Hunting the Pirates: The Guruji and BharatStudent amongst others to be caught in recent T-Series Rampage

An Indian music giant is out to hunt pirates. And how! Instituting copyright infringement proceedings against YouTube & Yahoo! for copyright infringement was only the beginning of the T-Series in court. As reported by the Economic Times, the company has also confirmed to notices issued to websites, including MSN, MySpace, Guruji.com and Bharatstudent.com. [Read Spicy posts on the Youtube and T-Series case here and here. Read also, Sumathi's post on the rumoured out of court settlement, which T-Series has denied in the same ET article].

The offence: (In the words of their Vice President- Digital Content, Mr. Neeraj Kalyan) "Facilitating" or "providing" a platform for users to upload copyrighted content without any form of payment makes these websites equally guilty of copyright theft.

The whole controversy is especially interesting since the company claims that being the copyright owner, the Indian Copyright will be applicable, and that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will not provide MNCs (here namely, Google owned YouTube and Yahoo!) protection. [Long ago, Duncan had posted on a possible Indian DMCA as well as responded to a comment on the sections similar to the same in the Indian Copyright Act: Section 79 as well as the shortcomings as against the DMCA.]

Other infringers such as Guruji.com and Bharatstudent.com, offer "meta data—listing and tagging of songs" and even the uploading of videos in case of the latter site, instead of a mere link display related to the search term. The allegations have obviously been strongly refuted that claim to be doing nothing outside the purview of the what a search engine usually performs, and claim to not host any such infringing content.

While the outcome is something that we will closely follow, referring to an old post of my own as well as Swaraj's recent post, it is good to see the music industry finally waking up to take stock of their rights.