Continuing with the trend of using technology to bring more transparency and to transform India into a digital empowered society, the Indian Copyright Office has recently taken some significant steps and issued important public notices. There has been an appointment of Mr. Hoshiar Singh who has taken over the charge of Registrar, Copyright Office with effect from 7th August 2017. The new Registrar has already issued two important notices, details of which are as under:
- The public notice dated September 01, 2017 indicates that the Copyright Office will publish on its website, the list of application received for registration of copyrights. This publication would be treated as a notice to every person who claims or has any interest in the subject matter of copyright or disputes the rights of the applicant. In case no objection is received within 30 days of the publication, the said copyright application would be examined for further necessary action. It also points that if the notice is issued to the applicant and no work/documents are received within 30 days, it would be assumed that the applicant has no work/document to submit and as such, the application would be treated as abandoned, without further notice, with a liberty to apply fresh. The list of such applications would be published on first Friday of every month.
- In another public notice, the Copyright Office has decided to publish, on its website, every entry made in the Register of Copyright or the particulars of any work under Section 45, the correction of every entry made in the register and every rectification ordered on monthly basis from January 01, 2017.
For the last few months, the Copyright Office has been uploading the lists of deficient copyright registration applications and through different public notices, the applicants were requested to remove the respective discrepancies within a specified date. In cases where the applicants have failed to reply/remove respective discrepancies, the applications are ordered to be abandoned. The purpose of this drive is to reduce the back log of the pending copyright applications which are pending due to non-compliance of the objections raised by the Copyright office.
Another public notice dated August 24, 2017 informs that application for registration as copyright society has been submitted by Screenwriters rights association of India (SRAI) for literary work such as story, script, screen play, dialogues or any other literary work excluding lyrics. The Copyright Office has invited objections/ suggestions from the general public/stakeholders on the application filed by SRAI and such comments/suggestions can be sent to registrar.copyrights@gov.in and by post to Copyright Office within 21 days of the publication of notice on official website.
The initiatives such as availability of e filing of copyright application, dissemination of information such as applications and registrations by making them available online and steps to reduce the back log of pending copyright applications are definitely progressive in nature and will help in strengthening the trust for the protection of Intellectual property rights in the minds of stakeholders.
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