iWorld
PPL & Novex: The music royalty collection question
Mumbai: Are music royalty collecting agencies like Novex Communications and Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) entitled to collect performance royalties on behalf of their clients from organisations such as hotels and others? Well, the Bombay high court (court) has adjudicated (decision) that they are in a bunch of matters, namely Novex Communications vs Trade Wings Hotels Ltd, Comip suit No. 264 of 2022 and others (said matters), despite them not being registered as a copyright society. A single judge bench passed a detailed judgement on 24 January 2024 in favour of the two (plaintiffs).
In 2022, the duo had filed a bunch of suits against various third parties (defendants) seeking injunctions against them from using the sound recordings, wherein the former own copyright by way of assignments from the respective producers (said songs), without obtaining licences from the plaintiffs.
The defendants raised a preliminary issue that the PPL and Novex cannot carry on the business of licensing without being registered as a copyright society under section (s.) 33 of the Copyright Act, 1957 (“Act”).
Rival contentions:
Plaintiffs inter alia contended the following:
(i) As per s.18(2), Plaintiffs being the assignees are the owners of copyright in the said songs. Further, as per s.30, the Plaintiffs, being the owners / duly authorised agents of the owners, are entitled to grant licenses;
(ii) Relying on compulsory license and statutory license provisions under s. 31A to D, Plaintiffs contended that these provisions do not mention copyright societies which implies that copyright licensing business need not be done only through a registered copyright society;
(iii) Chapter VII relating to copyright societies which was introduced by 1994 amendment to the Act did not affect the rights of a copyright owner to issue licenses for its work. This is corroborated by s.34 of the Act which allows a copyright owner to withdraw itself from the copyright society. Thus, the copyright society provides an additional option to the owners to grant licenses through a copyright society in addition to (and not in exclusion to) issuing licenses on their own;
(iv) S.33(1) of the Act which provides that no ‘person’ shall carry on the business of licensing without being registered as a copyright society does not include the ‘owner’ of a work. If ‘owner’ is deemed to be included within the term ‘person’, then s.30 which empowers an owner to issue license will be rendered negatory;
(v) Two conflicting provisions (s.30 which entitles an owner to grant license and s.33 which entitles only a registered copyright society to grant license) should be reconciled by restricting each to its own object. Relying on the headings of s. 30, 33 and 34, Plaintiffs contended that all that is required is if a copyright society wants to do business of issuing licenses, then it must be registered as a copyright society as per s.33 and this does not curtail the owner’s right to license under s.30;
(vi) The term ‘business’ in s.33 of the Act should be given a contextual meaning to read as ‘business of issuing licenses in respect of works which are not owned by such person’. If the term ‘business’ is given a wider meaning, then 99 per cent of the ownership rights will be taken away and the copyright owners would only be able to license their rights for philanthropy;
(vii) Considering there is an apparent conflict between s.30 and 33 of the Act, s.30 is the leading provision and s.33 is a subordinate provision which must give way to s.30;
(viii) The second proviso was needed since the Parliament was clear that s.33(1) did not prevent all owners including authors from licensing their copyrights for profit and since parliament wanted to draw distinction between the authors and the owners the second proviso became necessary. Hence it is specifically mentioned that licensing by the authors of the underlying works will only be done by the copyright society; ‘Parliament is deemed to know the law and therefore the fact that the Parliament has amended s.33(1) in 2012 by adding the second proviso shows that Parliament itself did not think s.33(1) barred every owner of a copyright from carrying on the business of licensing his works’.
(ix) As per second proviso to s.33(1), in case of underlying works forming part of sound recordings, the rights of owners to grant licenses have been taken away. Such a prohibition is not there for sound recordings. This means that rights of owners of sound recordings to grant licenses have not been curtained. With respect to Madras High Court order in Novex v DXC Technology (“DXC case”), the Madras High Court wrongly applied the second proviso to sound recordings;
(x) Defendants are rank infringers and they have no plausible defense;
In response, the defendants inter alia contended the following:
(i) The term ‘person’ in s.33(1) of the Act includes ‘owner’. Thus, without registration as a copyright society, no one can carry on the business of licensing;
(ii) There is no conflict between s.30 and 33 of the Act. s.30 provides a right to an owner to grant license. Once the owner carries on business of licensing, then it has to first seek registration as a copyright society. Assuming there is any conflict, s.33 being a special provision must prevail over s.30 which is a general provision;
(iii) S.33 does not take away the right of an owner to grant license as contended by the Plaintiffs. It merely regulates the same by way of providing an obligation to register as a copyright society;
(iv) 1st proviso to s.33 which exempt owners in their ‘individual capacity’ from registration as a copyright society does not apply to Plaintiffs who are not acting in their individual capacity;
(v) The assignment deeds in favour of the Plaintiffs are executed to circumvent the requirement of registration as a copyright society;
(vi) Plaintiffs’ acts are in contravention of s.33(1), and therefore, they are not entitled to any reliefs from this Hon’ble Court;
(vii) PPL was earlier registered as a copyright society and it is still trying to obtain registration. This shows that PPL is aware that it is required to be registered as a copyright society;
(viii) If Plaintiffs’ contention is accepted, then s.33(1) would be rendered redundant;
(ix) The law intends that there must be a single copyright society for one class of work to ensure a single window for end-users;
(x) The law clearly seeks to address a mischief, i.e., of a person carrying on the business of licensing without regulation. Accordingly, Heydon’s Rule or Mischief Rule must be applied to suppress the mischief that was intended to be remedied, especially when Parliament has consciously made an amendment to the law;
(xi) The Supreme Court’s decision in “ENIL v Super Cassette Industries Ltd”, the Parliamentary Debates and extracts from Copinger make it amply clear that the object of copyright societies is not just to promote rights of owners but to balance it with public interest by protecting the interests of users.
Decision:
After considering the rival contentions and provisions of the Act, the Court observed as follows:
S.30 empowers an owner / duly authorised agent of an owner to grant license;
The idea of a copyright society is to assist the owner and not take away rights from an owner.
As per s.34(1)(b), an owner can either issue license through a registered copyright society or withdraw its authorisation to copyright society and grants license on its own;
Chapter VII relating to copyright society does not take away the rights of owners to grant license. It only gives a choice to the owner to either exploit its copyright on its own or through a copyright society;
The word ‘person’ in s.33(1) does not include the ‘owner’, otherwise s.33(1) would take aware the right of owner under s.30;
S.33(1) applies to those entities which carry on the business of licensing of work which is owned by ‘others’;
S.30 is the leading provision and s.33(1) is the subordinate provision which must give way to s.30;
DXC case overlooked s.30 and wrongly applied second proviso of s.33(1) which relates to underlying works;
In view of the above, the court held that the plaintiffs are entitled to carry on the business of copyright licensing without being registered as copyright societies. The court further clarified that the decision will also apply to ‘exclusive licensee’ as under s.54, the ‘owner of copyright’ also includes an ‘exclusive licensee’.
Comments:
The court has analysed the provisions of the act in detail and passed the decision on a long pending question. However, the decision is diametrically opposite to the detailed judgment in DXC case against which appeals are pending before the division bench of the Madras High Court. It remains to be seen if the decision is carried in appeal. Considering the differing stands taken by the courts, it would be in the interest of all that the question is tested and answered once and for all, by the Hon’ble Supreme court.
Written by Anushree Rauta – equity partner- head of media and entertainment practice, Shwetank Tripathi – associate partner, Shrija Verma- associate, and Savan Dhameliya – associate.
This is an article sourced from the Indiantelevision.com group legal representative firm, ANM Global, and the group need not subscribe to the views contained in it.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
