Irony of a Charitable Trust:

"The irony of a charitable art trust sueing an artist and trying to wrest away her work has escaped the plaintiff. And so has the fact that one would rather expect such trusts to educate artists about their rights in the first place.

"The gradual commercial expansion of Indian music attracts all types of individuals who compensate by greed what Nature deprived them of talent. It is the very raison d'être of copyright law that the commercial rewards should benefit those who are the fountainheads of those rights, namely the creators themselves. Copyright is the sacred bond, engraved in Law, between the creator and his or her creation, be it a song or a book. It stands to reason that the commercial rights of a song, whose duration is – precisely! - calculated on the lifetime of the author (they last until 60 years after his/her death), cannot be misappropriated on the sly, without a written, explicit consent from theFirst Owner.

"It is the sacred duty of the publisher to exercise his vigilance so that this property is not usurped by the clever, the unscrupulous and the powerful, and that artists today do not meet the fate of the labourers described yesterday in the novels of Charles Dickens, Emile Zola or Jack London. The utter penury into which many eminent contemporary artists or their descendants have sunk – while the record companies continue to reap the benefits of their work, and will continue to do so for many decades because they misappropriated these rights from the unsuspecting artists –, should serve as a clarion call to all songwriters to stand up for their rights."

Achille Forler on Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra vs Shubha Mudgal