The Delhi High Court has restrained Commercial Law Publishers and its associated parties from printing, publishing, distributing or selling books containing headnotes allegedly copied from Taxmann, holding that the material appeared, at the preliminary stage, to reproduce the publishing house’s original editorial work.
Justice Vikas Mahajan issued the ex parte interim injunction on November 2 in the copyright infringement case, Taxmann Allied Services Pvt Ltd v. Commercial Law Publishers (India) Pvt Ltd & Ors.
The Court found a prima facie case that the defendants had copied Taxmann’s original headnotes, including its distinctive method of identifying legal issues, condensing judicial decisions and presenting the legal principles emerging from them.
The restraint covers eight publications identified in the suit, as well as any other publication containing Taxmann’s headnotes or substantial reproductions of them. The defendants and those acting on their behalf have been prohibited from printing, publishing, reproducing, distributing, selling, advertising or otherwise dealing with the disputed material until the next hearing.
Taxmann approached the Court alleging that Commercial Law Publishers had reproduced substantial portions of its headnotes across eight books dealing with income tax and related subjects.
The publishing house maintained that its headnotes were independently created by an in-house editorial and research team of more than 200 professionals. Preparing them, it argued, required the team to study complete judgments, identify the questions of law decided, select the relevant facts and formulate the resulting legal propositions in an original manner.
According to Taxmann, this process involved considerable research, skill, judgment and editorial discretion. It therefore claimed that its headnotes qualified as original literary works protected under the Copyright Act, 1957.
The company alleged that hundreds of its headnotes had been reproduced in the defendants’ publications. The disputed titles included Income Tax Act, 1961, Direct Tax Law and Practice, Search and Seizure and Taxation of Salaried Employees and Pensioners.
Taxmann specifically pointed to at least 280 allegedly copied headnotes in Direct Tax Law and Practice and another 235 in Income Tax Act, 1961. It also relied on instances where the defendants’ books reportedly mentioned ‘TAXMANN.COM’ beneath the disputed headnotes as their source.
The interim order prevents the defendants from commercially using the disputed material while the case proceeds. The Court will consider the matter further at the next hearing.