The copyright conundrum in Carnatic music Premium

Musicians should have the right to own their soulful additions to a song and also to commercially exploit their performance

During the recent Margazhi season or music season in Chennai, rasikas (connoisseurs) hopped from concert to concert. While tuning into the music, they also had to keep in mind copyright law as the sabhas (performance venues) forbade them from unauthorised recording. Copyright law has seldom been at the forefront of discussion in the Carnatic music sphere as there is a general belief that copyright law does not apply to it. We need to revisit this view.

In Indian Performing Right Society Ltd. v. Eastern Indian Motion Pictures Association (1977), Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer asked whether music meant only the composition of a piece or extended to the soulful tune, voice, and rendering of the piece. This remains unanswered in Parliament. Apart from being a metaphysical question, what is music is also a legal question.

Copyright law across the world defines music as a melody, i.e., a composition which is reduced to print. The idea that music is only a composition stems from a western classical understanding of music. The lawmakers of the Indian Copyright Act, 1914, failed to understand Indian music before enacting the law. The same colonial understanding followed even in the legislation enacted in 1957. This excludes several unique factors of Indian classical music from the realm of copyright law. It is pertinent to ask: should law follow music or should music follow the law?

A song is born after the synchronised efforts of a composer, lyricist, singers, and other performers. The composer and the lyricist get protection over their respective creations for their lifetime and then 60 more years. When a song is recorded onto a medium, there is a separate right over the recording. Called ‘mechanical right’, this is granted to the one who records the song, for 60 years, to commercially exploit it.

Performers’ right enables the singer and other musicians to forbid anyone from recording the song. Further, the law enables the performer to be eligible to claim royalty from the streaming of their performances or the sale of their music. Though this right is available to the singer and the accompanists theoretically, they do not enjoy the same in its true sense, in a concert space. It is only in prominent sabhas that video/audio recording of the performance is prohibited; this is not a norm everywhere. Several performances of notable singers are posted by third parties on YouTube and Spotify, which is a violation of the Copyright Act and robs the musicians of the chances to monetise their rendering. Any recording that is done without consent is a violation of the performers’ right; it is even a violation if the sabha does this without the informed consent of the performers. The licence regime within a Carnatic concert is complex even for music that is in the copyright domain.

Since most of the songs that are performed are in the public domain, the form of music has also remained outside the realm of copyright. The works of Tyagaraja Swami, Shyama Shastri, Muddusvami Dikshitar, Purandara Dasa, and Gopala Krishna Bharathiar, for instance, are in the public domain for anyone to perform today, as they were all created even before the inception of the concept of copyright. Whether the additions and improvisations made by the musicians also become a part of the public domain along with the song and whether a musician who improvises a song has any right over such improvisations remain unanswered questions.

When any performer learns these songs from their guru, they inherit their guru’s imagination packaged with the original rendition. The learner also has the scope to add their own touch to the song. They have their own interpretation and perform the song with improvisations which may not have been a part of the original composition. They may even sing the same song in a different raga from what was originally envisioned. For instance, several songs of Gopala Krishna Bharathi are today not sung in the ragas that Bharathi had composed. Does the musical imagination to interpret the song in a different raga become “creativity” under copyright?