- (1.) THESE appeals by special leave have been preferred against the common judgment of a Division Bench of the High Court of Delhi involving the analogous question and are, therefore, decided together by this judgment.
(2.) APPELLANT No. 1 " Eastern Book Company is a registered partnership firm carrying on the business of publishing law books. Appellant No. 2 " EBC Publishing pvt. Ltd. is a company incorporated and existing under the companies Act, 1956. The said appellants are involved in the printing and publishing of various books relating to the field of law. One of the well-known publications of appellant No. 1 " Eastern Book Company is the law report "supreme Court Cases" (hereinafter called "scc" ). The appellant publishes all reportable judgments along with non-reportable judgments of the Supreme Court of India. Yet another category included in SCC is short judgments, orders, practice directions and record of proceedings. The law report SCC was commenced in the year 1969 and has been in continuous publication ever since. The name "supreme court Cases" has been coined by the appellants and they have been using the same continuously, exclusively and extensively in relation to the law reports published by them. For the purpose of publishing the judgments, orders and proceedings of the Supreme Court, the copies of judgments, orders and proceedings are procured from the office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of India. After the initial procurement of the judgments, orders and proceedings for publication, the appellants make copy-editing wherein the judgments, orders and record of proceedings procured, which is the raw source, are copy-edited by a team of assistant staff and various inputs are put in the judgments and orders to make them user friendly by making an addition of cross-references, standardization or formatting of the text, paragraph numbering, verification and by putting other inputs. The appellants also prepare the headnotes comprising of two portions, the short note consisting of catch/lead words written in bold; and the long note, which is comprised of a brief discussion of the facts and the relevant extracts from the judgments and orders of the Court. Headnotes are prepared by appellant No. 3-Surendra Malik. As per the said appellant (plaintiff No. 3 in the suits filed in the Delhi High court), the preparation of the headnotes and putting the various inputs in the raw text of the judgments and orders received from the Supreme Court Registry require considerable amount of skill, labour and expertise and for the said work a substantial amount of capital expenditure on the infrastructure, such as office, equipment, computers and for maintaining extensive library, besides recurring expenditure on both the management of human resources and infrastructural maintenance, is made by the plaintiff-appellants. As per the appellants, SCC is a law report which carries case reports comprising of the appellants' version or presentation of those judgments and orders of the Supreme Court after putting various inputs in the raw text and it constitutes an 'original literary work' of the appellants in which copyright subsists under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957 (hereinafter referred to as "the act") and thus the appellants alone have the exclusive right to make printed as well as electronic copies of the same under Section 14 of the Act. Any scanning or copying or reproduction done of or from the reports or pages or paragraphs or portions of any volume of SCC by any other person, is an infringement of the copyright in SCC within the meaning of Section 51 of the Act. The defendant-respondent No. 2 Spectrum Business support Ltd. (in Civil Appeal No. 6472/2004) has brought out a software called "grand Jurix" published on CD-ROMs and the defendant-respondent No. 2 Regent Data Tech Pvt. Ltd. (in Civil Appeal No. 6905/2004) has brought out software package called "the Laws" published on CD-ROMs. As per the appellants, all the modules in the defendant-respondents' software packages have been lifted verbatim from the appellants' work; the respondents have copied the appellants' sequencing, selection and arrangement of the cases coupled with the entire text of copy-edited judgments as published in the plaintiff-appellants' law report SCC, along with and including the style and formatting, the copy-editing paragraph numbers, footnote numbers, cross-references, etc. ; and such acts of the defendant-respondents constitute infringement of the plaintiff-appellants' exclusive right to the same. The plaintiff-appellants herein moved the Court for temporary injunction by filing applications in Suit no. 758/2000 against Spectrum Business Support Ltd. and in suit No. 624/2000 against Regent Data Tech Pvt. Ltd. before a learned Single Judge of the High Court of Delhi. The interim orders of injunction were passed in the suits from time to time. However, the defendant-respondents filed application for vacation of the stay order. By a common judgment dated 17. 1. 2001, the Single Judge of the High court dismissed the appellants' applications for interim injunction and allowed the respondents' application for vacation of stay. However, before the Single Judge, the respondents conceded that the appellants have copyright in the headnotes and as such they undertook not to copy these headnotes in their CD-ROMs.
(3.) AGGRIEVED by the said order dated 17. 1. 2001 refusing to grant interim injunction, the appellants preferred appeals before a Division Bench of the Delhi High court and the applications praying for interim relief were also filed in both the appeals. The applications praying for the interim relief were disposed of by the Division bench on 9. 3. 2001 directing that during the pendency of the appeals the respondents will be entitled to sell their CD-ROMs with the text of the judgment of the Supreme Court along with their own headnotes which should not in any way be a copy of the headnotes and the text of the plaintiff-appellants. The Division Bench of the Delhi High Court heard the matters finally and has held that the appellants are not right in submitting that although the respondents have a right to publish the raw judgments they could do so only after obtaining the same from the original source, i. e. after obtaining certified copy of the judgment. The division Bench did not agree with the submission of the appellants that by making certain corrections in the judgments or putting paragraph numbers or arranging the said judgments in a particular manner while printing, the appellants can claim that the copy-edited judgments become their 'original literary work'. If the right of a person like the appellants who are merely reporting the judgments of the courts is stretched to this extent, then after a judgment is reported by a particular journal, others would be barred from doing the same and the very purpose of making these judgments in public domain, therefore, would be frustrated. The Court has further held that the appellants are not the author of the Supreme Court judgments and by merely making certain corrections therein or giving paragraph numbers, the character of a judgment does not change and it does not become materially different from the original judgment. Once a person has a right to obtain certified copy of the judgment from the Registry of the Court and to publish it, it cannot be said that he has no right to take text of the judgment from the journal where it is already reported. The act of reproduction of any judgment or order of the Court, Tribunal or any other judicial authority under Section 52 (1) (q) of the Act, is not an infringement of the copyright. Any person can, therefore, publish judgments of the Courts. The appellants may have happened to have first published the judgments, but the same will not mean that they can have a copyright therein. It is the considered opinion of the Division bench that no person can claim copyright in the text of the judgment by merely putting certain inputs to make it user friendly. The appellants cannot claim copyright in the judgment of the Court. But it has been held by the Court that reading the judgment and searching the important portions thereof and collecting sentences from various places for the purposes of making headnotes would involve labour and skill; and that there is originality and creativity in preparation of the headnotes, but not when they are verbatim extracts from the judgment and, therefore, there would be copyright in the headnotes to the judgments prepared by the appellants. So far as footnotes and editorial notes are concerned, it cannot be denied that these are the publisher's own creations and based on publisher's own research and thus will have a copyright of the appellants. The Division Bench modified the judgment of the Single Judge by directing the respondents that they shall be entitled to sell their CD-ROMs with the text of the judgments of the Supreme Court along with there own headnotes, editorial notes, if any, which should not in any way be copy of the headnotes of the appellants. The respondents shall also not copy the footnotes and editorial notes appearing in the journal of the appellants. Thus, the Court has not accepted the case of the appellants that they have a copyright in the copy-edited judgments of the supreme Court. Aggrieved by the decision of the Division bench of Delhi High Court, the appellants have filed these appeals by special leave.;