SC to hear plea on safeguarding copyright over live-streamed court proceedings

Virag Gupta, Govindacharya's lawyer, had mentioned the urgent listing plea on September 26. He cited YouTube's terms of service and stated that if the proceedings are webcast on it, this private platform obtains copyright to them as well.

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New Delhi: The Supreme Court will hear a petition on Monday from former RSS idealogue K N Govindacharya, who claims that the copyright of live-streamed Supreme Court proceedings cannot be surrendered to private platforms such as YouTube. On September 27, the Supreme Court began live-streaming its Constitution bench proceedings related to the hearing of petitions challenging the reservation for Economically Weaker Sections and the dispute over control of services between the Centre and the Delhi government for the first time. A bench of Chief Justice Uday Umesh Lalit and Justice Bela M Trivedi has scheduled a hearing on Govindacharya's interim petition for Monday.

Govindacharya's lawyer, Virag Gupta, had mentioned the urgent listing plea on September 26. He referred to YouTube's terms of service and stated that if the proceedings are webcast on it, this private platform also obtains the copyright to them. According to a 2018 ruling, "the copyright over all the material recorded and broadcast in this court shall vest with this court only," the lawyer said.

“Direct for a special agreement with YouTube for safeguarding the copyright over live streaming and archived judicial proceedings, as per the directions in the judgement of Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India...,” the plea said. The bench stated that these are preliminary steps and that the Supreme Court will have its own platforms to live to stream the proceedings. The Supreme Court decided unanimously at a full court meeting led by the CJI to live-stream proceedings of all Constitution bench hearings beginning September 27, four years after Justice Dipak Misra, the then CJI, issued a landmark decision on the issue in 2018.

(With ANI inputs)