Understand Copyright (Amendment) Bill and why broadcasters oppose it

Television broadcasters  are up in arms, protesting last minute changes in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010 which will now be presented in the Rajya Sabha, and, if passed, result in the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2011.

Thanks to these proposed changes, the  television industry will be kept out of the ambit of the statutory licensing provisions, reports The Economic Times .

“Statutory licensing provisions would have made it mandatory for content owners and music companies to provide content to television companies without any discrimination and on reasonable royalties as determined by the Copyright Board,” explains the article.

What are the other changes and the ramifications thereof?

Nandita Saikia has done us yeoman service by uploading her analysis of the changes to the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2010.

According to her analysis, the major changes are as follows:

• The deletion of the proposed amendment to Section 2(m) of the Copyright Act, 1957

• The omission of the references to the principal director of a film;

• The clarification of ownership of rights and the sharing of royalties with reference to  the underlying works used in films;

• The revision of clauses dealing with access to copyrighted works be persons who have disabilities;

The “strengthening” of the proposed so-called safe harbour clauses with reference now being made to “transient OR incidental storage” as opposed to the earlier “transient AND incidental storage”.

Saikia adds a disclaimer that her analysis “may not be entirely accurate, and is intended to be used exclusively for academic discussion.”

Rather than reinvent the wheel, we thought we’d upload the pdf file with her annotations so that readers could review the document easily. Firstpost thanks Saikia for allowing us (and anyone else interested) for disseminating the document.

You can view the entire document below: Copyright Amendment Bill 2011

If there are any errors in it, please inform Saikia of them at saikianandita@gmail.com or use the comments box.