A law journal copy-edited a court judgment. It sought copyright by establishing amount of skill, labour and capital put in the inputs of the copy-edited judgment. It was contested on the ground that judicial pronouncemen

A matter having similar facts was decided by the Supreme Court in the case titled Eastern Book Company & Ors. vs. D.B. Modak & Anr. [Appeal (civil) 6472 of 2004, D/ 12/12/2007 (AIR 2008 Supreme Court 809,810)] . As per the judgment, the judicial pronouncements of the Apex Court would be in the public domain and its reproduction or publication would not infringe the copyright law. That being the position, the copy-edited judgments would not satisfy the requirement of being a work which is to be protected by the copyright law merely by establishing some amount of skill, labour and capital put in the inputs of the copy-edited judgments since the original or innovative thoughts contained in the judgment carrying the creativity are completely excluded from being subject to a copyright. Accordingly, the original or innovative thoughts are necessary to establish copyright in the authors' work. The principle that where there is common source the person relying on it must prove that he actually went to the common source from where he borrowed the material, employing his own skill, labour and brain and he did not copy, would not apply to the judgments of the courts because there is no copyright in the judgments of the court, unless so made by the court itself. To secure a copyright for the judgments delivered by the courts, it is necessary that the labour, skill and capital invested should be sufficient to communicate or impart to the judgment printed in some journal some quality or character which the original judgment did not possess and which differentiates the original judgment from the printed one. The Copyright Act is not concerned with the original idea but with the expression of thought. Copyright has nothing to do with originality or literary merit. Copyrighted material is that what is created by the author by his own skill, labour and investment of capital, maybe it is a derivative work which gives a flavor of creativity. The copyright work which comes into being should be original in the sense that by virtue of selection, co-ordination or arrangement of pre-existing data contained in the work, a work somewhat different in character is produced by the author. To claim copyright in a compilation, the author must produce the material with exercise of his skill and judgment which may not be creativity in the sense that it is novel or non-obvious, but at the same time it is not a product of mere labour and capital. The derivative work produced by the author must have some distinguishable features and flavor to raw text of the judgments delivered by the court. The trivial variation or inputs put in the judgment would not satisfy the test of copyright of an author. Adding, in the copy-edited version the cross-citations to the citation(s) already given in the original text; adding names of cases and cross-citations where only the citation of the case is given; inserting citation in case history where only the title and year of the impugned/ earlier order is given; presenting in their own style the cases when they are cited repeatedly in the judgment; providing precise references to the quoted matter in the judgment by giving exact page and paragraph number as in the original case source/treatise/reference material; adding margin headings to quoted extracts from statutes/rules, etc., when they are missing from the original text of the judgment; adding the number of the Section/ Rule/Article/paragraph to the extract quoted in the original text; adding the names of Judges on whose behalf opinion given; adding ellipsis "......" to indicate breaks in quoted extract; supplying the matter inadvertently missed in quoted extracts in the original text of the judgment; changing the text as per corrigenda issued, etc. etc., does not give the Law Journal copyright in the copy-edited judgement. Therefore, the law journal will not succeed in its copyright claim.