Established - 1954
Copyright refers to a bundle of exclusive rights vested in the owner of copyright by virtue of Section 14 of the Copyright Act.
The Copyright law protects expressions of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. Under section 13 of the Copyright Act 1957, copyright protection is conferred on literary works, dramatic works, musical works, artistic works, cinematograph films and sound recording.
The Indian media and entertainment industry has been reeling under the ill effects of piracy which blatantly delves into copyright infringement. This has a ripple effect on the industry in terms of impacting profitability resulting in lower capital investment - lesser film production - lower job creation. Also, infringed copies of film appear online within hours of release of film and affects box office performance of the film.
The producers fraternity suffers huge monetary losses with every film of theirs losing out on richly deserved box office revenue & affects the distribution & exhibition sectors too in the value chain and the overall impact on the industry is thus even worse with a significant number of persons depending on the industry for their livelihood also falling victims to the scourge of piracy.
The substantively injuring effect of piracy on copyright protection can be gauged from the fact that though Hindi film industry makes most feature films in the world it still earns barely 2% of the revenues made by Hollywood. Hollywood is the largest film industry in the world and India despite having 1/6th of world population and fourth largest economy is merely a marginal market for Hollywood. The same applies for other vectors of the industry such as music, television, gaming & the primary reason for this anomaly is the menace of piracy which is severely hurting copyright protection with respect to the Hindi film industry in particular and the Indian film industry on the whole.
