2012 (5) TMI 104

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....vice on charging a subscription. The clients who subscribed can login to its website to do a search on what is being spoken about various brands and so on. The system operated by the applicant generates a report with analytics with an inputs provided by the clients. The information for generation of report is obtained from blogs and forum, social networking sites, review sites, question and answers sites and twitter. The applicant does not depend on third party application programme Interface feeds for data collection and has its own crawlers (computer programme that gathers and categorizes information on the internet) for data extraction. The applicant also maps blog, forums, facebook posts and twitter users country wise to provide social ....

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.... was pleaded on merits that what was received by the applicant from the subscribers was royalty as defined in the Act and in the DTAC between India and Singapore. It is pointed out that the clients of the applicant can avail the services through the payment of a subscription fee. The basic mechanism of providing the services is tracking internet messages and feed back through a computer programme 'Crawler' which is owned by the applicant. The subscription fee paid to the applicant by the subscriber cannot be disassociated from the user of the computer system. Subscription enables the client to access data through this sophisticated system maintained by the applicant. Subscription fee paid is not only for the use of an equipment but it is al....

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....itable by the subscriber and only by the subscriber of the applicant. It was a secret process. The payment received was covered by clause (iv) to Explanation 2 to Section 9(1)(vi) or in any event by clause (iv) of Section 9(1)(vi) of the Act. It is also explained that Crawler is a general term and it was really a store of data based information. Even the applicant's tax residency certificate shows that it was an online business and market intelligence services. No one other than the subscriber could use the information put on the web for the purpose of his business. 7. In its further written submission dated 21.4.2012 the applicant has contended that what is received by it is not equipment royalty as per clause (via) of Explanation 2 to ....