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India to Forbid Song Covers?
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Friday, September 26 @ 19:23:35 EDT Copyright
Badri Natarajan writes:

An amendment to the Indian Copyright Act has been proposed, and will likely be passed in Parliament in a couple of months, after sustained pressure and lobbying by the music industry in India. The effort has been led by Universal Music India (among others) with some prominent composers and musicians acting as the figureheads and personally lobbying important Cabinet ministers.

Currently, the Copyright Act, in S.52(1)(j) explicitly allows the making of cover versions of songs (called "version recordings" - the provision is actually broader than just cover versions and encompasses things like remixes and so on), two years after the original recording is released, on a compulsory licensing+royalty basis. However, the music industry wants to delete the entire section so that "version recordings" are banned completely (barring permission at the discretion of the copyright holder of course, and we know how likely that is).

The ostensible reason for this is to battle music piracy. They claim that most music distributors sell cover versions and then underreport the sales and pay virtually no royalty at all. While this no doubt occurs, solving the problem is an enforcement issue changing the law to outlaw an entire category of legitimate use of music achieves nothing except give the music industry a really big stick (ie, copyright infringement instead of mere failure to properly account for sales) to wield against the music distributors at the cost of outlawing cover versions and remixes in music.

Of course, music that is independently covered by the Indian version of fair use, (called “fair dealing” and based on British law) will still be allowed, but that will only save a tiny fraction of the music that takes advantage of this provision. One of the main benefits of this provision has been to make music accessible cheaply to the masses. For example, when the soundtrack to a new film is released (by far the most popular genre of music in India), the demand for it is immense and the record labels have virtual carte blanche to sell it at any price they wish. However, starting in the 1970s and 80s, enterprising music distributors released cheap cover versions of popular songs (some of which were not covers but outright pirate versions) and significantly expanded the existing market by making music accessible to people who could never afford it before.

In this lobbying campaign, the music industry has also not hesitated to make some rather far-out arguments which tend to appeal to the religious right (which dominates the multi-party ruling coalition in India). These are along the lines of how song remixes are evil and mixing "pure" Indian music with music from other cultures is distasteful and further evidence of how our culture is polluted by American music, etc.

Although this amendment is likely to pass unimpeded, one can only hope that (in the absence of organized protest against it), the music distributors’ lobby will take some action against it.

 
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Re: India to Forbid Song Covers? (Score: 1)
by Sphere1952 on Saturday, September 27 @ 14:40:35 EDT
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Let them add stupid restriction on top of idiotic constraint. All it will do is speed the end of their control. See A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 5TH OF FEBRUARY 1841 [yarchive.net] by Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Best part: "I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."


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