Copyright registration records who owns what. It does not, by itself, get anyone paid when a song is played. That is a different system, and in India the entry point to it is IPRS.

What it is

The Indian Performing Right Society Limited, a copyright society registered under section 33(3) of the Copyright Act. It licenses the public performing and mechanical rights in literary and musical works, collects what those licences generate, and distributes it to members.

Two things follow from “registered under section 33(3)”, and both matter more than they sound.

Joining is an assignment, not a listing

This is the part that is genuinely under-explained, and it is on the application form itself.

An applicant agrees, if admitted, to execute an Assignment Deed to the society of all the public performing and mechanical rights in the literary and musical works of which they are composer, songwriter, publisher or owner, “including all future works to the exclusion of all other persons including myself”, and undertakes to execute further assignments for works acquired later.

Read that carefully:

  • it covers future works, not only what you notify today;
  • it is to the exclusion of all other persons including yourself, so you are not retaining a parallel right to license those uses directly;
  • it is a deed you physically sign, not a checkbox.

None of that is a reason to avoid membership, it is how collective licensing works everywhere, and the alternative is that nobody collects performing royalties on your behalf at all. But it is a real transfer, and it deserves to be understood before signing rather than after.

There is a clause you cannot draft your way around: an author’s right to an equal share of royalties for a song cannot be assigned or waived except to legal heirs or to a collecting society, and an assignment to the contrary is void.

So when a label takes an assignment of a song and wants the paperwork to actually hold, the workable structure is not a buy-out clause. It is: assign the economic rights, and route the author’s royalty share through a society registered under section 33(3). The statute names the mechanism; IPRS is the mechanism.

That is the practical link between the two systems, and the reason a label ends up dealing with both.

What it is not

Not a substitute for registration. IPRS does not adjudicate ownership; it distributes on the basis of what members notify. Registration is where authorship and ownership are recorded.

Not the same as an ISRC. An ISRC identifies a recording; IPRS deals with the underlying work. Different identifier, different body, different purpose.

Not the whole royalty picture. IPRS covers performing and mechanical rights in the literary and musical work. Rights in the sound recording are a separate stream.

Next: the membership process, including the part that surprises people.