Devansh Bansal is a 4th-year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at Symbiosis Law School, Nagpur, with a strong focus on Intellectual Property Rights, Media & Entertainment, and Technology, Media & Telecom law.
In 2000, Indian television got its first taste of a very particular kind of quiz show: a darkened studio, dramatic music building in the background, one contestant alone in the hot seat, and a set of lifelines to fall back on. Few of the people watching knew that the whole format had been bought, for a serious licensing fee, from a British company that had already sold the same show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, to more than a hundred countries.
Reality and game show formats like Big Brother, Bigg Boss, MasterChef, Roadies, Dance India Dance (and many others) are not just clever ideas, but are operated commodities in a global industry that makes billions of dollars in annual revenues and are traded, licensed, and litigated over, unlike patented pharmaceutical compounds are, without any corresponding exclusive right supporting them. Yet, beneath this vast commercial structure lies an unsettling and indigestible legal fact: a television format, on its own, is not in itself copyrightable matter, in most countries, including India.
This article discovers the murky and under-discussed knot between entertainment law and IP law, that of format rights and the bundle of commercial expectations that broadcasters and producers develop around a show, without precise statutory support. It charts the doctrinal issues with regard to the dichotomy of idea versus expression, explains the judicial improvisations of the Indian courts on the concept of breach of confidence and passing off, and wonders whether India’s fast-expanding format licensing economy can be built on such shaky ground.
The idea-expression dichotomy
Under the Copyright Act, 1957 (Section-13) copyright is granted to original literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, along with cinematograph films and sound recordings. It doesn’t refer to formats anywhere. It is not a mistake, but a reflection of the fundamental dichotomy of the idea/expression model on which every copyright system around the world is based, and which the Supreme Court affirmed in R.G. Anand v. Delux Films, that there is no copyright in an idea, theme, or subject matter, only in the particular way in which an idea is expressed. At such a high level of abstraction, a quiz show featuring suspense, a rotating panel of judges, or a villa where contestants are eliminated one by one is an idea that should be left for others to develop, or else a few early winners will dominate future generations of stories.
The difficulty with a format is that it lies in a middle, uncomfortable space. It is more specific than a bare premise since it typically includes a title, the visual style, catchphrases, a scoring or elimination mechanic, a host persona, and a production bible, which can be hundreds of pages of very granular instructions given to the licensee. But it is not as concrete as a completed, fixed work such as a novel or a film: a format is a set of instructions for the creation of a potentially infinite series of unscripted episodes, no two of which will be exactly the same. A format is essentially incapable of being fixed. This defeats the copyright fixation condition by design: a format is being built which is flexible across various hosts, contestants and cultural contexts, and that adaptableness is precisely what contributes to its commercial value.
The foundational case: Green v Broadcasting Corp. of New Zealand
A Privy Council decision of 1989 is the primary common-law opinion on the matter. The British television host Hughie Green had developed and hosted a very popular talent show called Opportunity Knocks, with a series of recurring elements: a clapometer to determine approval, a list of catchphrases which he repeated on air, and a sponsorship device to introduce the contestants to the audience in the studio. A New Zealand broadcaster aired a very similar programme with the same title, and Green filed a suit for copyright infringement on the basis that the format and the dramatic structure had to be protected as a dramatic work.
The claim was rejected by the Privy Council. It believed that the elements that Green used were at best peripheral to an overall show concept that was too underdeveloped, too vague, and too lacking in certainty and unity to create copyrightable script. Since then, the case has been cited in almost every format dispute case in the Commonwealth, as the reason courts treat the word format with substantial inspection, even as producers remain to depend on on it commercially.
India’s improvised response
In a similar challenge to the same structural question about ten years later, Indian courts found a more producer-conscious, doctrinally ad hoc answer, not through extending the definition of a copyrightable work, but by holding that a sufficiently detailed format document can itself be protected as an expression, and by adding to copyright an independent equitable remedy, breach of confidence.
