On 1 October the Supreme Court declined to disturb a Delhi High Court finding that Ilaiyaraaja’s copyright in one of his own songs covers the tune and nothing else. Not the lyrics. Not the sound recording. A bench of Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice K Vinod Chandran, as reported by LiveLaw, put it this way: “We are of the view that no error, not to speak of any error of law, could be said to have been committed by the High Court in passing the interlocutory order.”
The song is En Iniya Pon Nilave, from the 1980s Tamil film Moodu Pani. The case is Ilaiyaraaja v Saregama India Limited.
What the fight is about
The Federal sets out the sequence. A production house, Vels Film International, made a recreated version of the song for another film, saying it had Ilaiyaraaja’s authorisation. Saregama said the authorisation that mattered was not his to give, because the label holds the rights by assignment from the producer of the original film.
The Delhi High Court agreed with the label. A single judge on 21 May, a division bench of Justice C Hari Shankar and Justice Om Prakash Shukla on 26 May, and then a review petition also dismissed on 26 May, all landed in the same place: the composer’s copyright is “limited to the music of the song and does not extend to the lyrics or the sound recording”.
Senior Advocate C Aryama Sundaram argued for Ilaiyaraaja that the finding had consequences well beyond this song, pointing to Section 13(4) of the Copyright Act, 1957, which treats the underlying works and the sound recording made from them as separate copyrights.
One line in the order that everyone will skip
Read this before deciding the matter is settled. On being asked, the Supreme Court clarified that “the observations in the impugned judgment are prima facie, for the purpose of deciding the issue in question”.
That is not a small footnote. Every one of these orders is interlocutory. The High Court made a prima facie finding at the interim stage, the Supreme Court has said it will not interfere with an interlocutory order, and it has gone out of its way to record that the findings are provisional. Anybody writing that the Supreme Court has ruled on who owns Indian film music has read the headline and not the order.
Why composers keep losing this
The structure is the thing, not the personalities. In Indian film music the producer commissions the song, pays for the session, and owns the sound recording as the producer of that recording. The producer then assigns it, usually to a label, usually decades ago, usually for a sum that looked reasonable at the time and absurd now. The composer wrote the music and holds the copyright in the musical work, which is a real right but a narrow one, and separate from the recording that everyone actually listens to.
So when a new film wants to recreate a 1980s song, the composer’s blessing is a courtesy. The signature that clears the use belongs to whoever holds the sound recording.
Parliament did try to shift this balance. The 2012 amendments to the Copyright Act strengthened authors’ and composers’ royalty entitlements for uses outside the film itself. Those provisions are generally understood to operate on agreements made after they came into force, which is exactly why a song recorded in the 1980s is still being litigated on the older terms. The man who wrote it is arguing under a regime designed before anyone imagined a recreation economy.
The commercial reading
Strip out the sentiment and here is what producers now have in writing, at least provisionally. If you want to recreate a film song, clear it with the sound recording owner. A composer’s consent, however famous the composer, does not protect you. Vels Film International believed it had permission and still ended up on the wrong side of an injunction.
Given how much of current Indian film music is recreations of old songs, that is an expensive clarification, and it moves leverage to the labels sitting on back catalogues. Which they have been quietly accumulating for forty years.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Ilaiyaraaja wrote something like seven thousand songs, carried entire Tamil films on a cassette release, and is at this point a court-recognised owner of melodies he is not allowed to let anyone perform. There is no version of copyright law that is working well if that is the output.
And yet the High Court is probably right on the statute. That is what makes it worth writing about. The injustice here is not judicial, it is contractual, and it was executed decades ago by producers buying rights from artists who had no bargaining power, no agents and no idea the songs would still be earning in 2026. The courts are enforcing those bargains as written, which is their job.
The fix was never going to come from a bench. It had to come from Parliament, it came partly in 2012, and it came too late for the generation that built the catalogue. Every composer working today should read this order as a contract lesson rather than a tragedy: the sound recording is the asset, and the person who owns it owns the song in every way that pays.
