In Bengaluru, Ola is charged for another issue of copyright for using pirated music on OlaPlay. Bengaluru-based company, Lahari Recording company has made a complaint of copyright infringement against Ola and their supporting company ANI Technologies for playing pirated music via OlaPlay. Police searched their office and seized hard disks and other storage devices under the allegation of the song have been downloaded illegally without any authenticate permission. Moreover, police went for surprise check and seized some of them. The complaint is filed against the Bhavish Agarwal and Ankit Bhati, CEO and CTO of Ola.
On this, Police has commented that “We have documented all the songs which were playing, the notice has been issued to both the accused to show their copyrights on each song. Both accused didn’t turn up on notice and we will wait for some more time. If they fail to appear, we will arrest them and produce before the court.”
Ola hired Luthra & Luthra as their legal representative and they stated that “the company hadn’t engaged in any wrongdoing. It appears that the management of Ola has been dragged into this issue with a mala fide intention, we are confident that our client will stand vindicated of these allegations. Our client is sensitive to their rights as well as that of others. We have taken appropriate legal steps to protect our client’s interests and the matter is now before the courts.”
Lahari Velu, founder of Lahari has mentioned that “I booked an Ola cab to go to the airport and that is when I found that without attaining any music rights they were using songs from Baahubali and other films for their Ola Play feature. This is resulting in a loss of over ₹6 crore for our company.”