the plaintiff has been publishing case law reports (decisions with its head notes) on its website www.taxmann.com which is available to its paid subscribers. The Defendant is a company which owns the website www.casansaar.com. Towards the end of July, 2015 it came to the knowledge of the plaintiff that its editorial comments/ head notes (factual summary and case ratio given under the ‘Held’ section) had been fully copied by the defendant in large number of cases and these were available on its free website. A preliminary review by the plaintiff of the cases on defendant’s website was limited to the period 2013 - July, 2015 which confirmed wholesale and extensive identical/verbatim copying done by the defendant in about 1487 cases out of about 2800 cases (with citations) uploaded by it in the last 4 years. The plaintiff issued legal notice to the defendant which was returned undelivered with the remark ‘Party not accepted’. The plaintiff issued another legal notice to the defendant. However, the defendant failed to comply with the notice. Aggrieved plaintiff approached the High Court with the allegation of unfair competition and sought permanent injunction restraining infringement of copyright (in editorial comments/ headnotes to cases) and for damages.

Decision

The High Court granted ad interim injunction and restrained the defendant from continuing with the infringement of plaintiff’s copyright in its editorial comments/case Head-notes. The Defendant was also directed to remove the existing infringing material from its website www.casansaar.com.

Reasoning

1. Editorial comments/case head notes are developed independently by qualified and skilled people consisting of Chartered Accountants, Company Secretaries and law graduates after expending considerable efforts and substantial expense and are proprietary material which qualify as original 'literary works' under Section 2(o) of the Copyright Act, 1957 and are entitled to copyright protection under Sections 13 and 14(a) of the Act. Hence, the exclusive right to use thereof vests in the person who developed it or the person who get it developed by professionals like plaintiff.No one else can use the same without proper authority or permission.

2. The Plaintiff provided examples of cases uploaded on its website and the defendent's website in this regard. Perusal of which showed that the head notes of the defendant were almost similar to that of the plaintiff. Thus, the plaintiff was able to make out a strong prima facie case for grant of ad interim injunction.

(See 2015-TIOL-2730-HC-DEL-MISC)