Mumbai
Bollywood is beginning to realise that intellectual property is a serious matter - and it's all thanks to Harry Potter. Or to be more accurate, Warner Brothers' view that a Mumbai-based movie production house's new film, Hari Puttar - A Comedy of Terrors, infringes on the copyright of one of the studio's most bankable franchises.
The similarity is obvious, in spelling and sound. The difference is that 'Hari' is a common Indian boys' name and 'Puttar' is Punjabi for 'son'. Warner, whose suit is being heard by an Indian court, is annoyed at this similarity. The Harry Potter brand is estimated to be worth more than #7 billion (HK$98 billion) and more than 400 million copies of the series' books have been sold.
Hari Puttar is a Hindi-language film which tells the story of a 10-year-old Indian boy who moves to England with his parents. It was shot on the Yorkshire Dales on a budget of #2 million and tells the story of Hari, whose father works on a top-secret project for the Indian army. His plans are kept on a computer chip hidden in the family's house.
There are no wizard spells or flying broomsticks. If anything, the plot bears a greater resemblance to the comedy Home Alone which made Macaulay Culkin a star: when Hari's parents go on vacation, he is left to battle thieves who enter the house to steal his father's computer chip. Mirchi Movies' lawyer, Pratibha Singh, says that the case involves only the title, not the content or characters. She says that Warner had asked to see the script in 2005 to check that there were no similarities but Mirchi Movies had refused to show the script, saying the story was completely different.
'Mirchi Movies bought the film from a London-based director and producer called Harinder Kohli and it seems he wanted 'Hari' [as the name of his protagonist] because it's part of his name and he is Punjabi, hence the word 'Puttar'. I'm confident the court will understand our point of view,' Singh says.
