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Bombay High Court
KOTVAL
N.T.Raghunathan - Appellant
Versus
All India Reporter Ltd., Bombay, with Branch Office at Congress Nagar, Nagpur - Respondent
Decided On : 03/08/1957
COPYRIGHT - INFRINGEMENT - HEAD-NOTES OF JUDGMENTS - ORIGINAL LITERARY WORK - COPYRIGHT ACT, 1914 - APPLICABILITY AFTER CONSTITUTION - ARTICLE 372.
Fact of the Case:
The plaintiff, All India Reporter Limited, published a monthly law journal called the All India Reporter, which included head-notes on points decided in judgments of various High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. The defendant, the editor of the Madras Weekly Notes, published an All India Digest, 1951-55, which contained notes and head-notes pirated from the plaintiff's publication. The plaintiff filed a suit for infringement of copyright and obtained a temporary injunction restraining the defendant from printing, publishing, and selling the Digest.
Finding of the Court:
The court held that the head-notes prepared by the plaintiff constituted original literary work and were protected by copyright. The court also held that the defendant's notes and head-notes were substantially similar to the plaintiff's and amounted to infringement of copyright. The court further held that the Copyright Act, 1914, which substantially applied the English Copyright Act of 1911 to India, was still in force after the coming into force of the Constitution by virtue of Article 372, which continues in force all existing laws and their adaptations.
Issues: 1. Whether the head-notes prepared by the plaintiff constituted original literary work and were protected by copyright? 2. Whether the defendant's notes and head-notes were substantially similar to the plaintiff's and amounted to infringement of copyright? 3. Whether the Copyright Act, 1914, was still in force after the coming into force of the Constitution?
Ratio Decidendi: 1. The court held that the head-notes prepared by the plaintiff constituted original literary work and were protected by copyright, relying on the following principles: - A genuine and just abridgment is an original work and can be the subject of infringement of a copyright. - The head-notes or notes of a report require skill and exercise of thought to express the principle of law to be deduced from the decision or the facts and circumstances which bring the case in hand within some principle or rule of law or of practice. - The head-notes in the plaintiff's Digest were not verbatim extracts from the judgments of Courts, but were prepared by the exercise of human ingenuity and intellect. 2. The court held that the defendant's notes and head-notes were substantially similar to the plaintiff's and amounted to infringement of copyright, relying on the following factors: - The defendant admitted that his notes were prepared only from the matter contained in the plaintiff's "NUC"s. - A comparison of the notes and head-notes in the plaintiff's and defendant's Digests showed that they were prima facie substantially similar, both in ideas and expression. - The defendant's notes and head-notes were impossible to separate from the original matter in the Digest. 3. The court held that the Copyright Act, 1914, was still in force after the coming into force of the Constitution by virtue of Article 372, which continues in force all existing laws and their adaptations. The court distinguished the case of Menon v. State of Kerala, 1955 SCR 280, where the Fugitive Offenders Act of 1881 was held not to be law in force in India after the Constitution, on the ground that the Copyright Act, 1911, was applicable to the whole of India, except the State of Jammu and Kashmir, and the words "throughout the parts of His Majesty's dominions" used in the Act were not necessarily repugnant to the independent sovereign status of India.
Final Decision: The court dismissed the defendant's appeal and upheld the temporary injunction granted by the trial court.
2. The circumstances under which the action in the trial Court was commenced may now be stated. The plaintiff, the All India Reporter Limited, Bombay, publishes a monthly law journal known as the All India Reporter. Apart from reports of judgments of various High Courts in India and of the Supreme Court of India it publishes at the head of the reports, notes and headnotes on points decided in those judgments. In 1955 the plaintiff commenced the practice of reporting in addition to the judgments and their respective head-notes, only notes and head-notes without the original judgments. These it published separately in the monthly parts of its publication and called "Notes of Unreported Cases" or "N.U.C." as they were repeatedly referred to at the Bar and as I shall hereafter refer to them.
3. According to the plaintiff, the preparations of the notes and head-notes involved the plaintiff in considerable expense in employing lawyer editors to prepare the notes, and when prepared, such notes constituted original literary work in which the plaintiff had a copyright.
4. The plaintiff also publishes Digest of Law cases and in that Digest publishes the "NUC"s in conjunction with another Digest known as the Madras Law Journal Digest.
5. The defendant No.1 who is the editor of the law journal called Madras Weekly Notes recently published an "All India Digest, 1951-55, Civil, Criminal and Revenue." In this Digest he has pirated the notes and head-notes published by the plaintiff in his "NUC"s. The notes published in the defendant's Digest are copied from the plaintiffs head-notes by making imitations or alterations and by "paraphrasing, shortening or otherwise" of the head-notes of the plaintiff. The plaintiff appended to the plaint a list of such imitations or copies which constituted infringement of the plaintiff's copyright. The defendant No. 2 was added as a party to the suit since he was the publisher of the defendant No. 1's Digest.
6. On 13-12-56 the defendant No. 1 filed a written statement wherein he denied that he had infringed the plaintiffs copyright in the head-notes. According to the defendant there was no copyright in respect of those head-notes because they were merely reproductions or shortened extracts of judgments of Courts of law which were public property and in which the plaintiff could not claim any copyright. The defendant denied that his notes were imitations or substantial reproductions of the plaintiffs notes or head-notes but that they were the defendant's own original abridgments, and the only thing common between the plaintiff's and the defendant's Digests were the ideas in respect of which there could be no copyright. He alleged mala fides on the part of the plaintiff in bringing the action as the plaintiff was really interested in suppressing the Madras Weekly Notes which was a journal competing with the plaintiffs journal the All India Reporter.
7. Pending the suit, an application for temporary injunction was moved by the plaintiff, praying that the printing, publication and sale of the All India Digest, 1951-55, should be restrained by the issue of a temporary injunction. The defendant substantially raised in answer to this application the defence already adverted to in his written statement and further alleged that he had brought to bear upon his Digest his own labour and skill and that in any event the number of "NUC"s digested in the defendant's Digest was insignificant when compared to the total volume of cases reported in the entire Digest and therefore injunction ought not to be granted. At the hearing other contentions of law were also raised one of them being that the Copyright Act of 1914 which applied the English Copyright Act of 1911, had upon the coming into force of the Constitution of India ceased to apply a
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