ⓘ Featured image: A file-photo of Bhushan Kumar, Managing Director of T-Series
Tiger Global and Bertelsmann backed Roposo, a TikTok like short video platform is facing a tussle with India’s music and film production major T-Series. The production house yesterday has sued Roposo, Tiger Global and Bertelsmann before the Delhi High Court.
T-Series’s president Neeraj Kalyan in a statement to the Economic Times said,
“The app is infringing content under the user-generated content. They are offering our music in their library and enticing users to upload our content in exchange for cash rewards. Their venture capitalists have not done due diligence, they are hand in glove,”
T-Series claims that Roposo is blatantly using T-Series music records to fuel their library and also illegally ripping/extracting the songs from users’ devices, especially from Apple Music and Google Music accounts. The company also highlighted that Roposo is misusing records within its video advertisements and in its contests – creating effects/filters with T-Series songs without taking a license from the music giant.
Kalyan in a statement to Bollywood Hungama also said,
“It’s a matter of shame for global major venture funds that they are backing music pirates for commercial gains. It has become fashionable for such pirates to seek refuge under ambiguous provisions of law and claiming to be an intermediary or are entitled to any safe harbour protection given the number of direct instances of infringement by Roposo and others like them. Their actions are contradictory to their bogus claims as their actions and offerings in the App clearly show commercial synchronization, encouraging users to upload videos containing infringing content, curation of our music in an audio library as well as monetization of our songs directly by Roposo. Having admitted before the court to having provided our content in the music library and ripping/extracting our songs, to now say that the content is user generated or that Roposo is an intermediary is just misleading, an eye-wash and a futile attempt to justify their crimes. In fact, as I understand the law also requires that even intermediaries, which Roposo is not, to conduct regular due diligence of its platforms and prevent such violations proactively and not wait for a takedown notice. None of what Roposo is doing is intermediary behavior and instead requires a specific license under copyright law. We expect a company backed by global investors such as Tiger Global and Bertelsmann and operated and run by global names such as Glance InMobi to be well aware of the law and considerate of the market realities, especially of the fact that virtually every other similarly placed service including ‘Sharechat’, “Moj”, ‘Facebook’, ‘Tik-Tok’, ‘Instagram’ etc has taken a license from us for such features and offerings. We have zero-tolerance policy against any kind of infringement, however, we are always open to license our content and will be happy to initiate meaningful discussions in this regard.”
This is the second time T-Series is reporting such issue. The company back in March sued Sharechat for a similar violation and the company ended up taking a license from T-Series to use its record labels.
In November 2019, Roposo was acquired by InMobi, a Japan’s SoftBank backed global advertising technology company based in Bengaluru, India.
LAFFAZ Media has contacted Roposo to comment, this news article will be updated as soon as the company shares a statement.
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