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.