Music company T-Series has issued notices for copyright violations to multiple social video platforms, including Bolo Indya, Mitron, MX Player’s Takatak, Triller and Josh. The company has also warned them against using its work on their platforms in any form.
The Super Cassettes Industries Private Limited, which operates under the brand name T-Series, has reportedly asked each of these short-video platforms to pay around Rs 3.5 crore in damage. It has also asked them to “render accounts of all revenues illegally earned” by the platforms from the copyrighted content, as per infringement notice. The company has also served notice to Chinese app ‘Snack Video’, (operational in India) and filed a lawsuit against short-video app ‘Roposo’.
When PTI contacted the T-Series-appointed Ira Law firm, they confirmed the issuance of notices to these platforms. Geetanjali Visvanathan, Partner at Ira Law, said to PTI, that a legal notice to the named video apps have been served and a lawsuit against Roposo has been filed but made no further comments. Bolo Indya in response to an e-mail query sent by PTI said it does not offer audio and video library as a feature to users as of the date and thus there is no base for any breach of music rights.
“We are a UGC (user-generated content) platform and due to the ban of Chinese applications, a lot of content creators started to upload those videos which they created on those apps. These videos weren’t created on our platform and any such video reported from time to time, where any possible breach of IPR is there, is immediately removed from the platform,” Bolo Indya founder Varun Saxena said. He said that his firm always requests music companies to work collaboratively with it like they do with YouTube and report any copyrighted content.
“When in future we will launch audio library as a function, we will work in a very collaborative manner with all the leading music companies as we respect their rights and are committed to build a cohesive and strongly synergetic environment of all Indian companies growing together,” Saxena said. Triller declined to comment on the issue and other companies did not revert to the query.
The demand for new video-based social media apps rose in the country after the government banned popular Chinese apps Tiktok, Helo, Likee, Bigo Live etc.
T-Series said that its proprietary repertoire comprises over 40,000 videos and more than 1.5 lakh songs, accounting for more than 20,000 hours of music available in various languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Bhojpuri etc.
The music and entertainment company said that most of the major global internet giants such as Facebook, Amazon, etc, and top mobile application owners such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Music, Gaana, Saavn, Wynk, Spotify, etc, have already taken licences from T-Series for use of its copyrighted content.
