Can India’s Writers Pull Off An IP Coup?

in yesterday's story, we wrote about the uphill battle that writers in the Indian entertainment industry have been waging for decades. They have resigned themselves to working for poor pay, getting lesser importance and credit than directors, and foregoing any share in royalties or profits generated from the stories they write.

The Mumbai-based Screenwriters’ Association (SWA) is trying to change that, this time, with some legal pushback. 

In the 1950s, film producers in newly-independent India began interfering in the relationship between writers and directors, insisting that they would decide who fills both roles in the movies they make. As film writers saw their freedom and power erode, 80 of them signed up to be part of a trade union. In 1954, in the presence of 24 of these members, a film writers’ association was born, with a promise to enrol more writers. Among the first members of this early version of the SWA were legends of the Hindi film industry including KA Abbas, Shakeel Badayuni, Sahir Ludhianvi, and Kamal Amrohi, who later became a director and founded Kamal Amrohi Studios.

In the 70 years since, the film industry has changed beyond recognition. In the last decade alone, more corporate and now Big Tech money has made its way into the Indian entertainment industry. But producers’ chokehold over the industry and consequently, the writers, hasn’t changed much.

Why don’t screenwriters, even those who are among the SWA’s 66,000 members, find any value in their trade union?

“I don’t think the SWA functions effectively as a trade union because it does not have any power against producers in the film industry,” a film, TV, and web-series writer told The Impression on condition of anonymity. “Look at any effective trade union in India or anywhere in the world. What makes it effective is strong political leadership and representation. The SWA does not have leadership like that. What power will it exert in an industry where its members are systematically exploited?”

Yet, there are other writers who say the SWA’s authority has found respect among a few producers. “If you file a complaint about copyright infringement through the SWA, I have seen it work,” film and web series writer Vaibhav Suman told The Impression. “The producer of a Punjabi film I worked on received a complaint from the SWA just days before its release. A writer alleged that the makers had used his creative concept. He had copies of emails he had exchanged with the filmmakers. The producers acted immediately and settled the matter with the writer as fast as possible.”

But as we wrote in part 1 yesterday, most writers consider the SWA a body that helps offer (some) protection of their original ideas from copyright infringement. “I haven’t used the union for anything else,” the first writer quoted above says. “I don’t know any other writer who has, or any famous case where a SWA member has successfully fought back against a producer.”

Union Levels Up

The SWA’s leadership says it knows about these drawbacks.

“When I became a writer back in 2008, I also thought the SWA was only a place to register your scripts,” Saiwyn Qadras, member of the SWA’s executive committee told The Impression. “But we realised that we have to show writers we [the SWA] are with you, through the ups and more importantly, through the downs of the business.”

That meant expanding the usefulness of the SWA to beyond just a repository of registered, protected scripts and ideas. “One big event we used to do was the three-day screenwriters’ conference where new and aspiring writers could come and meet established writers, attend master classes, understand how their contracts should be written, and how we can help them when they don’t get their dues.”

The SWA offers free legal representation to its members (up to Rs 5 lakh) and runs a Dispute Settlement Committee to mediate disputes between SWA members and other film professionals, usually producers. It is also working on offering minimum basic contracts and standard rate cards for writing film, TV, and web-series scripts.

The union’s second aim was to get itself taken seriously by the film and entertainment industry, especially all-powerful producers. “Now the SWA has built immense credibility among studios, platforms, and producers,” Qadras says. “They actively engage with a screenwriters’ body and listen to us about the minimum basics that all writers should be given and how credits should be formulated. These conversations weren’t possible in the early 2000s or even for a long time after.”

More recently, the SWA has invested in other events including a union writers’ award ceremony, a 2-day annual pitchfest allowing writers to pitch their stories directly to interested producers, and smaller events such as last month’s Sab Khairiyat (translation: All Okay?), a panel discussion covering the mental health struggles of film and entertainment writers.

Is this all enough? Maybe not yet. “It’s great there are now events for our mental health,” the first writer quoted above says. “But you know the biggest source of writers’ mental health problems? Lack of money and respect.”

Grabbing The Bag

For the SWA to become as effective as Hollywood’s striking writers’ union, the WGA, it will first need to secure writers the copyright to their work and the money it makes for everyone involved. That means enforcing a legal framework that applies to all writers in the film and entertainment industry, not mere producer negotiations and writers’ events.

