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Synopsis

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday decreed a copyright infringement suit filed by the storytelling platform ‘Humans of Bombay’ (HOB) against the Instagram handle namely ‘People of India’ (POI).

The bench of Justice Prathiba M. Singh directed HOB and POI to not copy each other's copyrighted contents.

"In the context of the suit, the core idea is storytelling. There cannot be any monopoly in running of a storytelling platform. However, all platforms ought to adopt their own creative expression to communicate and disseminate the said stories," the judge said. 

"If photos are commissioned or videos produced by the platform (POI or Humans of Bombay), the copyright would be vested in the respective platform and they would be cinematograph works," it added.

The plaintiff HOB filed the present suit seeking an injunction restraining infringement of copyright of its copyrighted content which included (i) plaintiff’s content, (ii) Literary works, (iii) Materials, (iv) Films and (v) creative expressions which were published on its website as also Instagram handle and YouTube channel, against the defendants-POI Social Media Pvt. Ltd. & Anr.

The plaintiff’s case was that the defendants had started an identical portal/service having identical content as that of the plaintiff by the name ‘People of India’ available on the Instagram Platform handle @officialpeopleofindia. It also contended that the defendants (POI) had replicated a large number of images and videos from the plaintiff’s platforms and had used the same on their platforms.

Counsel for the plaintiff submitted that the defendants (POI) were approaching the very same subjects who were shown on the plaintiff’s websites in order to create an imitative platform. He showed the court a comparative table of some images which showed that the defendants had completely replicated their business model as well as the stories themselves.

Counsel for POI argued that the plaintiff's platform was "not unique" and that there were similar platforms like Humans of Goa, Humans of Delhi, etc, and all these pages had imitated the 'Humans of New York' platform, which started back in 2010. He submitted that the plaintiff was also guilty of copying and replicating contents from POI's handle.

Noting that neither party insisted on any damages from the other, accordingly, the court decreed the suit. 

On September 18, the court had issued summons in the suit. On perusal of the images shown by the HOB, the court had said, "Prima facie, there is substantial imitation and in fact, in some cases, the photographs/images are identical or imitative".

Case Title: Humans of Bombay Stories Pvt Ltd v. POI Social Media Pvt Ltd