A musical event being touted as a ‘live’ concert of late Ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh has not gone down well with his wife, Chitra Singh.
Panache Entertainment Private Limited, in collaboration with the Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS), is organising this ‘live’ concert at Siri Fort Auditorium on Friday, March 18th. Chitra Singh had moved the Delhi HC against the organisers, claiming that as IPRS doesn’t have the privileged membership of Jagjit Singh anymore, and hence loses the right to license his work to a third party, in this case, Panache Media.
However, Sheetal Madnani (Manager-Legal, Data and Distribution at IPRS) told The Quint that Jagjit Singh is still one of its members. In fact, she also clarified that legally speaking, neither Jagjit Singh nor his legal heir can claim the copyright to his works, since they are the intellectual property of the music labels who have produced them.
While the Delhi High Court has issued an interim direction restraining the IPRS from granting and/or recovering licenses on behalf of the late artist, the concert in question is fully sold out and taking place as planned.
The organisers will be pulling off the event by extracting audio and video portions from the late artist’s previous concerts, while band members who used to perform with him will be synchronising their tunes to his vocals. The concert hopes to bring him alive in this virtual manner, which is also reported to be something that Chitra Singh reportedly finds disturbing.
Meanwhile, the court has said that the organisers have been ‘clearly misleading’ and ‘breaching the right of privacy and other intellectual property rights of Jagjit Singh’ by promoting the musical evening as ‘Jagjit Singh Live in Concert’.
Randhir Ranjan Roy, Business Head & Founder of Panache Media, says they have taken permission from IPRS, to whom Singh had given rights before his death.
IPRS has the Copyright to all of Singh’s works, but has not paid the royalty to the family since 2007, which was the catch. His wife questioned the legality of IPRS and that we didn’t take permission from her. Our tickets have already been sold out. Honestly, this is between Ms Singh and IPRS. We will follow the court’s orders for the payment of license fee to its rightful owner.Randhir Ranjan Roy (Founder, Panache Media)
Chitra Singh has claimed that the documents produced by IPRS are fraudulent. She had also filed the same complaint in the Bombay High Court in February this year, before a similar ‘live’ concert was held in the city. But her plea was turned down. Panache Media shared this update via its Facebook page around the event.
The Delhi court has asked the organisers to pay a fee of Rs 5 lakh to ‘secure the rights of the plaintiffs’ and to not advertise it as a ‘live’ event.
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