Storm in a copyright teacup

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Editor's note: Before you reach the end of this sentence, go to the music streaming platform of your choice, tap on your last five tracks, and fish for the song credits. Here’s what it looks like on Spotify: …and here’s what it looks like on YouTube: YouTube, for lack of a better term, is all over the place. Sometimes you see songwriting credits, sometimes you don’t. But the takeaway here is that it takes a battalion to make a song. The artist or singer isn’t always the writer or composer, which is why you have music or performance rights societies to give the foot soldiers of music their due. Enter the Indian Performing Right Society, or IPRS. The non-profit IPRS was born in 1969, in an India where music and lyrics belonged to the producers and music labels that commissioned them. Artistic licence, liberty and right were virtually unheard of. Cut to the ’90s, however, and a groundswell of composers and lyricists expected better. The IPRS, buoyed by this awareness, promised just that. Its premise was simple: become a member, pay yearly …