T-Series, the Indian music company, has accused more websites of copyright infringement.

The company has issued legal notices to several websites, including Microsoft’s MSN, MySpace, Guruji.com and Bharatstudent.com.

Earlier, Google and Yahoo were sued by the music giant for illegally allowing users to upload copyrighted content onto their websites. In an interview given to a business daily, T-Series vice president for digital content Neeraj Kalyan slammed all these websites, saying that providing a platform to users for uploading content that has been acquired illegally was no less a crime than violation of copyright.

The case clearly illustrates the contradiction between the international and Indian copyright laws. Multinationals like Google’s Youtube and Yahoo adhere to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but the Indian Copyright Act conflicts with the DMCA in digital content matters such as this.

The company said that Guruji.com, which is essentially a search engine, is offering meta data - listing and tagging of songs - instead of merely displaying links related to the search term. Bharatstudent.com also lets users upload and share videos on its site, most of which are naturally copyrighted and thus restricted.

The ‘music search’ function on the site leads the user to songs that he or she could have accessed using any other search engine or directly from the website.

In an interview with IT Examiner, Guruji.com chief operating officer and founder Gaurav Mishra denied the allegations made by T-Series against the Indian search engine. Mishra said Guruji.com is not involved in a hosting content business, as it is just a search provider. He added: “We don’t see any issue of copyright violation in this case”.

T-Series officials failed to respond to phone calls. X