Royalties And Research: A Forgotten Faultline In Indian Copyright Law?
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Royalties And Research: A Forgotten Faultline In Indian Copyright Law?
By Anushka Aggarwal
The recent controversy over access to academic materials in India has, unsurprisingly, sparked conversations about systemic barriers to knowledge. For many academics, the immediate flashpoint, whether students and researchers can access scholarly works through platforms like Sci-Hub or LibGen, reflects a much deeper problem: the structure of publishing agreements themselves.
In an earlier post, it was noted that this debate should push us to look beyond piracy and injunctions, towards an often neglected question: Are the copyright assignment agreements that regulate academic publishing in India even valid? It had then pointed to two underexplored provisions, Sections 19(3) and 19A of the Copyright Act, as possible areas of challenge. This post builds on that starting point.
Section 19(3): The Royalty Mandate
After the 2012 amendments, Section 19(3) of the Copyright Act, 1957 requires that any valid assignment of copyright must “specify the royalty and other consideration payable to the author”. This replaced the earlier formulation, “royalty payable, if any,” with a mandatory requirement, aimed at strengthening authors’ bargaining power. The amendment was drafted with film and music industry in mind, and the courts have been clear that royalties should mean real, quantifiable payments.
Academic publishing, however, operates on an entirely different model. Standard journal agreements require authors to assign copyright but contain no reference to royalties. While some publishers, particularly in open-access or book publishing, use licensing models, journal publishing overwhelmingly relies on assignments. Non-exclusive licenses are legally possible, but in practice publishers prefer assignment because it secures control over indexing, dissemination, and enforcement. As a result, assignment remains the prevailing norm in this sector. Correspondingly, the global standard is “zero-royalty,” and journals would justify this on the ground that they bear costs of peer review, editing, and dissemination. Authors, in turn, would accept the bargain because their reward lies more in visibility, career advancement, and scholarly recognition rather than financial return.
Seen economically, the current system is a stable equilibrium. Authors rarely push for royalties because they lack bargaining power. Journals are gatekeepers to career advancement, and the payoff from negotiating a few hundred rupees in royalties would be negligible compared to the costs in time and risk. Publishers, for their part, have little reason to voluntarily negotiate royalty payments since their business model rests on subscription revenue, not on sharing downstream value with authors. The result is a system where publishers extract value by controlling access, while universities, libraries, and researchers bear the costs through subscription fees. Section 19(3), if applied here, risks making access even harder. In film and music, royalties can directly sustain production. In academia, however, financial incentives work very differently. Research is mostly driven by non-financial motives, career advancement, scholarly reputation, and the imperative to publish. Royalties are unlikely to change that. Worse, when financial incentives are introduced (whether through government productivity targets, institutional pressures, or probably even royalties), they are likely to distort research behaviour, encouraging rushed publications and quantity over quality, without effectively improving knowledge production. Instead, royalties would become a new item in publisher costs. Since publishers operate in concentrated markets with high bargaining power, those costs are not likely to be absorbed by them. They will be shifted onto universities and libraries in the form of steeper subscription rates, and ultimately onto researchers and students who face either more paywalls or narrower access.
The irony is that a rule meant to empower authors could, in practice, further restrict readers. Instead of bridging the gap between creation and demand, mandatory royalties risk deepening the access issue. The law thus collides with its own public-regarding purpose, i.e., in trying to secure fair compensation for authors, it may worsen the systemic problem of knowledge being priced out of reach for those who most need it.
Section 19A and the Question of Remedies
Suppose an author does challenge their assignment contract. Section 19A (2) empowers courts to revoke an assignment if the assignee fails to exercise rights, or if the terms are “harsh” to the author. At first glance, a zero-royalty agreement might seem to fit this description, especially given Section 19(3)’s mandatory language. But in practice, revocation is unlikely to be what authors want. Losing the assignment would disrupt indexing, citations, and access, undermining the very reputational benefits that drive academic publishing.
What authors would realistically seek is royalties, not termination. Yet this raises its own difficulties: How should a court calculate them? On subscription revenue, downloads, citations? The costs of designing and monitoring such a regime could easily outweigh the benefit to authors. This is again a situation where transaction costs outweigh the potential gains. For a court to enforce royalties in academic publishing, it would first need to identify a workable metric–subscription revenue, download counts, citation impact, or some hybrid formula. Each option creates measurement issues, requires data disclosure from publishers (who may be reluctant to share), and invites litigation over what constitutes “reasonable” payment. Even if a formula were settled on, monitoring compliance would be an ongoing challenge. Publishers operate across jurisdictions, bundle journals into subscription packages, and constantly alter pricing. Tracking what portion of revenue is attributable to a single article, and then ensuring timely payment to its author, would require a complex enforcement framework. All of this would generate legal uncertainty and administrative expense disproportionate to the tiny financial return most journal articles could ever command.
It is true that royalty-sharing is not inherently unworkable. Books, music, and employment-related licensing arrangements rely on such models, often involving split payments. But academic publishing differs in both scale and incentive structure. In books or movies, royalties are the author’s primary economic reward. In academia, by contrast, the incentives are more reputational in nature rather than financial, and the monetary value of royalties per article is negligible. Replicating a royalty system in this setting would thus impose disproportionate administrative burdens for minimal benefit. From an efficiency perspective, then, mandating royalties here creates more friction in the system than value. The legal system would be devoting resources to calculate and enforce payments that are negligible in individual cases, while distorting the underlying market equilibrium without improving author welfare.
Conclusion
Legally, Section 19(3) challenges the very structure of academic publishing in India. Economically, however, strict enforcement may generate inefficiency. It must be noted that the 2012 amendments were motivated less by efficiency than by fairness, i.e., an attempt to prevent authors from being stripped of bargaining power through “zero-royalty” assignments. Even granting that fairness requires some baseline of compensation, the question is whether academic publishing is the right context in which to enforce it. As the piece has attempted to highlight, the distributive gains to authors are minimal, while the costs such as higher subscription prices and reduced access may ultimately frustrate the public-regarding purpose of copyright law. The real task, then, is not merely statutory compliance but institutional design that protects authors, sustains publishers, and expands access in the most effective way possible. Until that happens, Indian copyright law will continue to carry an untested, and uneasy fault line at the heart of academia.