The first major ruling was in 2002, in the case of Anil Gupta v. Kunal Dasgupta before the Delhi High Court, about the reality show Swayamvar for matchmaking services. Plaintiffs had formulated a concept note to outline how the mythological swayamvar (bride’s choice of husband) ritual would be adapted for the modern medium television, complete with its structure, characters, and episode breakdowns they shared it with the defendants, for a possible collaboration, presentations and discussions happened however subsequently the court granted an injunction, when the defendants went ahead and developed another similar show on their own. Importantly, the court did not find that the bare idea of a televised swayamvar was protectable but rather that an idea, once it is rendered into a detailed form, is capable of being protected, and separately, that disclosing an idea in a confidential setting creates an independent, enforceable obligation to not exploit it.
This logic was put to the test and developed one year later by a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court in an interesting case titled Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Sundial Communications Pvt. Ltd., where two competing television serials were competing based on an avatar of Lord Krishna dressed in a child’s attire. Plaintiffs presented a detailed concept note, character sketches, and episode plots of a serial entitled Krish Kanhaiyya to the defendant broadcaster in confidence, but the talks did not lead to a deal, and eventually, a serial with a similar premise was aired by the defendant.
The BHC distinguished between the law of copyright and the equitable doctrine of breach of confidence, which, in some respects, is a more expansive right than a proprietary copyright claim: it does not require the same degree of fixed, original expression; it requires that confidential information, disclosed in circumstances imposing an obligation of good faith, shall not be used by the recipient without permission. On the facts, the court concluded there was infringement of the copyright in the detailed concept note, as well as a separate breach of confidence, that has since been termed the substance, foundation and kernel test by Indian courts: if the differences are removed do the residual similarities sum to a substantial reproduction of the original?
This two-pronged method, a more stringent copyright claim with a sufficiently developed concept and a more lenient confidentiality claim with only a need to disclose an idea under trust, has subsequently emerged as the go-to approach in format disputes in India. It was later reiterated in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation v. Zee Telefilms Ltd., where the DHC warned that generic tropes of a genre, such as terrorism, secret agents, a ticking clock are in the public domain and cannot be monopolised just because two shows have a similar feel, stating that the test is not resemblance of genre convention, but substantial reproduction of specific expressive choices. More recent cases such as Beyond Dreams Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. have adopted and extended the three-part test to determine breach of confidence: information must have an appropriate quality of confidence; it must have been communicated by the person under a duty of confidence; there must have been an unauthorised use of the information to the detriment of the person communicating it.
The 2025 flashpoint
The doctrinal confusion regarding format and concept protection has recently struck with a neighbouring, similarly disputed category, one about character rights, that went mainstream.
In 2025, a popular TV comedy show aired where the comedian, who impersonated Baburao Ganpatrao Apte, the iconic character from the movie series Hera Pheri, in its live performance, was sued by producer Firoz Nadiadwala, who is known to be the proprietor of this character, for copyright infringement and trademark violations, with the damage sought by the producer being around ₹25 crore. The notice invoked Section-14 of the Copyright Act, the provision defining the exclusive rights of reproduction and public communication together with trademark protection, producer Firoz Nadiadwala, wanted the removal of the segment and a public apology.
Regardless of how it is resolved, the dispute illustrates the same problematic dichotomy discussed earlier. Indian entertainment law lacks a specific, clean policy for the sort of IP assets in question, recurring recognisable characters, catchphrases, personas, entertainment formats, that actually generate commercial value in film and television, and the litigants are left to cobble together arguments based on copyright, trademark, and personality rights doctrines built for other fact patterns. The parody takes the form of a comedic sketch, and is close to fair dealing and free expression; a format pitch document is close to a confidential information; both are argued awkwardly under the same handful statutory provisions.
Self-help, and the FRAPA Model
Over the last two decades, the television industry has developed its own system of self-regulation because, courts across main format-trading jurisdictions have reached the same conclusion that a bare format idea is not copyrightable, and only a sufficiently detailed and fixed expression of it may be. The Format Recognition and Protection Association, an international, Cannes-based industry association, runs a voluntary format registration programme through which a producer may submit a format bible along with a time stamp as evidence of the date and content of the recording.
Being registered with such a body does not automatically give a person a statutory copyright interest; it does not create a copyrighted work out of an idea. What it does is create documentary evidence to support a passing off or a breach of confidence claim, help to establish a chain of title if a format is used across territories, and it can act as a basis for the organisation’s mediation services when two producers claim to have developed the same concept independently. But in practice it has created a private evidentiary infrastructure to fill the void of the public system, a kind of striking example of how commerce practises around rather than waits for a positive legal system.
