Advantages And Disadvantages Of Copyright

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The exclusive rights granted by Copyright have been enumerated in Section 14 of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, (the “Act”). The precise rights which the copyright holder enjoys with respect to a specific work would vary depending on the nature of the work. However, plain reading of the section would lead us to conclude that regardless of the kind of work, the owner would be the only person entitled to exercise (or authorise the exercise of) the rights listed in the said section, and further, that one of the rights under the said section is the right to issue copies of the work to the public (not being copies already in circulation) and/or communicate the work to the public . Section 14 contains a number of provisions which deal with different…show more content…
Copies which have once been sold are deemed to be copies already in circulation. A question which has repeatedly arisen with respect to the exhaustion of rights in literary works is: Where are the rights of the copyright owner under Section 14(a)(ii) exhausted? Are they exhausted, by the first legal sale, only in India, in a specific territory in which the copyright owner intends that particular copy of the work to be sold, or are the rights of the copyright owner exhausted throughout the world? Once a copy of has been sold, the Act states that it is deemed to be in circulation. However, the Act does not clarify where it is deemed to be in circulation. If it is deemed to be in circulation in India, it would follow that it is that right of the copyright owner to issue copies of the work to the public not being copies which have already been sold in India. As such, the copyright owner would have lost or exhausted its right to re-issue that copy only in India. Its rights beyond the territory of India would remain intact. However, to reach such a conclusion, it would be necessary to rely on the territorial nature of copyright, and the fact that the Act applies only to India. The second possibility is that the rights are exhausted in those territories where the copyright owner intends that the work be sold. This is a possibility which the Indian Courts have tended to veer towards, although the logic has not always been entirely

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