FIR against ShareChat for alleged copyright violation

An FIR has been registered against vernacular social networking startup ShareChat based on a complaint filed by South India-based Lahari Music for alleged copyright violation.

According to an Economic Times report, the Yeshwantpur police in Bengaluru has registered a case against ShareChat under Section 64 of the Indian Copyrights Act, 1957 along with Section 201 of the Indian Trademarks Act, 1999.

In its complaint, Lahari Music has said that Mohalla Tech, which owns ShareChat, has allowed its users to download Lahari's copyrighted musical content without their consent which has led to a substantial monetary loss to the company.

Entrackr has reached out to ShareChat for comment. We will update the post as and when they respond.

Last year, ShareChat had to remove TikTok's exclusive content after being served with several legal notices by the company.

Separately, ShareChat had filed a case against ByteDance, the owner of Chinese social media app Helo over copyright violation. However, the case was dismissed by the Delhi High Court after Helo changed its user interface and stopped placing bids on the ‘ShareChat’ keyword.

With over 60 million monthly active users, ShareChat is available in 15 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, and Gujarati.

The four-year-old Twitter backed company has recorded a loss of Rs 414.73 crore without any revenue from actual operations in FY19.