MORAL RIGHTS

INTRODUCTION
• Le droit moral (french) – spiritual, personal,
non economic
• Rights are perpetual and inalienable
• Rights : 1. To be known as Author
2. To prevent others from falsely
attributing to him the authorship of a work
that he has not written
3. To prevent others from being
named as Author of his work.
 Cont.

4. To publish anonymously or pseudonymously

5. To prevent others from using the work in such
a way as to reflect adversely on his professional
standing.
6. To prevent others from making deforming
changes in the work.
7. To publish work or withheld from
dissemination.
 Berne Convention
• Art – 6 bis – Independently of author’s
economic right and even after the transfer of
the said right, author shall have the right to
claim authorship of the work and to object
any distortion, mutilation or other
modification of or other derogatory action in
relation to the said work which shall be
prejudicial to his honour and reputation.
 SEC 57 – SPECIAL RIGHT
• Independently of author’s copyright and even
after assignment of copyright either wholly or
partially
• Author’s right to claim authorship
• Right to restrain and claim damages in respect
of any distortion, mutilation , modification or
other act prejudicial to his honour or
reputation
 Cont.
• No right regarding adaptation of computer program.
• Failure to display work to the satisfaction of author
is not covered within moral right
• Enforceable by legal representative.

Arun Chadha vs Oca Productions Pvt. Ltd. &Ors on 5

July, 2012
Neha Bhasin v. Anand Raj Anand,- performers moral
right
 MORAL RIGHTS CASES
• Manu Bhandari v KALA VIKAS PICTURES

• Amarnath Sehgal v. Union of India

• Raj reval v UOI

• Sartaj Singh Pannuv Gurbani Media Pvt. Ltd. & Anr
• it was given that a voluntary waiver is not against
public policy and voluntariness has to be ascertained
based on the evidence available on record.
Castillo v. G&M Realty L.P., No. 18‐
498‐cv (L) (2d Cir. Feb. 20, 2020)
FIRST SALE DOCTRINE/EXHAUSTION
OF RIGHTS/PARALLEL IMPORTATION
• Copyright’s first sale doctrine is that it prevents
restraints on the transfer of lawfully acquired
copies of works by limiting the scope of the
distributionright.

• The copyright owner loses all the rights with regard

to the copy, all throughout the world. It could be
understood as a Right in Rem and it is territory
neutral as the rights would be exhausted in the
entire world.
 Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus 210 U.S. 339
(1908)
• (1) In Bobbs-Merrill, the Supreme Court held that such
restrictions found no support in Copyright law and that
the copyright owner’s exclusive right to “vend” the work
did not create a right to limit or place conditions upon
resale.
• (2) The Bobbs-Merrill Court did not hold that contractual
terms restricting resale were invalid,
• it simply held that violation of those terms was not a
copyright violation. The department store was not bound
by the contract terms for a much simpler reason; it was
not a party to them.
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 133 S.
Ct. 1351 (2013)
• In Kirtsaeng, the majority held that the words
“lawfully made under this title” in Section 109
indicated a principle of international
exhaustion. Based on “§109(a)’s language, its
• context, and the common-law history of the
“first sale” doctrine” the majority of the
• Supreme Court declined to limit the first sale
doctrine to works made in the United States.
 ReDigi v Capitol Records
• Defendants had created an Internet platform
designed to enable the lawful resale, under the first
sale doctrine, of lawfully purchased digital music files,
and had hosted resales of such files on the platform.

• ReDigi’s Internet system version 1.0 infringed the

Plaintiffs’ copyrights by enabling the resale of such
digital files containing sound recordings of Plaintiffs’
copyrighted music right to reproduce their
copyrighted works
• The court held that in the course of ReDigi’s
transfer, the phonorecord has been
reproduced in a manner that violates the
Plaintiffs’ exclusive control of reproduction
under § 106(1); the second was that the digital
files sold through
• ReDigi, being unlawful reproductions, are not
subject to the resale right established by §
109(a),
 INDIAN CASES
• Penguin Books Ltd. v. India Book Distributors
and Ors.
• Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Others v.
Santosh V. G
• John Wiley and Sons Inc. and others v. Prabhat
Chander Kumar Jain and ors [2010] PTC (Delhi
High Court
 Broadcasters Rights
• ESPN Star Sports v. Global Broadcasts News Ltd. & Ors.2008 38 PTC
477 Delhi
• It was alleged by the appellant that the respondents
• commercially exploited the footage and ran them for more than the
prescribed time on their channels in the pretext of broadcasting
news prime time.
• Media Works NZ Limited and Anr. v. Sky Television Network Ltd.,
wherein it was observed that, “fair dealing meant that the extract
must be brief, and should be considered in light of the length of the
• recording. Moreover, the extracts should be used within 24 hours of
the concerned event for it to amount to current events and only be
used in a programme that reported current events, e.g., not in a
review of the player’s career to date.”
 DECISION
• Appellant could use footage length of the maximum limit prescribed by the
ICC Guidelines, that fresh footage would be delayed by at least 30 minutes,
the Appellant should not air any advertisement immediately before, during
or immediately after the said footage, unless said footage is shown in the
news bulletins, in which case, ticker advertisements would be allowed
provided that such advertisements had not been booked by the Appellant
to be shown only during reporting of ICC Twenty 20 World Cup, 2012.

• Also, the advertisement(s)/logo(s) of the sponsor of the news bulletin in

which said footage is shown can be carried by the defendant on tickers at
the time of reporting of the event, only if the sponsorship is of the news
bulletin and the logo and/or advertisement of the sponsor appears on the
ticker(s) throughout the news, except when the advertisements of others
are being aired.
 CASES
• New Delhi Television Ltd. v. ICC Development Ltd & Anr. (2012) 195 DLT 61 (DB)

• The court observed that TV Channels had two choices and only one of them can be
opted in case of special sports news programmes:
• Firstly, to opt to put on the air, an advertisement specifically targeted during special
programmes, and not to use the footage.
• Secondly, to opt to use the footage but not put on the air any advertisements.

• Tips Industries v.Wynk MusicCS IP (L) No. 113 & 114 of 2018, Bombay High Court

• The court ruled that Wynk’s feature of letting customers to download songs and save
them for limitless future use constituted ‘selling’ rather than ‘communication to the
public’, and so did not qualify as a ‘broadcast’ under Sec. 31D. The court ruled that
allowing users to save or cache copyrighted songs on their devices qualifies as
‘making another sound/audio recordings’ embodying the copyrighted work under
Sec. 14(e)(i)
 CASES
• KRISHIKA LULLA AND ORS. V. SHYAM VITHALRAO DEVKATTA AND ORS.
2016 (157) AIC 56 – TITLE OF DESI BOYZ movie is copyrightable??
• SANJEEV PILLAI V. VENU KUNNAPALLI AND ANR. FAO No. 191 of 2019
• AUTHOR’S SPECIAL RIGHTS POST ASSIGNMENT OF COPYRIGHT
• against the Moviestrunk.com & Ors., the defendants, who ran various
internet streaming services, for illegally streaming one of the Plaintiff’s
films
• STAR INDIA PVT. LTD. V. MOVIESTRUNK.COM & ORS. CS(COMM) 408 OF
2019, I.A. 10601 OF 2019 &