New Delhi: Halfway through 2026, major transformations relating to copyright violations have occurred in India’s music industry amid the rise of independent music artists and digital tech.
A recent Madras High Court order directing Chennai-based organiser TVK Cultural Academy to pay licence fees for two live music events or be restrained from organising the events as scheduled is not a first. The copyright infringement suit filed by the Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS)—India’s only music copyright society representing authors, composers and publishers of music in India—shone a light on the broader judicial and industry shift toward stricter enforcement of music licensing norms in the country’s rapidly expanding live entertainment sector.
Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy ruled that TVK cannot stage these events without prior authorisation and payment of a royalty licence fee of Rs 75,000 per programme to the Copyright Society.
Music event organisers routinely do secure venue permissions, police approvals and even sponsors, but tend to treat copyright licences as a secondary requirement. In everyday life, songs are publicly performed at properly ticketed concerts and the not-so-elite tribute shows with very limited scrutiny on whether the composers and lyricists or copyright owners have been compensated properly via royalty payments.
These royalty payments are much more formalised for digital music platforms that pay rights holders whenever a song is streamed or played. Important to note are public performance rights (PPR), essentially legal permissions under copyright law to play, screen, or perform copyrighted material such as music, films, or plays in public.
In the case before the Madras High Court, IPRS alleged that musical works from its repertoire were being performed at TVK Cultural Academy’s Chennai events without the required licences, taking legal recourse to formalise an industry long driven by informal practices.
This, IPRS Chief Executive Officer Rakesh Nigam believes, is not aimed at disrupting events, but to “reinforce the importance of respecting creator rights and ensuring that composers, lyricists, and publishers are fairly compensated for the commercial use of their work”.
Nigam told ThePrint that in the Chennai matter involving TVK Cultural Academy, the legal proceedings were initiated only after the necessary licence fees for the scheduled events were not secured despite prior communication. This order, he said, demonstrated “a growing recognition that creator rights are fundamental to the entertainment ecosystem and cannot be treated as optional”. It reinforces an important industry principle, he added: “whenever music drives audience engagement and commercial value, the creators behind that music must be recognised and compensated”.
“Courts today are sending a strong message that the commercial exploitation of copyrighted works without proper authorisation is not sustainable in a mature creative economy. Considering that lakhs of events take place across India every year while only a relatively small percentage obtain the required music licences, there remains significant untapped value that should rightfully flow back to creators and rights holders,” he remarked.
Managing Partner at Fidus Law Chambers Shwetasree Majumder told ThePrint that the most significant gap in India’s copyright enforcement ecosystem is in the licensing regime.
While the Copyright Act mandates that registered copyright societies regulate licence fees, this is rarely followed in practice, she explained, noting a key reason being the parallel existence of rights management organisations that operate outside the statutory framework governing copyright societies. The result, she said, is a fragmented, unaccountable system where event organisers, venues and performers bear the regulatory burden that should fall on these organisations themselves.
This asymmetry, Majumder told ThePrint, is perhaps most visible in how notices are issued. A consumer is not required to obtain a licence for public performance of music at a wedding or a private ceremony under existing provisions. Yet copyright societies and Rights Management Organisations (RMOs) routinely issue notices for exorbitant fees, relying on legal intimidation rather than legal merit.
“Legislative intervention is, therefore, needed not to create new rights, but to clarify the scope of existing ones, and to shift the compliance burden onto organisations that hold and enforce rights, rather than onto ordinary users.”
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The law and precedents
The law has been amended several times to keep up with technological developments, the most important one being in 2012 when the Copyright Act of 1957 was amended to grant authors of literary and musical works the right to receive royalties even if they had assigned their rights to producers or music companies. Provisions for statutory licensing, digital rights management, and protection against circumvention of technological measures were also introduced.
Under the Copyright Act, organisers staging events involving copyrighted musical and literary works are required to obtain licences from copyright societies or rights holders. The royalties collected are then distributed among composers, lyricists, publishers and other stakeholders.
In practice, however, the compliance has remained inconsistent over the years, with copyright societies repeatedly having to take legal course at the Madras High Court.
One recurring name is that of Ilaiyaraaja, Padma Bhushan-awardee and veteran music composer, who has fought big music labels and filmmakers over “unauthorised commercial exploitation”, and successfully pushed courts to recognise the special moral rights of composers and ongoing claims over their creations.
Last year, the Madras High Court protected his personality rights, issuing legal notices asking organisers to get licences directly from him, not just from music companies, thus giving him control and ownership of his creative works. The court legally blocked third parties from unauthorised commercial use of his name, likeness, AI-generated visuals, voice samples, and titles like ‘Isaignani’) across digital and social media platforms.
Nearing the end of 2025, the Madras High Court reinforced music composer Ilaiyaraaja’s moral and intellectual property rights by settling a copyright dispute over the unauthorized use of his iconic songs in the films Dude and Good Bad Ugly. The producers, Mythri Movie Makers, settled by paying a reported Rs 50 lakh.
