Future of Innovation and Commerce Confluence of Copyright in Audio Visual Trade Industry and the Underlying Issues

We are the inhabitants of the 21st Century, an era full of skyscrapers, global warming, and a generation endorsing the ‘Netflix and chill’ phenomenon. Trade incentivizes development and innovation. Intellectual property rights provide an impetus for innovation. Thus trade indirectly and constantly demands innovation so as to reach out to consumers in various forms. Audio- visual industry is one such form of trade facilitated innovation which has gathered importance in the recent past. With the advancement of technology, subject matters of copyright do not remain restrained in their country of origin. It is attributed to the development in the field of trade and commerce which has facilitated access to such audio-visual work around the globe. The audiovisual service sector has experienced drastic increase in the last few years. Technological developments have permitted greater quantities of content to be delivered and have given allowed customers to exercise more control over what they want to consume and when. Thus the confluence of trade and innovation creates a dynamic industry with worldwide consumers. The boom in consumers of Netflix, Amazon prime videos, Hotstar etc are to name a few. With rights come responsibilities and thus spring the issues of copyright while the audio-visual work travels trans-boundary. Up until today, practically every strategy that has been deployed to try to thwart unauthorized copying of digital audiovisual work has been unsuccessful or defeated by readily available applications that are developed almost as quickly as new methods of copy protection come online. The audio-visual sector of trade is a recent phenomena and thus requires all the more attention given its susceptibility to IP issues. This paper seeks to dwell into the concept, meaning and analysis of the issues with respect to copyright in the audio-visual industry.