Copyright is the one intellectual property right you get for free and without applying. What registration buys you is proof.
Protection is automatic
Under the Copyright Act, 1957, copyright subsists in original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, cinematograph films and sound recordings, from the moment the work is created and fixed in some form. India is a signatory to the Berne Convention, under which protection cannot be made conditional on any formality. There is no requirement to register, publish, or use the © symbol.
What registration actually gives you
- An entry in the Register of Copyrights, which is prima facie evidence of the particulars entered, including ownership and date
- A document you can put in front of a court, a marketplace, or a customs officer without first proving authorship from scratch
- Practical leverage in takedown and licensing negotiations
In a contested case, the difference between having a certificate and having to prove creation through drafts, file metadata and witnesses is substantial. That is the real argument for registering anything commercially important.
The evidential value comes from the Act itself: the Register of Copyrights is prima facie evidence of the particulars entered in it, and certified copies of entries are admissible in every court without further proof or production of the original. In practice that means you prove ownership by producing a certified extract rather than by putting the author in the witness box, which changes both the cost and the timetable of a case.
What registration involves
The application is made to the Registrar of Copyrights in the prescribed form with the prescribed fee, and copies of the work. Two features surprise applicants. First, after the application is filed and a diary number issued, there is a mandatory waiting period of thirty days for any objection to be received, and it cannot be shortened however straightforward the work. If an objection comes in, both sides are heard before the application proceeds. Second, the fee is fixed per work and varies by the class of work, with a software or artistic work used in relation to goods costing more than an ordinary literary work, so take the current figure from the Copyright Office rather than assuming a single rate. Our step-by-step note on copyright registration in India, the process, works and term goes through the forms, the statement of particulars and what to file for software.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, never the idea itself. A business concept, a plot premise, a method or a functional process is outside it. Two people can independently write on the same subject and both hold copyright in their own text. This is the most common misunderstanding I encounter.
Term
For literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, the author's lifetime plus 60 years. For films, sound recordings and anonymous works, 60 years from publication.
Two refinements matter when you are working out whether something has fallen into the public domain. The sixty years runs from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year of the author's death, or of publication, rather than from the date itself, so a work always expires on the last day of a year. And in a work of joint authorship the clock runs from the death of the author who dies last.
Photographs are a common trap. The separate provision that once gave photographs a term of sixty years from publication was repealed by the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012. A photograph is an artistic work, so it now takes the general term of the author's lifetime plus sixty years. Anyone treating an old photograph as free because it was published more than sixty years ago is very likely to be wrong.
Assignment must be in writing
Under Section 19, an assignment of copyright must be in writing and signed, and must specify the work, the rights assigned, the duration and the territory. If duration is not stated it is presumed to be five years, and if territory is not stated it is presumed to be India. This is the clause that catches companies out when they commission work and never take a written assignment.
The section carries two further traps. It requires the assignment to specify the royalty or other consideration payable to the author or the author's heirs during its currency. And where the assignee does not exercise the rights assigned within one year of the assignment, the assignment of those rights is deemed to have lapsed, unless the agreement provides otherwise. A company that takes an assignment and then shelves the work can therefore lose it by inaction, which is a good reason to displace that default expressly.
The layered structure of rights is easiest to see in music, where the lyrics are a literary work, the composition a musical work, and the recording a separate sound recording, each capable of belonging to a different person. Our note on who owns a Bollywood song unpacks that chain, and if you are on the other side of it, our guide to copyright infringement remedies in India sets out the injunction, damages and account of profits available and how a certificate of registration shortens the route to them.