Document Fragment View

Matching Fragments

8. The purchasing of the genuine software program of plaintiff No.4 can be done through (a) retail purchase, (b) online purchase and (c) volume license.

9. It is also the case of the plaintiffs that the copyrights in the plaintiffs' software products are infringed inter alia in one of the following ways: (i) end-user piracy, (ii) counterfeiting, (iii) channel piracy and (iv) internet piracy.

10. It is averred in the plaint that the plaintiffs suffered incalculable damages to their intellectual property rights and business on account of various forms of copyright piracy in their software programs. A brief description of common methods of copyright infringement employed in relation to piracy, are (i) reproducing the plaintiffs' software and the packaging of that software so that purchasers are deliberately misled to believe that the product they are buying is genuine software, (ii) reproducing or burning the plaintiffs' software into a blank writable CD/DVD where no attempt is made to represent that the copy is genuine,

(iii) reproducing a number of plaintiffs' programs on a single CD/DVD-ROM, known as a compilation CD/DVD and (iv) making more copies than permitted by the End-User License Agreement.

11. It is also averred that the corporate or end-user piracy is the most damaging form of the software piracy which occurs when businesses, corporations, companies, institutions, schools, non-profit organizations, etc., make additional copies of plaintiffs' software without authorization. The reproduction of the plaintiffs' software without the plaintiffs' permission is an infringement of their copyright in their software programs.

12. It is stated that this kind of a piracy occurs (i) when number of software copies installed on the computers of an organization or a company exceed the number of copies permitted or authorized by End-User License Agreement held by that organization or the company or, (ii) when the number of copies of the software installed on computer systems within an organization or a company exceeds the number of licenses for the relevant software held by that organization or, (iii) When the softwares are installed and copied from pirated CD/DVD ROMs containing single or multiple pirated/unlicensed version of software programs onto the computers used by an organization or a company, or (iv) when academic or other restricted or non-retail software is acquired without the license and used for commercial purposes, or (v) when advantage of upgrade offers are taken without having a legal copy of the version to be upgraded.

14. According to the plaintiffs, the defendant No.2 appears to be a company into the business of providing IT services and solutions to its clients. The defendant No.1 appears to be the system administrator of the defendant No.2 entity. It is the case of the plaintiffs' that they have received information on their Business Software Alliance (BSA) website reporting the usage of unlicensed / pirated software programs of the plaintiffs by the defendants on their computers. The BSA is a non-profit association of global software companies including the plaintiffs that is formed to fight software piracy regarding the large scale use of unlicensed / pirated software and thus strive to promote a safe and legal digital world. According to the plaintiffs' investigation, it was revealed that the defendants were involved in piracy of the plaintiffs' software programs and to determine the sphere of activities of the defendants, the number of computer systems in use, and the types of software programs being used by the defendants, an independent investigator, Dhruv Maingi, was engaged to carry out investigation into the activities of the defendants. During the course of the investigation it was confirmed that, defendant No.2, a company by the name 'Chetu' is in existence and located in Nehru Place, New Delhi. The investigator then conducted an online survey for Chetu on the website www.chetu.com which revealed the address of the centre to be located in Sector 63, Noida. It is also revealed that the company is using the software programs such as Microsoft Active Directory, SQL server and Microsoft Windows for its functioning. Thereafter, the investigator conducted an online search on the website www.123eng.com which revealed certain job openings at Chetu looking for candidates who are proficient in the use of software programs such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Actionscript, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver.