The manner in which the copyright came to be acquired by Sony was as follows:
One Echo Recording Company Pvt Ltd acquired copyright in the sound recordings from various producers of movies which included musical works written and composed by Ilaiyaraaja. It included 536 title albums.
Thus, Echo became the absolute owner of copyright with respect to sound recordings over which the producers had earlier held ownership/ copyright.
Echo entered into an assignment agreement with one Oriental Records USA thereby assigning all ownership rights to them.
After this, through a Catalogue Acquisition Agreement, Sony Music acquired absolute exclusive assignment from Oriental of those sound recordings.
IMMPL then approached the Madras High Court claiming adverse right, title and interest in respect of 310 songs. The Madras High Court rejected all the claims by Ilaiyaraaja except for the moral rights over the literary and musical work written or composed by him.
It held that Echo was the legal owner of the sound recordings and was entitled to exploit the same.
After acquiring the substantial copyrighted works from Echo, Sony entered into a confidentiality agreement with IMMPL to purchase their remaining repertoire.
During such talks, Sony stated that they intended to exploit the acquired copyrighted works through various modes and mediums including digital distribution.
However, in December 2021, Sony discovered that the Echo repertoire was available on YouTube and the defendants had started broadcasting, distributing and communicating it to the public.
Out of the 536 titles, 115 are available on YouTube alone while a total of 228 have been illegally broadcast and communicated to the public, the suit said.
Source: Barandbench
