T-Series Drags YouTube to Court

Entertainment major T-Series has taken video-sharing website YouTube to court, alleging violation of copyrights for its music products. Bhushan Kumar of T-Series filed a case against YouTube and its parent company Google Inc in the Delhi High Court.

On November 5, the court had issued a notice against YouTube and Google, 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 (Super Cassettes Industries Ltd, which owns the T-Series brand) owns exclusive, valid and subsisting copyright".

"You can free download and upload on YouTube and the website is using our promotional materials without seeking our permission," said Kumar.

"We have been negotiating with them for a long time, but they get away by saying, 'Surfers are doing it, we are not doing anything'. But they are allowing surfers to use their website to do the crime and they should pay for it. It's harming our business."

"More hits means more revenues. People are flocking the website and it earns revenues in millions from advertisements. It encourages people to upload copyrighted work on the website without obtaining any license or permission from the rightful copyright owners and without paying them any royalty," he added.

Kumar claimed that the revenue of the music industry had gone down by 40-50 percent because of the "illegal websites".

"After Google took over YouTube, it paid a huge amount of money to foreign music labels to allow them to use their promotional materials, but they are not doing the same for Indian music companies," he claimed.