A Comparative Analysis of Ownership of Copyright Under US, UK & India

Abstract

The meaning of copyright is to have the sole right to produce or reproduce the whole work or any part of that work. Thereof, if any person produces or reproduces that whole work or part of the work and the work has the copyright for another person then the copyright in the work is deemed infringed. The sole right to produce the work is conferred to the owner of the copyright. To keep pace with the new technological developments, the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 was amended in 1983 & 1984. The wave of liberalization of the Indian economy was, indeed, a positive and major step in the direction of free-market and competition. But outdated copyright law was a major hurdle in integrating India with the international business community. The United States, in fact, did keep India as a black-listed trade partner under the notoriously called Super 301 and asked India to make its Patent, Copyright, and Trademark laws more effective and at par with International Standards. It was at this stage that the Copyright (Second Amendment) Bill, 1992 was introduced in Parliament. It is, indeed, heartening to note that the said Bill was finally passed and assented to in 1994. The present work proposed to undertake a comparative study of Indian copyright law with that of copyright laws of the United Kingdom and the United States. It was thought proper to study English Copyright law not only because Indian law on the subject has heavily borrowed from the former but also due to India's historical links with Great Britain. The choice of United States was again made for two reasons, first, the United States Copyright law has also for historical reasons been influenced by the British Common law, and secondly, as in the early years of Independence from Britain, the United States opted for national needs rather than the copyright protection, how far India can benefit from the United States experiences when in the changed global scenario, it is the United States itself which threatened India to update its copyright regime. The study, thus, wishes to test the hypothesis that Indian Copyright law is highly inadequate as compared to Copyright laws of the United Kingdom and the United States even after the latest amendment. As to the ‘subject-matter of copyright’, the study reveals that there is substantial similarity in the laws of the three countries studied here. In these three countries, there is a general agreement that the quality or merit of work are matters of taste and do not enter into the question of what is work. Nor is there a prescribed degree of originality, ability, or amount of skill and knowledge necessary to create the work or a measure of resources used to produce it. Unlike for a patent, where novelty is essential, there is no such requirement for copyright.