Neighbouring Rights and Why They Are Separate
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Syllabus topic 2.3, "Rights of Broadcasting Organizations, Producers of Phonograms and Performers."
Pages 271 to 274 of 719
In one line
Some people add something to a work without writing it: the singer who performs a song, the company that records it, the station that broadcasts it. What the law gives them is called neighbouring rights, and they are not copyright.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: Chapter VIII of the Copyright Act, 1957, headed "Rights of Broadcasting Organisation and of Performers", confers by sections 37 to 39A the broadcast reproduction right and the performer's right, which are special rights related to but distinct from copyright in a work.
Why the law has this at all
Because copyright protects the work and not the delivery of it. A song is a musical work with lyrics that are a literary work. The singer who sings it composed nothing. On the classical view she has created no work and so owns nothing.
Technology made that unbearable. Before recording, a performer could not be copied: to hear her you had to be in the room. Once sound could be fixed and carried, one performance could displace a lifetime of them.
The three claimants came together. Performers, producers of phonograms and broadcasting organisations all faced the same problem and all had the same difficulty in calling what they did authorship. So an international instrument was drawn for the three of them at once.
That instrument is the Rome Convention, 1961. Its full title is the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations.
The names, and why they differ
Neighbouring rights is the older name, translating the French droits voisins, rights that live next door to copyright.
Related rights is the modern name and the one WIPO uses. The two mean the same thing.
Not copyright is the point of both names. Rome article 1 puts it beyond argument: protection granted under the Convention "shall leave intact and shall in no way affect the protection of copyright in literary and artistic works", and no provision of it may be interpreted as prejudicing that protection.
Section 39A(2) says the same thing in Indian words. The broadcast reproduction right or the performer's right "shall not affect the separate copyright in any work in respect of which, the broadcast or the performance, as the case may be, is made."
How the Indian Chapter is built
| Section | What it does |
|---|---|
| 37 | the broadcast reproduction right: a special right for a broadcasting organisation, twenty-five years, five infringing acts |
| 38 | the performer's right: a special right where a performer appears or engages in a performance, fifty years |
| 38A | the exclusive right of performers: what a performer may do or authorise, and what happens when the performance goes into a film |
| 38B | the moral rights of the performer: identification, and objection to distortion |
| 39 | acts that do not infringe either right |
| 39A | the copyright sections that are borrowed and applied to both rights |
The rest of this chapter
Module one is free. The rest of this chapter comes with the LL.M. Intellectual Property and Information Technology Semester 2 notes.
You are reading a chapter from a later module. Everything in module one of every subject stays free, and so does every question paper and the syllabus.
Notes + Solved papers: ₹798 Already bought it? Sign in
Or notes only: ₹499
Or solved papers only: ₹499
Free either way: question papers, the syllabus, and module one of every subject.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.