We at Patracode specialize in helping you out with Copyright Practice and Copyright Protection, which includes acquiring artworks, authored works from the contractors, protecting them by filing for registration and enforcing them by taking up the matters in contentious and non-contentious fashion, commercializing them, procuring licenses, and to achieve your commercial goals with respect to a copyright-able or copyrighted subject matter. Our clients vary from various industrial segments, like Software, Entertainment, Publishing, Consumer Goods, etc..
The protection of original work of authorship of any artistic work which can be musical work, cinematographic films, literary works, sound recordings, dramatic work, etc, is done with the help of filing for Copyrights, under the 1957 Copyright Act. Like patents and trademark it is an intangible property. A Copyright protection gives an exclusive right to perform or authorize the performance of acts with respect to a work or any substantial part thereof.
For protection, the subject matter should be well expressed with all possible details, so as to create a differentiation between his works and that of other. The expressions shall further be strong enough to even create differentiation from common pool of ideas. In jurisprudence, the copyright is govern from doctrine of “sweat of brow”, which says that whoever has put in effort for creating a work should be rewarded for the sweat before it reaches his brow. Simply, for this reason the protection of Copyright is automatic and from the moment of inception or creation of the work.
Further, a society’s economic and social development depends on the number of creative minds it constitutes of, and more creative the work, the better for the society. Therefore protection of this intangible property is provided to encourage and motivate the creator of the original work to create more work. Copyright is an economic right, because exploitation of the Copyright-able work by himself or by licensing it for royalty may bring economic gain to the author. As per Indian Copyright law, generally any work which is original and can be categorized as literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works are subject of copyright protection.
They are further categorized and sub-categorized under the Copyright Act. More or less, all other jurisdiction have similar recognition of various types of similar matters which can be Copyright-able. The list of Copyright-able subject matter includes Original artistic works and musical work, dramatic compilations and literary works. Literary works are again of many types such as compilations of data and other subject matter, poetry, manuscripts, theses, dissertations, collective works, speeches, reports, bound volumes and loose-leaf volumes, textbooks, brochures, pamphlets, catalogs, directories, reference works, games, computer programs, software codes, automated databases, etc.
Artistic work will in turn include original works of art, which can be an engraving, a photograph, sculpture, painting, and even works of artistic craftsmanship, like architecture. Musical work would mean any original work in music which would include the representation of music which may be graphically notated, however, it would not include words or actions that are sung, spoken or performed with the music.
The computer Program includes computer software, algorithms, a machine readable language, Cinematography film includes visuals of moving or non-moving images together with sound in a synchronous fashion. When it comes to protection of sound recording, the composer of the particular work is entitled exclusive rights to not just make recording of the sounds embodying it, but can also agree for the sale or hire of the copies of that particular film in question.
The procedure for registration of a work under the Copyright Act, 1957 is to fill out an application stating the particulars for registration of copyright and further filing it along with a prescribed fees at Copyright Office at Delhi, India. Separate applications should be filed for registration of each separate work. If the application is filed by the advocate on behalf of the applicant, then a Power Of Attorney (PoA) has to be signed by both the advocate and the party and this PoA should be included with the filing application.
We are specialized to deal with complex matters where we support our clients in expressing of the copyrights for whose adaptations they shall be going to use or practice further. It is an intensive task to support clients to write a Business Plan, Operational Plans, Methodologies, Methodological flow of business processes which are implemented through software, schematic representation of computer or software implemented product, any other type of aspects which is considered as algorithms, mental acts, methods and non-protect-able under patents, and other types of composite work which shall be separated out to provide a better protection.
We undergo various iterations to help them copyrighted and further filed and registered for appropriate protection. In case, any subject matter is licence-able, we support our clients to develop whole legal framework for licensing and franchising the subject matter and further help them to implement it, which includes working over with the clients to crystallize business model to fill up all possible legal loopholes, drafting licensing or franchising agreement or any other related business agreement which is appropriate, helping negotiate the agreement with the licensing prospect, and further getting the agreement executed, once the agreement is operational, we support in keeping timelines and terms against each of the parties so the executed legal instrument is affected.
