Renunciation vs relinquishment in copyright law

India is the land of saints and the spiritual. It is not uncommon, therefore, for women and men to decide to renounce all worldly pleasures, in a bid to attain spiritual enlightenment. As the Supreme Court said in Kishan Chand Mangal v. State of Rajasthan, India is “a country where renunciation is worshipped and the grandeur and wild display of wealth frowned upon…”

Even otherwise, the law itself recognizes the factum of persons who intend to renunciate. For instance, under Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act, one spouse may seek divorce if the other “has renounced the world by entering any religious order”.

This indicates that renunciation carries with it the attribute that the person has or intends to completely withdraw from society. But what of the corporeal and incorporeal rights over property held by the renunciate? In a recent decision of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust India v. WWW.FRIENDWITHBOOKS.CO, the Delhi High Court examined this question in the context of intellectual property law.

In essence, the question which arose before the Court was this: if a person has authored an intellectual work and assigned the rights in the work to a trust founded by him, does the fact that they have renounced the world automatically imply that they forever surrender all rights over the such works authored by them? The case concerned the many works of Srila Prabhupada, who founded ISKCON.

As a matter of law, a person may decide to renounce the world. But unless a specific disability applies by the law automatically, the rights over the property held by the renunciate continue to subsist even after the factum of renunciation. Thus, for instance, rights over immovable property which vest in a renunciate do not automatically terminate upon the act of renunciation. As the Court saw it:

“A renunciate is a person who, by statement, utterance, writing or otherwise, renounces or gives up possessions, rights or claims. The legal twin of this concept can be found in the word “relinquishment”. The act and the consequence of relinquishment certainly finds expression in various laws including property law, testamentary law, contract law, as also intellectual property law. (para. 13)

…What needs focus is, that a person who seeks to renounce the world and give up his rights to property in law, must do so within the recognized rubric of relinquishment.” (para. 15).  

What weighed most with the Court was the fact that there was a specific provision under the Copyright Act which governed the manner in which a person who holds a copyright in a work may decide to give it up. Under Section 21, the manner of giving up one’s copyright in a work is termed as relinquishment and this provision empowers an author of a work to relinquish the copyright that they may hold. This is the substantive aspect of Section 21.

Apart from this, is the procedural aspect. The provision prescribes the precise manner in which the relinquishment ought to be done: (A) By giving a notice in the prescribed form to the Registrar of Copyrights or by way of a public notice [Section 21(1)]; (B) If such notice is served on the Registrar, then the Registrar shall have to have it published in the Official Gazette [Section 21(2)]. Section 21(2A) provides a timeline for such a notice, which is published in the Official Gazette, is to be publicly available.

As the Court saw it, for the property rights to either be transferred or be terminated, an act as ordained by the relevant law has to be carried out before such rights come to an end. In other words, renunciation does not lead to the cessation of rights over intellectual property. As the Delhi High Court noted, this issue is no longer res integra. After drawing on a welter of case law, the Court held, in the context of the Copyright Act:

“In any event, the decisions adverted to by plaintiff’s counsel are unanimous in their conclusion in relation to similar issues which arose i.e. that rights in works authored by a saint or ascetic can subsist in their name. Even on first principles, as noted above, defendant’s assertion to the contrary, infirm and untenable and is based upon an amorphous concept, not sanctioned or endorsed by law, of a renunciate automatically deemed as relinquishing all rights in property upon becoming a sanyasi. A copyright vests in a person by virtue of his sweat and toil and therefore, subsists by law, inter alia, per Section 17 of the Copyright Act. Once the person is the repository of the right recognized by law it can only extinguish qua him or her by a legal mode.” (para. 27)

There was another aspect to this case. The works in question were assigned by the author of the work to a trust formed by him, which is recognised under Sections 18 and 19 of the Copyright Act. Once this act of relinquishment had occurred, the copyright in the works were now vested in the trust. Yet, the act of the original author renouncing the world does not impact either the mode of assignment if validly made as per the Copyright Act, nor does the act of renunciation per se automatically result in the copyright in the work being surrendered in the eyes of law.

In the final analysis, it is the statement of the law contained in the Copyright Act which governs all temporal matters concerning intellectual property rights in authored works.

Rohan J Alva is an arguing counsel in the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court.