The plaintiff, Radio Today Broadcasting Ltd. (RTB), wished to run a radio station on the FM band, known as "Radio Today", and intended to play both film and non-film songs on their radio station. They paid licence fees t

The plaintiff, Radio Today Broadcasting Ltd. (RTB), wished to run a radio station on the FM band, known as "Radio Today", and intended to play both film and non-film songs on their radio station. They paid licence fees to the producers of the film and non-film songs, who were members of Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL). However, they did not intend to pay any royalties to the lyricists, composers and other artists, who were members of the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS), the defendant. The defendant threatened the plaintiff with violation of copyright law if the songs were played on their radio station, and the plaintiff filed the instant action claiming protection under section 60 of the Copyright Act 1957. The plaintiff filed the present suit to seek an injunction against the continuance of threats of infringement, and the defendant filed a counterclaim alleging copyright infringement by the plaintiff. The issue before the High Court of Calcutta was whether the plaintiff radio station was obliged to pay any royalty and/or licence fees to IPRS for the songs broadcasted through its radio station in addition to the licence fees paid to PPL, a society of producers. The court held, following the Supreme Court decision in IPRS v. Eastern Indian Motion Pictures Association (EIMPA) that though the right of a composer or lyricist in respect of a song that was put into the sound track of a film was "extinguished" when he was paid, he could nonetheless still claim copyright in his song and reserve his right to assign it to others for commercial exploitation of his work in other modes if there was an express agreement between him and the producer of the film reserving his copyright. In the present case, the plaintiff radio station did not contend that the IPRS members had assigned their exclusive rights to the producers by agreement. The court held that unless it was shown that these exclusive rights of the IPRS members were expressly assigned in favour of the members of PPL, IPRS was entitled to claim royalties from the plaintiff if it wanted to exploit the work by broadcasting the songs on its proposed radio station. This decision is noteworthy for it affirmed, following the Supreme Court decision in IPRS v. EIMPA, the separate nature of the authorship rights of composers and lyricists in their musical compositions, and the derivative rights of producers in the sound tracks of their movies. It resolved the misunderstanding that the Indian composers' and lyricists' as authors could not licence their songs for use with other media once they were assimilated into the producers' films as sound tracks. On the facts, the plaintiff radio broadcaster was held to require licences from both IPRS (representing the composers and lyricists) as well as PPL (representing the producers of both "film" and "non-film" songs) in order to secure permission to broadcast all the songs on their radio station. With the liberalization of the broadcasting industry by the Indian government since October 1999 to grant licences for private FM stations to provide entertainment-related broadcasting services, this decision affirmed the necessity for FM broadcasters to seek both IPRS and PPL licences for the broadcast of music (songs) and pay royalties to both. Discuss briefly the relevant provision of the Copyright Act dealing with the Statutory Licence for Broadcasting of Literary and Musical Works and Sound Recording.