T-Series Issues Notice To Guruji.com Amongst Others
By Cerius Shah - Thu 17 Jul 2008 11:39 AM PST
Sure enough, the days without incident were indeed numbered. T-series has issued a notice to Guruji.com amongst other websites including MSN, MySpace and Bharatstudent. It has accused them of allowing users to upload content on their platforms. The report features quotes from T-Series, VP (digital content), Neeraj Kalyan, stating in essence that T-series will battle it out till the end until they reach either an out-of-court settlement or manage an injunction against the websites. It also states that T-series believes Youtube, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and MySpace can’t take harbour under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if the copyright holder is Indian. Although it states that in this case the Indian Copyright Act 1957 would apply, I doubt the good folks in 1957 ever forsaw how we would consume media in the 21st Century.
T-Series states that Guruji.com is offering meta-data (listing and song tags) instead of merely displaying links related to the search term. Guruji, as expected, is stating it’s doing nothing outside the purview of what a search engine is supposed to do and, specifically, isn’t hosting the copyrighted content.
The Indian movie industry reportedly posted a loss for the first six months of 2008, with only four films managing to pull their weight at the box office amongst a total of 116 films. T-series, which supposedly controls 60% market share, relies on these movies for their music library. It seems it’s offline business is feeling the strain from the shift in consumption patterns, hence the attempt to monetize through content deals with UGC platforms like iShare. The fact remains that even if T-Series were to win an injuction against all the platform providers, users, some of whom may not know the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, will still pirate content.
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