TFI is hogging the limelight for all the wrong reasons lately. Plagiarism is becoming a hot topic with many writers approaching courts about their stories getting hijacked. As the world is shifting towards OTT platforms from theatres and the digital era is booming, writers must take all the security measures to protect their ideas. For example, writers get royalty in Hollywood and the laws regarding plagiarism are stringent there. If a director or producer wants to hear a story, he must approach the writer through a literary agent and has to give a written statement that he will not leak the idea. If he does so, he will be dragged to courts and fined heavily. We all know what happened to Eddie Murphy when he copied the story of his film ‘Coming to America’ from the writer Art Buchwald.
Paramount pictures paid millions of dollars as fine in this issue and it shows the might of writers in Hollywood. There are institutions which safeguard intellectual property rights in Hollywood and that is why studios take utmost care when it comes to copyright issues. Indian film industry is hero dominated and not much importance is given to anybody except him. But now as more and more OTT platforms are being introduced, they will stress more on these copyrights to avoid future trouble.
Netflix and Amazon employ strict filtering protocols when it comes to finalizing a script. They need the writer, representatives from the production house and a legal consultant when listening to the script. It will be promoted to the next level only after the legal team certifies it. For example Amazon Prime bought the rights of a movie named ‘Hero’ starring Siva Karthikeyan. Soon after the streaming started, a writer approached the court stating that the story was copied from him. This made Amazon remove the film from streaming and made the movie team pay a heavy fine.
There are many copycats in our industry who lift some scenes from Hollywood and Korean movies. Knowing this, Hollywood employed a team to identify this plagiarism and started dragging such people to the court of law. In ‘Baaghi’ which was the remake of ‘Varsham’, the makers lifted an action sequence spanning 8 minutes from a Hollywood flick and had to pay a hefty fine of 22 crores to that American studio. Tollywood was very fond of Korean films and used to free-make many of them. Recently, Korean film industry made a Telugu producer their representative to keep a check on such anomalies which has led to reduction of idea theft. Now the trend of paying royalty to the Korean producers started after such a measure.
All these measures taken to control plagiarism are dependent on information and the international studios are ready to pay handsome remuneration for those who can identify these and inform them. They are registering cases in Indian courts because our producers can’t pay in dollars even if they sell themselves. To avoid these circumstances, our copycats should start using their own brains or else be ready to pay exponential fines.