As part of the compromise, the songs featured in Dude remained on streaming platforms under a valid licence, while the use of his tracks in Good Bad Ugly faced legal restrictions. This underscores the composer’s strengthened legal authority to prevent the commercial exploitation or remixing of his works without direct consent.
A Delhi High Court division bench this week ruled that Ilaiyaraaja does not hold any copyright over his popular song En Iniya Pon Nilave from the 1981 film Moodu Paani. Even though he had a right over the musical component of the song, the court noted that he does not hold any right over the lyrics, with the overall right over the sound recordings in the film belonging to recording label Saregama. The court clarified that while composers hold moral rights and ownership of the original musical score, they cannot independently licence or monetise an adapted version that may be a combination with another musical score.
In April last year, the Delhi High Court stated that an unregistered copyright society cannot issue or grant licences for the sound recordings in its repertoire.
Majumder believes that the emergence of AI as a tool for music consumption and creation makes an already urgent problem more pressing. She explained how the recent working paper on music and AI proposes a blanket licensing framework under which creators would receive compensation when their music is used to train AI models. While one can theoretically argue that creators should have the right to opt out from holding any right entirely, practically, she said, that is unenforceable at scale.
“The only realistic protection for creators is a robust licensing regime—one that ensures they are compensated fairly and transparently. Getting that architecture right in the traditional events and performance space is a prerequisite for getting it right in the AI space,” she told ThePrint.
She also noted how the shift from ownership to access is the most consequential change: streaming has replaced physical sales and downloads with per-stream royalties that pay fractions of a cent per play, platforms benefit from scale; artists, unless already at the top of the ecosystem, receive amounts that bear no reasonable relationship to the value their work generates.
“Stream ripping (extracting audio from platforms like YouTube and converting it to downloadable files) has become one of the most prevalent forms of digital piracy today. Unlike peer-to-peer file sharing, the tools are freely available and operate in a grey zone that enforcement has struggled to address,” she said.
Metadata failures quietly worsen the problem, she said, as royalty systems depend on accurate song and composer information to route payments correctly. Western digital infrastructure cannot properly categorise Indian Classical Music and hence, musicians face devastating financial drain and erasure of artistic credit, she said.
AI is the newest and most disruptive frontier; “generative tools can now produce music mimicking an artist’s style and voice without directly using their recordings, potentially sidestepping copyright while still commercially exploiting their creative identity”. There is currently no adequate legal framework in India to address this, which is precisely why Majumder believes that there should be more conversation around blanket licensing for AI training.
Industry impact and gaps in the ecosystem
The rise in such cases has been gradual since the 2012 amendment to the Copyright Act which made royalty entitlements inalienable, preventing producers and labels from coercing authors and composers into assigning or waiving their right to continuous royalties when their works are commercially exploited beyond the original release.
Since then, copyright societies such as IPRS have increasingly shifted from passive royalty administration toward active enforcement and litigation.
“As India’s live entertainment industry continues to grow, it is important that organisers recognise music licensing as an integral part of responsible event management and not merely a procedural requirement,” Nigam told ThePrint.
A gap is the absence of a single window licensing mechanism, Majumder believes. For example, anyone seeking a licence now must approach each copyright society and RMO separately, with no standardised fee schedule, no transparency on how rates are determined, and no obligation on these bodies to justify their demands.
The recently launched Vasant Sangeet Dwar platform, Majumder thinks is a welcome step, but it is a voluntary initiative. “A mandated, unified licensing portal with published tariffs and a non-discrimination requirement would reduce both the compliance burden and the scope for coercive practices,” she said.
“Inconsistency in enforcement of existing provisions is another concern. Statutory licences for cover versions have been on the books but remain largely unimplemented. The consequence is that some artists monetise cover versions freely while others face disproportionate penalties, an outcome that serves neither creators nor the public interest. Regulatory intervention to operationalise these provisions is long overdue,” Majumder added.
“The common thread across all of these gaps is accountability. India does not lack copyright legislation; it lacks the regulatory infrastructure to make that legislation work equitably. The intervention needed is not more rules for the public to follow, but binding obligations on copyright societies and RMOs: mandatory tariff publication, accessible dispute resolution, verified rights claims before legal proceedings can be initiated, and consequences for bad faith enforcement. Without that, compliance norms in the events industry will remain aspirational at best,” she said.
Pointing to the gaps in India’s growing copyright ecosystem, the key challenge remains awareness and implementation at the ground level, especially within the live events ecosystem, Nigam believes.
Many organisers still treat music licensing as a procedural formality rather than a mandatory intellectual property compliance requirement, he said, adding how in several cases, stakeholders also claim ignorance or lack of awareness about licensing obligations, which often becomes the easiest way to avoid obtaining the necessary licences.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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