Jurisdiction Under Section 62 of the Copyright Act and Section 134 of the Trade Marks Act: The Supreme Court's Ruling in Indian Performing Rights Society Ltd. v. Sanjay Dalia

The Question Before the Court

In Indian Performing Rights Society Ltd. v. Sanjay Dalia, the Supreme Court was called upon to settle a recurring and commercially significant question: where a plaintiff's principal place of business is at a location where the cause of action has also arisen, can the plaintiff nonetheless choose to sue at a different place — typically the location of a branch office — merely because it also carries on business there? The Court answered this decisively in the negative, holding that Section 62 of the Copyright Act, 1957 and Section 134 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 must be construed purposively, and that a plaintiff residing or carrying on business at a place where the cause of action has also wholly or partly arisen must institute the suit at that place.

The Statutory Scheme

Section 20 of the Code of Civil Procedure ordinarily determines where a suit may be filed: under clauses (a) and (b), at a place where the defendant resides or carries on business, and under clause (c), at a place where the cause of action wholly or in part arises. An Explanation to Section 20 further provides that a corporation is deemed to carry on business at its sole or principal office in India, or, in respect of a cause of action arising at a place where it maintains a subordinate office, at that subordinate office as well.

Section 62 of the Copyright Act and Section 134 of the Trade Marks Act supplement this scheme with an additional forum: a plaintiff may also sue at the place where it actually and voluntarily resides, carries on business, or personally works for gain — irrespective of whether the defendant resides there or the cause of action arose there. The Court clarified that the non-obstante clause in these provisions ("notwithstanding anything contained in the Code of Civil Procedure") does not oust Section 20 of the CPC altogether; rather, it simply relieves the plaintiff of having to satisfy Section 20 where it chooses to rely instead on this additional forum.

Purpose of the Additional Forum

The Court emphasized that this additional forum was inserted for a specific and limited purpose: to spare authors and trademark holders — often individuals or entities of modest means — the burden and expense of litigating far from their own residence or place of business, simply because the defendant happened to reside, or the cause of action happened to arise, elsewhere. It was not intended to give plaintiffs a tool to drag defendants to a location even more inconvenient and more remote from the plaintiff's own real seat of business than the CPC would otherwise permit.

Accordingly, the Court held that where the plaintiff's principal place of business coincides with the place where the cause of action has arisen, the additional forum adds nothing — the plaintiff must sue there, and cannot instead choose a subordinate or branch office location merely because business is technically carried on there too. The provisions were never meant to let a plaintiff with, say, its head office and cause of action both in Mumbai, sue instead in Delhi or any other city merely because it maintains a branch office there. To read the provisions otherwise, the Court observed, would let a corporation with branch offices across the country institute proceedings at whichever such branch location proved most convenient or inconvenient to the defendant — an outcome plainly at odds with the legislative purpose of protecting plaintiffs from being dragged away from their own place of business, not enabling them to do the same to a defendant.

Applying this reasoning to the facts, since the plaintiff's principal place of business and the cause of action were both admittedly situated in Mumbai, the Court held that the Delhi courts lacked territorial jurisdiction to entertain the suit, regardless of any subordinate office the plaintiff might maintain there.

The Mischief Rule and Its Application

The Court invoked the mischief rule from Heydon's Case (76 ER 637), as explained by S.R. Das, C.J. in Bengal Immunity Co. v. State of Bihar, AIR 1955 SC 661 — under which a statute's true interpretation requires considering: the state of the law before the enactment; the mischief or defect the common law failed to address; the remedy Parliament devised to cure it; and the true reason for that remedy.

Applying this framework, the Court identified Section 20 of the CPC as the pre-existing law, under which a plaintiff could sue only at the defendant's location or where the cause of action arose. The mischief this created was the financial hardship and deterrence faced by authors and rights holders who had to vindicate their intellectual property far from their own residence or place of business. Parliament's remedy — inserting Section 62 of the Copyright Act and the equivalent Trade Marks Act provision — was to permit the plaintiff to sue where it resides or carries on business instead. But that remedy, the Court held, was never intended to extend further: where the plaintiff already resides or carries on business at the very place where the cause of action arose, the additional forum supplies no further latitude to sue somewhere else entirely.

The Court also rejected the argument, raised by reliance on Hiralal Rattanlal v. State of U.P., (1973) 1 SCC 216, that the mischief rule has no role to play where statutory language is otherwise clear. The Court held that where two interpretations of a provision are reasonably possible, the interpretation that best serves the statute's underlying object must be preferred — and here, that meant reading the additional forum as available only to the extent it serves the plaintiff's convenience, not as a device to inconvenience the defendant.

Guarding Against Reverse Mischief to the Defendant

A significant thread in the Court's reasoning was its concern for the position of the defendant. The provisions were designed to spare the plaintiff inconvenience — not to create a countervailing inconvenience for the defendant by allowing suits in wholly unconnected jurisdictions. The Court gave a pointed illustration: if a plaintiff carries on business and the cause of action arises in Mumbai, but the plaintiff also maintains branch offices in, say, Port Blair and Kanyakumari, an interpretation permitting suit at either of those branch locations — far removed from where the real dispute arose — would amount to precisely the kind of abuse the provisions were never meant to enable.

The Court's Holding

Drawing all of this together, the Supreme Court held:

1. A plaintiff may sue at a place where it resides, carries on business, or personally works for gain, without needing to establish that the defendant resides there or that the cause of action arose there — this is the additional forum the Copyright Act and Trade Marks Act create.
2. However, where the plaintiff's residence or principal place of business coincides with a place where the cause of action has also wholly or partly arisen, the plaintiff must sue at that place. It cannot invoke the existence of a subordinate office elsewhere to justify suing at that other location instead.
3. This reading gives full effect to the additional forum created by the Copyright Act and Trade Marks Act, while preventing its use as a mechanism to inconvenience defendants beyond what the statutory scheme intended.

Since the appellant's principal place of business and the cause of action were both situated in Mumbai, the Court held that the Delhi High Court lacked territorial jurisdiction over the suit.

Significance

Sanjay Dalia remains an important precedent curbing forum-shopping by large corporations and rights-holding entities that maintain branch offices nationwide. It confirms that the special jurisdictional provisions in IP statutes are a shield for genuinely inconvenienced plaintiffs, not a sword for plaintiffs seeking a jurisdictionally or strategically advantageous forum unconnected to their real place of business and the underlying dispute.

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This article is intended for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a qualified litigation counsel for guidance on questions of territorial jurisdiction in IP infringement proceedings.