The single judge ruling (against which VI has now filed an appeal) was delivered while dealing with three suits filed by Vodafone Idea Limited, Saregama India and the IPRS.
The dispute pertained to the Value Added Service (VAS) provided by Vodafone via its Caller Ring Back Tone (CRBT) service featuring music recordings. While some of these music recordings were owned by Saregama, others were protected by IPRS which represents authors, publishers, and musicians.
The IPRS had contended that Vodafone needed a separate license and royalty payments to use these works. Vodafone disagreed, claiming that it only needed permission from Saregama, the owner of these recordings.
The Court heard the multiple lawsuits – including those filed by IPRS seeking royalties, Saregama seeking an injunction to restrain Vodafone from using its copyrighted recordings and Vodafone that no permission or licence was required for such activity from IPRS. The telco had also sought to implead leading music labels like Sony and Tips.
On May 17, the Court (single judge Bench) concluded that the rights of an author to claim royalties under the amended law cannot be bypassed, even if there was an agreement by which some rights to exploit the sound recordings were assigned to VI.
Source: Barandbench
