MUMBAI: Music company Super Cassettes Industries, which owns the label T-Series, has moved the High Court Of Delhi against YouTube LLC and its parent company Google Inc. on account of rank infringement of its copyright in music by these companies.

YouTube invites and encourages members to upload videos (including music videos from films and music albums) on YouTube.com that are accessible to anyone surfing the web for free while YouTube and Google Inc., earn substantial revenues from advertisements on the website.

The business model of YouTube thus allows, encourages and profits from use of copyrighted work uploaded on the website without obtaining any license or permission from the rightful copyright owners and without paying them any royalty. 

On 5 November, 2007 the High Court of Delhi, after hearing Amit Sibal, counsel for SCIL, issued notice and summons against YouTube LLC and Google, Inc. in a suit filed by Super Cassettes Industries Limited and passed an interim order restraining them from reproducing, adapting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, disseminating or displaying on their websites or otherwise infringing in any manner any audio visual works in which the SCIL owns exclusive, valid and subsisting copyright. Thus, by this order High Court of Delhi has granted an injunction against the business practice of YouTube of earning profits at the expense of a rightful copyright owner.

During the course of hearing Sibal said that SCIL’s revenue comes from manufacturing and selling DVDs, CDs and audio cassettes of its copyrighted music and from royalties collected by licensing the copyrighted music to hotels, restaurants, television companies, radio stations, telecom operators and internet websites.

YouTube.com has been showing videos of SCIL’s copyrighted songs without SCIL’s license or permission. Sibal argued that YouTube and Google profit at SCIL’s expense by showing SCIL’s songs for free to the public, while displaying advertising on the screen and collecting revenue from the advertisers based on the number of hits on the site. The profits from this business model, which is based on copyright infringement, are enormous, as is indicated by the fact that Google paid $1.65 billion in stock to acquire YouTube.

“T-Series is the largest music company out of South Asia with our catalog spanning 16 languages across several hundred thousand music tracks including music videos. There are websites who encourage unlicensed sharing and distribution of copyright content, which is a new form of piracy in the digital medium. Copyright is the engine of creative output of popular content. We have to ensure that the incentive to create and distribute popular content is protected from these large corporates which are trying to profit by destroying the value of the hard work of thousands of artistes, for whom their creative output is perhaps their only source of livelihood.”

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