25 September 2008

Harry Potter vs. Hari Puttar

And the winner is Hari Puttar.

When one first looks at the title of the film "HariPuttar" you could be forgiven for thinking that this is rip-off of the highly successful Harry Potter books and films. However, on closer inspection it is not hard to see that Hari Puttar A Comedy of Terrors has more in common with Kevin McCallister / Macaulay Culkin than he does with Harry Potter / Daniel Radcliffe.

In order to protect its intellectual property Warner Bros brought a law suit in India claiming that the film Hari Puttar was an infringement of its copyright. The Indian court quite rightly rejected the claim and went to some length to point out why people generally would not be confused by the two. This included the obvious, Hari Puttar has nothing to do with magic!

It is good to see that an Indian court has been able to bring a bit of common sense to this overly-sensitive IPR claim from Warner Bros.

Thanks to this case I now know that Hari is Hindi for God and Puttar is Punjabi for son.

2 comments:

tere616.blogspot.com said...

I read it somewhere about this sometimes ago.

But I just knew that Hari Putar means The Son of God.

I really wants to watch that movie, it must be funny and try to compare it with Harry Potter :-p

Rob Baiton said...

Tere...

As I said I do not think there will be any comparison to make to Harry Potter (although I have not seen the film). By all accounts the film is more "Home Alone" than it is "Harry Potter".