14. In many cases, a work is derived from an existing work. Whether in such a derivative work, a new copyright work is created, will depend on various factors, and would one of them be only skill, capital and labour expended upon it to qualify for copyright protection in a derivative literary work created from the pre-existing material in the public domain, and the required exercise of independent skill, labour and capital in its creation by the author would qualify him for the copyright protection in the derivative work. Or would it be the creativity in a derivative work in which the final position will depend upon the amount and value of the corrections and improvements, the independent skill & labour, and the creativity in the end-product is such as to create a new copyright work to make the creator of the derivative work the author of it; and if not, there will be no new copyright work and then the original author will remain the author of the original work and the creator of the derivative work will have been the author of the alterations or the inputs put therein, for their nature will not have been such as to attract the protection under the law of copyright.
15. It is submitted by Shri Raju Ramachandran, learned senior counsel for the appellants that Section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Act does not bar the recognization of copyright in the copy-edited version of the text of judgments of the courts as published in law reports. The Government is the first owner of copyright in the judgments of the courts as per Section 2(k) read with Section 17 and Section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Act provides that any person wanting to reproduce or publish judgments would not infringe the copyright of the Government, but Section 52(1)(q)(iv) does not imply that in case a person has expended independent skill, labour and capital on the judgments of the courts to create and publish his version of the judgments, any other person is free to copy that person’s version of the judgments, substantially or in its entirely. Copyright subsists in the copy-edited version of the text of judgments of the courts as published in law reports, which have been created by the application of skill, labour and capital which is not trivial or negligible. The inputs put in the copy-edited judgments in SCC, is a derivative literary work created from preexisting material of the judgments of the court which is in public domain. The exercise of independent skill, labour and capital in its creation by the author of such work, and the derivative literary work created by the expenditure of the independent skill, labour and capital of the appellants gives them copyright in such creations. It is not necessary that work created should have a literary merit. The courts can only evaluate whether the skill, labour and capital actually employed, required in creating the work, is not trivial or negligible. It is further urged by the learned senior counsel that in deciding whether a derivative work qualifies for copyright protection, it must be considered as a whole, and it is not correct to dissect the work into fragments and consider the copyrightability of each such fragment piecemeal and individually apart from the whole. He submits that the respondents if wish to reproduce or publish a work already in public domain is obliged to go to the public domain/common source of such work rather than misappropriating the effort and investment of the appellants by copying the version of such work which was