The Fragmented Structure of Copyright Administration in India’s Music and Film Sectors 

A single popular film song in India is rarely governed by one copyright. It typically involves at least three distinct rights: the sound recording (owned by the producer or record label), the musical composition (owned by the composer), and the lyrics (owned by the lyricist or their publisher). When the film itself is considered, a fourth layer emerges — the producer’s rights over the cinematograph film as a whole. Each of these rights can be licensed, assigned, and enforced separately, and each has historically been represented by a different institution. This essay argues that the fragmentation commonly observed in India’s copyright regime for music and film is not primarily a defect in the statutory text of the Copyright Act, 1957, but a consequence of how collecting societies, licensing intermediaries, and courts have administered that text in practice. 

Existing literature on the subject largely converges on this diagnosis. Academic reviews of enforcement in the Indian music industry have found that while the statutory provisions are reasonably comprehensive, actual compliance and enforcement remain inconsistent and poorly coordinated. A related strand of scholarship, based on surveys of working musicians, has pointed to the informal and fragmented character of industry practice itself — noting that limited institutional support and uneven awareness of royalty mechanisms compound the problems created by overlapping collecting societies. This essay builds on both strands by tracing how the collecting-society system and the film-specific royalty provisions introduced in 2012 have generated recurring litigation, and what that litigation reveals about the gap between the law as written and the law as administered.