Anjum Rajabali on his 11-year journey of bringing copyright society to life

Intellectual property which is basically creative work has to be seen differently than any other form of property which is owned Because what intellectual property does is that it adds a certain enrichment to society be it painting music literature cinema This is why every society has worked out a way of incentivizing encouraging and protecting the work of creative peopleNow one way of doing it is to ensure that their copyright is not violated because this is something which has been created as an original by them Any creation comes from deep within the artist It is that when that work is exploited for further commerce then they should be receiving their due share of thatIf you buy a painting say by Tyeb Mehta for 1 lakh rupees and 10 years later maybe the price goes to 1 crore so you actually sell it further Now from that one crore that youre making a royalty has to be ploughed back to Mehta or his heirs which is actually the law Because what youre doing is from that persons original work you are actually making an extra profit From that profit some due royalty has to go back That is the whole definition of royalty Likewise the world over when a film is shown on cinema screens in cinema halls for that the contract is made with the writer The sort of assignment fee has been paid to them but once it is exploited for further commerce like outside of the cinema hall when it goes into a remake or its adapted into some other language or if it is sold to a foreign country or if it appears on another platform like television or any of the OTT platforms Then in which case from that additional money which is being earned based on the writers work some share has to be given back to the writerNow in most countries across the world this has been accepted as a law Even the World Intellectual Property Organization which is a branch of the UN there also it is very clearly established that these are the protocols and the work of artists their copyright as well as their royalties have to be protectedIndia has the Copyright Act which was formulated in 1957 Now for a very long time there was no concept really of royalties for the writers So what would actually happen is that if a producer is paying me even 100 rupees for a script then all the rights everything belongs to the producerHe would be able to do anything that he wants with it sell it change it do whatever it is that he wants with it and there is nothing that I can do because he has actually bought it He is the owner of that Now in 2012 the law was amended and it was a radical amendment which actually said a few very important things One was that if I have written a script then embedded in that there are certain rights under the copyright umbrella which are mine The right to show it to the public the right to make a film the right to adapt it the right to show it anywhere else all that is mine After a deed I am assigning those rights to the producer Now the producer can use those rights to make the film to show it elsewhere so all that becomes his right However the right to receive royalty cannot be transferredThe law forbids that saying it is illegal Which means that the producer in advance cannot purchase your right to receive royalty This created a huge uproar in the film industry amongst the producers studios broadcasters etc Because this nonassignability of the right to receive royalty is actually as a law it is there only in Germany and in India now This was quite radical and we were very grateful for that because we had lobbied very hard From 2009 to 2012 we really lobbied very hard with the government The government was sympathetic and so were all the other parties So it was unanimously passed in Parliament It is well known that Javed Akhtar spearheaded this whole thing in Parliament After that came the whole protocol as to how do you collect royalty The law very clearly said that a copyright society has to be formed and the right to receive royalty can be assigned by every writer to the copyright societyThe other thing the Law also said that in the copyright there are two dimensions Number one there is the author whose work it is And number two it is the owner to whom the rights have been assigned They call them owners Now both these people should become members of the copyright society so that they are able to collect royalties in equal measure If 100 rupees of royalty is due on say a work of mine which is being shown on television then 50 rupees 5037 of that goes to the producer and 5037 of that goes to the authorSo we created a company in 2013 and then we applied to the government for it to be registered as the official copyright society Because that is part of the law the government has to register it And this took a very long time almost 11 yearsIn 2016 the revised application was submitted to them as per their instructions There was a little bit of ambiguity in the wording of the law which had to be resolvedNow finally on the 30th of December the certificate was ready and it was handed over to us So now we are a registered copyright society of authors and ownersNow what is next is that two things come out first First is that the membership drive has already begun Which means we need to ensure that all the working screenwriters of India from every region like 2025 thousand of them including those who may not be alive but whose work is still within the copyright period have to be made members We have to educate them make them aware of what this means for them We have to also ask producers to become members Secondly the negotiations have to begin with broadcastersNow in every country there is a copyright society So the arrangement is that the copyright society of that country lets say in France when our work is shown on say French TV then they will collect the royalty on our behalf and they will transfer it to our copyright society which will then divide the royalty between the writer and the producer And likewise if a French film is being shown on Indian television then we will collect the royalty and then we will transfer it to the French society So this becomes the arrangement across the worldWill there be arrears So after 2012 21st of June when the act was actually gazetted royalty is supposed to be due on that Now the thing is and the clarification is very essential is that because this whole thing had not become operational the copyright society had not been registered we had not begun negotiations at that time so broadcasters did not budget for thisSo what we may have to do is negotiate for a certain lump sum for that periodThey may not be happy about it but I think they have resigned themselves to it simply because it is the law It is And now the law has become operativeIt is the rule world over So Netflix in America and other different places is giving royalties Now in America they dont call it royalties they call it residuals which are actually paid to writers collected by the union through the collective bargaining arrangementThe biggest challenge that I foresee is exactly this that the negotiated amount of the percentage of royalties should be fair to writers The writer who is credited for that film should receive royalties To ensure that the entire system must be cleaned up because till now this also used to happen that a lot of writers were being denied their credits especially new writers There are a lot of complaints that we have written this but the director took the credit the producer took the credit our name didnt come on the slate Most think that our career is starting even if our name is in the assistant or in the associate itrsquos a start But it is widely known that actually they are the ones who have done the work Now with royalties coming in that has to be changed The royalty period is for 60 years even after the death of the authorObviously every writer will get concerned about their credit because not only are they being denied their due fees now and their name on the screen but for the next 100 years they wont get any payback for their work There is going to be a pushback from the writers side to ensure that this system gets cleaned upCredit has to become very transparent We will be initiating conversation in the next two weeks The age of stolen stories is overmdashwriters will finally own their worth