Now, the SWA is negotiating with the government to set up a copyright society for writers.

“Getting a share of royalties has been a big issue, a struggle for writers for as long as films have been made in India,” Qadras says. But that might change. “We have succeeded in reaching out to the central government bodies to get a green light for a copyright society for screenwriters, just like there is one for singers and musicians. In a year’s time, these formalities should get sorted out.”

That copyright society is the Indian Performing Rights Society, a copyright society for musicians, singers, lyricists, and other musical artists set up in 1969. The IPRS collects music royalties from labels and pays them out in a set formula to its members. In 2012, the Indian parliament passed an amendment to the Copyright Act that entitled musicians to lifetime royalties on the music they create. Writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar, then a member of parliament, played a crucial role in building overwhelming support for the amendment across party lines. He is now the chairman of the IPRS.

The 2012 amendment allowed the IPRS to begin collecting this money from music labels and pay it out to their artist members.

But if the IPRS’ experience of dealing with music labels is anything to go by, the SWA has a long, arduous battle ahead of it in its quest to build a copyright society. The first step could be to simply shift the balance of power away from producers in line with copyright law.

“In 2012, the music industry did not accept the Copyright (Amendment) Act,” top music industry executive Achille Forler told The Impression. Forler is the founder of SyncMama and former managing director of Universal Music Publishing India, which acquired his independent music publishing firm Deep Emotions in the 2010s. “So they sent out emails to producers to tell them how to circumvent the law. They would ask music labels to discourage musicians from registering their work with the IPRS so they would not have to make any royalty payments.”

Just like film and entertainment producers, music labels exert disproportionate power and influence over the Indian music industry. Consider this: T-Series, India’s largest music label, became a member of the IPRS only in 2021, nearly a decade after the copyright law was amended. Before that year, musicians and lyricists who worked on songs for the label weren’t entitled to any royalty payments.

Besides this, running the IPRS is a time-consuming, costly affair. Twice a year, employees of the copyright society cross reference usage reports from music streaming services and other data regarding the music consumption in India with their database of registered musical artists. That allows the IPRS to determine how much royalty payment each member is entitled to during the half-yearly period under review from the commercial use of their music. In India, this is largely from streaming platforms, although it can include other forms such as the use of a song in a film, TV show, or web series.

In FY23, the IPRS had total expenses worth over Rs 31 crore, largely in employee expenses, per its annual report (pdf). That year, it also paid out over Rs 564 crore in royalty payments to its members. In FY18, it had collected just Rs 45 crore in royalties.

This bi-annual matching exercise can get complicated if musicians use different spellings of their names in their credits, for example, or if new artists register long after their work has been in circulation.

“Metadata is the oil of this whole industry,” Forler says. That data helps the IPRS identify when a music label, platform, or another music user isn’t paying their fair share of dues.

All these are challenges a writers’ copyright society will also have to face. But before it can get to questions of expensive data matching and fighting to get producers to pay, it has to establish some basic foundations.

“The SWA has been engaging with writers’ bodies of other Indian film industries to get them on board with a single copyright society,” SWA’s Qadras said. This copyright society will need to run a new membership drive, ensuring all active film, TV, and web series writers sign up to get royalty payments. “Members will have to pay separate fees to join the society. We will have our own new fee structure, which will help fund the body that will operate the copyright society,” Qadras added.

It’s early days, and the union is merely in talks with the government and other associations to lay down the foundations of this copyright society. But once it is established, a writers’ copyright society will be the first concrete step in the SWA’s 70-year history in securing concrete rights for Indian writers. There’s a long battle ahead, and for the leaders of the SWA, it isn’t about immediate benefits for themselves.

“First, the writers need to see that there is someone who is willing to fight for their rights,” Qadras says. “So when a call for ‘pens down’ ever comes in the future, it will actually lead to pens down. We have great leaders in the SWA such as [scriptwriter] Anjum Rajabali, who has spoken about these issues doggedly for so long. There are younger writers in the executive committee who are managing their day job while working on these issues [of writers’ rights]. We [younger writers] are getting to see the fruits of their [older writers] labour and it is both encouraging and overwhelming.”