T-series new experiment to remixes brings out Masakali 2.0 which raises serious copyright concerns of unauthorized usage and poses threat to the concept of Originality and its appreciations which is the basis of Copyright. Although the controversy sparked poses questions as to what is intellectual creativeness of the mind and what is reiterations and replica of the already established art. The jurisprudence of IP in general connotes a system of incentivization only to promote creativeness to honest labour done. It did not envision the enormous scope it left by not defining Originality under Copyright to be misused through composing obnoxious prototypes of the already copyrighted work.
The very reason why labor, skill and Judgement weren’t the only criteria of justification of rights under the IP only due to a single reasons that compilations of already existing work does not involve intellect and creative choices made by the author to claim a copyright or violated somebody’s copyright. The track is a remix with major upbeats and minor creativity compliance.
The requirement should be able to provide the way to measure the creativity on the quality and quantity of creative choices being employed by a human intellect on their respective work. The reasoning behind trying to measure the quality-quantity flux is to understand what must actually make a work original in terms of evaluating the ‘values that are being protected and why must we protect them. Myriad of cases from Macmillan vs Cooper to D.B. Modak are testimonial to only bestow rights to the deserving. The ‘intellectual creation’ test in Infopaq suggests that words by themselves cannot be original but that creativity might be expressed through ‘choice, sequence and combination’. Hence, this enlightens the settled point of what must qualify to be copyrightable.
Author:
Arunima Shastri, Assistant Professor, Unitedworld School of Law (UWSL)
Disclaimer: The opinions / views expressed in this article are solely of the author in his / her individual capacity. They do not purport to reflect the opinions and/or views of the College and/or University or its members.
