Legal Updates

Allowing to play music in a public place without permission from the copyright holder is an infringement

March 25, 2019
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The owners of the banquet hall allowed those who used the hall to play music during the events in the hall. The Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers moved the Court to instruct the owners of the hall to desist from infringing the copyright while paying compensation for the copyright infringement.
The court held that the owner of an event hall that is a public entertainment venue that plays in the hall a copyrighted composition for the purpose of earning profits without prior arrangement of payment to the copyright owner or anyone acting on its behalf constitutes a violation of the copyright even in case where he did not know and should not have known that the performance constituted a breach as aforesaid. Court held them also shareholders will also be directly responsible for such infringement, even if they were not aware of the breach. For this purpose, it was also determined that even where the music was played not directly by the hall owners, the breach would be deemed to have been performed directly by the hall owners. Therefore, the Court accepted the claim and awarded substantial compensation against the hall owners.