Why the gap matters, for India, specifically
The Television and OTT format economy is not a topic of peripheral interest to the TV industry but it is at the very core of the way the industry works in India. Many of the top rated reality and game shows in the country feature formats that are licensed from abroad, as do many of the singing shows, dating and matchmaking shows, and survival formats. At the same time, more Indian production houses are creating and exporting their own formats to the rest of the world. Each of those licensing sales is based on the legal fiction that a format is property, and property can be owned, assigned and licensed even though, as the case law cited above shows, an Indian court granting an order for such enforcement will likely be satisfied by the more flexible, more fact-intensive doctrine of breach of confidence, and not copyright infringement.
This make sense in cases where there is a known pitch, and a negotiation that fell through, as with Zee Telefilms and Anil Gupta. If there was no prior interaction whatsoever between the parties, the legal situation becomes far frailer. In that case, breach of confidence provides no remedy at all since there was no relationship of trust to be broken, and copyright provides little since the mechanics of a show format are not usually fixed and original enough to meet the threshold the courts have established.
There is also a political economy beneath this doctrinal deficit – and it’s fair to say who it does favour. Ownership of Indian Television and OTT has been limited to a handful of well-capitalised studios, a few of them supported by foreign groups. The Indian arm of Banijay (which acquired a stake in CA Media’s Indian operations) now operates the largest independent content studio in India, and has a library of shows that a broadcaster or platform can only get from Banijay, according to a press release. That type of scale, a smaller Indian production company doesn’t often have, provides two advantages: the paperwork that documents a format that was fixed and developed at one point in time, and the balance sheet to be able to sit through years of litigation over a breach of confidence claim instead of settling early or simply walking away.
Against the backdrop of a broadcasting and OTT industry that now has a business worth close to ₹2.78 lakh crore, and a single hit show can lift a channel’s ratings or a platform’s subscribers for several seasons in succession, the lack of a clear statute should no longer be an academic curiosity. A doctrine that is based on trust and litigation in practice, has a tendency to serve those who already have lawyers, and the leverage. The principle that is based on trust and litigation in practice, serves not necessarily those who thought up the idea first, but rather the individual who has lawyers and the leverage.
Towards a more coherent framework
None of this justifies extending the copyright protection to what is essentially a bare idea that would deter the kind of borrowing and building on ideas that the entertainment industry has long taken for granted, and would create, in the context of the format, a similar problem of monopolisation to the one the idea-expression dichotomy was meant to address. However, the current state of affairs leaves a sizeable gap between one extreme fully unprotected ideas and the other fully protected, fixed literary or dramatic works. There are several intermediate alternatives for policy consideration.
A sui generis registration system, loosely based on design or industrial-property registration and administered by a body like the Copyright Office, could codify the (informal) processes undertaken by FRAPA and hence create a public, time-stamped history of the creation of the format, and a resulting record that would strengthen breach of confidence and passing-off claims, without encompassing full copyright protection to the format itself.
Having a more precise standard for what constitutes a sufficiently detailed format bible, perhaps inspired by the granularity standards in trade secret and technical know-how lawsuits, would also provide producers with more certainty as to how much documentation is required to establish a copyright claim as opposed to having to re-litigate the question in every dispute.
Last but not least there is contractual practice: Contractual standard form option and development agreements which have been a staple in the practice of international format distributors can now perform some of the work of protection which the law cannot. The format rights, that is, are a bit of an anomaly, worth crores, but not capable of being neatly categorized under any of the usual IP law headings. Indian courts deserve some credit on the one hand, copyright’s emphasis on a fixed, detailed expression, and equity’s doctrine of confidence on the other.
However, a smart move on the bench cannot replace a good statutory response. When there is no history of trust between two parties and no statute drafted to address the issue, a business this much worth is resting on a foundation that’s not as secure as the turnover numbers may show. Indian formats are now on the move outwards almost as frequently as they are let in in, and that should push a designed solution not a piecemeal solution, assembled dispute by dispute higher up the list of things Parliament should get around to.
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