Bombay High Court rules in favour of Netflix, Hotstar, Reliance to screen Ranveer Singh’s 83 – India Today

The Bombay High Court has refused to restrain Hotstar and Netflix from streaming the Bollywood film, 83 on their respective portals, while upholding the exploitation rights of Reliance Entertainment Studios Pvt. Ltd. The bench of Justice Riyaz Chagla was hearing a suit filed by Mad Man Film Ventures against Reliance Entertainment Studio and others. The bench noted that the real dispute in the suit was with regard to the
interpretation of the Clauses of the Consent Terms / Consent Minutes of Order entered into between different parties.

Plaintiff, Mad Man Film Ventures, stated that in light of consent terms, the ownership of intellectual property was divided between them (37.5%), Reliance Entertainment (37.5%) and Vibri Media Pvt. Ltd., one of the producers of the film (25%). Advocate Virag Tulzapurkar appearing for Mad Man argued that as per the clauses in the contract, for the first 10 years period, it was entitled to receive a percentage of the net collection from Reliance. He further added that until such payment is not fully received, it had no obligation to consent to the delivery of the film for exploitation of digital or satellite rights of the film.

Due to the non-compliance of this clause by Reliance, Mad Man had not granted its consent to the platforms to broadcast the same and hence Hotstar and Netflix were required to be restrained from exploiting their rights received through Reliance without Mad Man’s prior consent, said Tulzapurkar.

Advocate Venkatesh Dhond appearing for Reliance contended at the outset that there seemed to be no challenge to the agreements entered into between Hotstar and Netflix. As for the challenge against the alleged non-compliance of clauses, Dhond submitted that Reliance shall continue to have all ancillary non-theatrical rights or exploitation rights for the subject film on worldwide basis for a period of 10 years from the date of the first theatrical release of the subject film. This would be during the First Cycle and it is only after the expiry of the first cycle that Mad Man will have such exploitation rights in the film.

The OTT platforms argued that they had been granted rights through agreements which were not under challenge and much prior in time to the consent terms between Mad Man and Reliance. They also contended that Mad Man’s contractual rights would begin only after 10 years till when Reliance had exclusive rights. In view of this, the Mad Man had no locus to even file the present suit for infringement of copyright.

After considering all submissions, Justice Chagla was of the opinion that the OTT platforms, Netflix and Star already had antecedent rights, both digital and satellite rights and Mad Man could not claim right to intellectual property over such rights. Additionally, the Court noted that Mad Man could commence exploiting its rights over the film only after the expiry of the first 10 years, where Reliance had exclusive rights.

In view of this, the Court rejected the ad-interim relief to Mad Man.

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