Puttar beats PotterAccording to Reuters, Harry Potter has failed to cast his spell over the Delhi High Court. The Court has held that Hari Puttar: a Comedy of Terrors can be screened. Warner Brothers failed to convince the court that the title was too close to Harry Potter. According the court, a Hindi-speaking rural child wouldn't have heard of Harry Potter while an English speaking city-dwelling child would know enough about Harry Potter to not mistake him for Puttar, a child left alone in London by his parents, seemingly without magical powers.
The IPKat can see that confusion was unlikely to be an issue here, but he's left with the distinct feeling that the combination of 'Hari' and 'Puttar' wasn't quite coincidental. He feels a little sorry for Warner Bros - if they hadn't brought this action, who, outside of the Hindi film-viewing market, would have heard of Hari Puttar?
UK IPO Policy Advisors
Ever wanted to win friends and influence people? The UK IPO is offering you the chance to do the latter. It's advertising five new positions as Policy Advisors in the Copyright and Enforcement Directorate and International Policy Directorate. According to the advert 'If you take up this challenge you’ll be involved in driving forward policy in a key area for the UK - building relationships with industry, NGO’s and negotiating with and influencing European and international counterparts.'
Diplomacy never was Tiddles' strong point
More details here.
Bad luck for Harry; do you want to be a policy advisor?
![Bad luck for Harry; do you want to be a policy advisor?]()
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Of course it's not a coincidence, but neither is it an infringement of any legitimate rights - who's going to be confused or deceived by it? I'm sure there are much worse pr0n parody titles out there already.
ReplyDeleteWhen a creative work becomes successful to the extent that its name/characters/etc. enter the cultural lexicon and it spawns a multi-million dollar industry, it's fair game for others to derive some limited commercial gain through creative homage/parody/whatever - within reason. For an author or their licensees to think they should be able to control everything that owes anything at all to the original creation is sheer greed and/or delusion.