‘Hari Puttar’ Beats ‘Harry Potter’ – Common Sense Prevails

August saw a strange story emerge when Warner Brothers, the movie studio behind the hugely successful Harry Potter films, sued the makers of Hari Puttar - A Comedy of Terrors because the name was just too similar for its liking. A court case has been taking place in the Delhi High Court ever since.

But this week saw a verdict passed, and for once, common sense seems to have prevailed, with Mirchi Movies, the company behind Hari Puttar, winning the case. According to Digital Spy, the judge ruled that Puttar has in no way violated the intellectual property rights of Warners.

Mirchi’s chief executive Munish Purii issued a statement saying:

“It’s clearly great to have won this case. We are hoping for a good release, although the timing of the Warner case distracted us from marketing.”

Yeah, of course it did. What about the fact that this court case gave the film more mainstream publicity than it would ever have got otherwise? I certainly don’t usually hear about the latest Bollywood release, and I write about the even less. So stop your whinging.

It’s the right result though as this was a ludicrous case to begin with. Hari is a common name in India, and “puttar” is Punjabi for son, so the film-makers were within their rights to put the two together in the film’s title.

Now, if the movie had been about an Indian boy wizard, I would have sided with Warners, but the plot bears absolutely no relation to any Harry Potter film so they had no case to answer in my view.