Emmy-nominated filmmaker and photographer Ronny Sen has filed a suit seeking Rs 18 crore in damages from Zee News, accusing the channel of a “deliberate act of copyright infringement” for using his “exclusive cinematographic work documenting the transport of cheetahs from Africa to India” without permission.
Zee News and its parent company, Zee Media Corporation, have been named as key defendants in the suit.
According to the suit, Sen’s claim centres on a cinematographic work he created during an assignment in June 2022. Travelling to South Africa between June 3 and June 10, Sen documented the capture and transport of cheetahs slated to be translocated to India.
In the world’s first intercontinental wildlife translocation, India brought 20 African cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa to a national park in Madhya Pradesh in 2022 and 2023. The animal had been declared extinct in India in 1952.
Sen claims that a 12-second clip from his video that he shot was aired prominently on Zee News Hindi’s primetime programme DNA, hosted at the time by Rohit Ranjan, on September 16, 2022, and September 17, 2022.
“It is also a video that is extremely rare in the world of animal photography, specifically in the context of this project being the first inter-continental translocation project of any big cat in history,” the suit says.
During the telecast, the channel branded the footage as its own “super exclusive” content, adding watermarks, tickers and on-screen text suggesting Zee News had secured unparalleled access inside the aircraft carrying the cheetahs from Africa to India, the suit claims.
The suit argues Zee News wrongly passed off Sen’s video as its own, which not only erased his credit but also made it seem like Zee owned the rights, reducing the money he could earn by licensing the clip later.
It adds that legal action is necessary because, beyond using Sen’s copyrighted video without permission, Zee News allegedly engaged in a broader pattern of misuse common in Indian TV media, taking creators’ work without credit, consent or payment and passing it off as their own under the guise of “fair use”.
Further, the suit argues that the media house’s act of “wilfully, maliciously, deceitfully infringing” Sen’s work is a violation not only of the Copyrights Act, but also of the Information Technology Act and the Bhartiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.
Sen claims this is not Zee Media’s first misuse of his work. In 2014, Zee News (Bengali) published one of his photographs in a story on the Jadavpur University protests without permission.
According to the suit, he had to repeatedly follow up and attend two in-person meetings before Zee finally told him to raise an invoice so he could be paid for the unauthorised use.
What does Sen demand?
In his suit, Sen has detailed a list of financial and professional losses that he says stem directly from Zee News airing his exclusive cheetah translocation footage without permission.
The suit says Sen lost major earning opportunities because Zee News aired his exclusive cheetah footage before he could license it. It said that he was in talks with NDTV to sell theme footage for Rs 1.25 lakh, and that he could have earned much more from other Indian and international channels. Since Zee falsely claimed “super exclusive” rights, no broadcaster wanted to license the footage anymore, it adds.
Sen says that on the first anniversary of the cheetah relocation project, many news channels could have used his footage for special stories. But because Zee claimed exclusive rights, no one approached him, and he lost future media opportunities, he adds.
The suit states that the value of the footage came from its uniqueness; it was the only close-up video of the first-ever international cheetah translocation. Zee’s false “super exclusive” claim destroyed his ability to sell or auction it globally as a premium, historic visual, the suit argues.
As per the suit, Sen was developing a major documentary/over-the-top series on the cheetah project, meant for platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and the BBC. Because Zee publicly claimed exclusive rights, potential partners would doubt his ability to use the footage, killing the project’s prospects, the suit states.
A commercial court in Kolkata admitted the suit and will hear the matter on January 16.
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