Legal News

Court Clears ?Hari Puttar? For Indian Release

By Dan Slater

Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling scored a big victory this month with their win in the fair use case against RDR Books, putative publisher of the “Harry Potter Lexicon.” But no such luck for Warners in India.

You remember Hari Puttar, don’t you, Law Blog Readers? He’s the star of the forthcoming Bollywood movie “Hari Puttar — A Comedy of Terrors.” Mumbai moviegoers will be happy to know that Hari Puttar (”Hari” means God in Hindi, while “puttar” is Punjabi for son) will hit screens this week, thanks an Indian court ruling on Monday that rejected a Warner Bros. lawsuit claiming the name was too close to its Harry Potter series. Here’s a story from the Economic Times of India, and here’s one from the AP.

The court said in its ruling Monday that people who have watched the Harry Potter movies and read the books would know the difference between that and an Indian Punjabi film called “Hari Puttar — A Comedy of Terrors.”

Warner Bros. spokeswoman Deborah Lincoln said the company was reviewing the judgment. “We brought these proceedings because we believe that the proposed title and marketing of the defendants’ film infringed our intellectual property rights,” Lincoln said in an e-mail to the AP.

“It’s clearly great to have won this case,” Munish Purii, the CEO of the company that’s producing “Hari Puttar,” told the AP. “We are hoping for a good release although the timing of the Warner case distracted us from marketing.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).