T-series seeks Rs 3.5 crore damages from desi TikTok programs Bolo Indya, Mitron, others

Music company T-Series has issued notices to numerous social video platforms, including Bolo Indya, Mitron, MX Player’s Takatak, Triller and Josh, for copyright violations and warned them against using the task of the company on their platforms in any form.

The Super Cassettes Industries Private Limited, which operates under the brand T-Series, has asked each one of these short-video platforms to pay around Rs 3.5 crore in damage and “render accounts of all revenues illegally earned” by the platforms from the copyrighted content, as per an infringement notice.

The company in addition has served notice to Chinese iphone app Snack Video which is operational in India and filed a lawsuit against short-video application Roposo.

When contacted, T-Series-appointed Ira Law firm confirmed the issuance of notices to these platforms.

Geetanjali Visvanathan, Partner at Ira Law, said legal notice to the named video software have already been served and a lawsuit against Roposo has been filed but did not make any more comments.

Bolo Indya in response to an e-mail query sent by PTI said it generally does not offer audio tracks and video library as a feature to users by date and thus there is absolutely no base for just about any breach of music rights.

“We are a UGC (user made content) platform and as a result of ban of Chinese applications, a lot of content creators began to upload those videos that they created on those apps. These videos weren’t created on our platform and such video reported every once in awhile, where any possible breach of IPR will there be, is immediately taken off the platform,” Bolo Indya founder Varun Saxena said.

He said that his firm always requests music companies to work collaboratively with it like they do with YouTube and report any copyrighted content.

“When in future we launch audio tracks library as a function, we will continue to work in an exceedingly collaborative manner with all the current leading music companies as we respect their rights and are committed to creating a cohesive and strongly synergetic environment of most Indian companies growing together,” Saxena said.

Triller declined to touch upon the matter and others did not react to the query sent to them in this regard.

The demand for new video-based social media applications rose in the united states following the government banned popular Chinese software Tiktok, Helo, Likee, Bigo Live and others.

T-Series said that its proprietary repertoire comprises over 40,000 videos and a lot more than 1.5 lakh songs, accounting for a lot more than 20,000 hours of music available in various languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Bhojpuri etc.

The music and entertainment company said almost all of the major global internet giants such as for example Facebook, Amazon, etc, and top mobile application owners such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Music, Gaana, Saavn, Wynk, Spotify, etc, have previously taken licences from T-Series for utilization of its copyrighted content.