Plagiarism issues are plaguing the TFI now and bigwigs are finding themselves in a soup lately. It is not new actually, as copyright issues date back to good old golden era. Right from Dasari Narayana Rao to Rajamouli, everyone faced these issues at some point in their careers and things have even got ugly at times.
Dasari’s plight
There are plagiarism claims even on legendary director Dasari Narayana Rao’s movies and he responded positively on such issues. Being a writer himself, Dasari never hid the fact that he opted for stories written by others and also took up good movies for ‘remakes’ when he liked them. One such film was Sobhan Babu starrer ‘Gorintaku’ which was written by K Ramalakshmi.
When popular writer Ranganayakamma registered a case claiming that it was her story, Dasari never lost his composure. Eventually when she won the case, he paid a hefty fine but never changed the writer’s name in titles. After this incident, he preferred to write own stories or make films on scripts written exclusively for him.
Rajamouli’s story
Rajamouli’s blockbuster film ‘Simhadri’ faced plagiarism issues back in 2004. This is the film which started his successful association with his writer father Vijayendra Prasad. The story for his first film ‘Student No.1’ was written by writer Prudhvi.
Simhadri’s story was claimed by a producer named GS Rao who went on to successfully establish the truth. Simhadri’s team had to display a ‘thanks card’ for him and even paid money to settle the issue. Later, Junior NTR made ‘Samba’ which was written by the same GS Rao. Ironically, GS Rao ventured into filmmaking and the story of the film he made was claimed by another writer as being his. In the light of all the above facts, we can conclude that writers who invest their time and skill into ideas will not benefit as much as those who simply copy their stories. Sad, but true!