Page:Eastern Book Company & Ors vs D.B. Modak & Anr.pdf/2

http://JUDIS.NIC.IN 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.

3. 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, crossreferences, etc.; and such acts of the defendant-respondents constitute infringement of the plaintiff-appellants’ exclusive right to the same.

4. 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.

5. 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