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Dhanush's Wunderbar Films moves High Court over Copyright Tax!

PUBLISHED DATE : 30/Mar/2018

Dhanush's Wunderbar Films moves High Court over Copyright Tax!

 

TL;DR The GST Intelligence body had sent a court notice to actor Dhanush's Wunderbar Films demanding a tax of Rs. 2.59 crore to be paid for its copyright services for the years 2013 - 2015. The GST body had also accused the production house of trying to evade tax by falsely claiming that they had transferred ownership of the copyrights (belonging to Wunderbar) to their buyers (of satellite rights, dubbing rights, remake rights, etc) permanently, whereas their documents indicated a 60 years' time. 

Now, in a response to this notice sent on August 11, 2017, S. Vinod Kumar of Wunderbar films has filed a written petition in the Madras High Court. To point 1, he has claimed that Wunderbar Films are by default exempted from the service tax, because taxes only apply if the copyrights are transferred temporarily or for a fixed amount of time, which they haven't done. He has further stated that point 2 is a misconception as Wunderbar films has mentioned 60 years (the maximum tenure that could be claimed on any copyright) because Section 19 (5) of the Copyright Act of 1957 states that if the period of assignment of a right was not mentioned in the agreement, then the period would be considered as 5 years, thus making it a temporary transfer.

It is worth mentioning here that the GST body has now made even permanent copyright transfers taxable. But it applies only to transactions done after July 1, 2017.    

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