If you have been following our blog, you will know that sometime ago, we had filed a copyright infringement case against another Indian company from Nasik for blatantly copying the entire user interface and functionality of ActiveCiti.
I agree that imitation is the best form of flattery – but blatantly downloading pages from someone else’s web property and then just doing a search-replace to put your name in — is just wrong!
Anyways, even though many people have told us that we’ve gone overboard with actually filing a criminal case against the accused company, I beg to differ. We have spent time, money and effort in developing something and we are going to defend it to the best we can.
During the entire case – which is already 8 months old, we have learnt quite a few things about Copyrights – and more importantly, “Copyrights in India”. In this post, I want to share some of this information with you…
The Berne Convention
The Berne Convention was an international agreement governing copyright issues and India is a signatory in this. What this means is that India will respect copyrights given by other signatory countries and other countries will respect the copyrights on works that India issues.
Copyrights in India
Copyright protects the artistic expression of an idea.
To put it more simply, ideas can be patented and expressions can be copyrighted.
As software cannot be (thankfully) patented in India, the best you can do is to get your work copyrighted.
Technically, all you need to do to copyright a website is put the words – “Copyright [Company Name]. [Years for which the copyright is valid]“
However, this does not work at all in the court of law – for obvious reason.
Hence, even though it is an expensive process, we went ahead and filed an application for obtaining the copyright – the legal way. To do this, we had to send all the material that we wanted to copyright (i.e. the entire website) in triplicate to the Copyright office in Delhi.
The Copyright office is located at:
The Ministry of Human Resource Development
Department of Secondary Education & Higher Education
Copyright Office
B2/W3, Curzon Road Barracks,
K.G. Marg, New Delhi – 110001
Tel: 3384387, -2549, -2458 / Extn. 31
Once they received this, they immediately issued us a receipt for the same (stating that our application is in process). The process generally takes 3 to 4 months to complete after which you will receive your copyright certificate.
Once done, you own the copyright for your work for 60 years.
Major changes made to the work warrant another copyright.
However, we are not very sure whether making subtle changes to the original work requires this.
Anyways, the process for obtaining a copyright is slightly complicated with quite a few forms to fill.
And the only copyright office being in Delhi, it makes sense obtaining the help of a lawyer or a firm which specializes in this.
Posted by Saurabh Jain 
