Kerala High Court: <\/b>Shircy V, J. held that an author has the legal right to protect his intellectual property even after he has sold his authorship while also directing the trial court to take all endeavour to dispose of the case, within six months.<\/p>\n
The appellant is a film director and a scriptwriter, who claims to have researched the history of a grand ancient festival \u2018Mamankam\u2019, and on this subject, he had written a script for a film. Subsequently, he met the first respondent and an agreement was made for making a film on it.<\/p>\n
The counsel for the appellant contended that though the appellant was initially the director, he was replaced shortly after and the film was completed after changing and damaging the script. Hence, a suit was filed, with a petition for interim injunction to restrain the respondents from releasing or distributing the film, but it was denied by the District Court.<\/p>\n
The counsel for the respondent Saiby Jose Kidangoor and V. Ramkumar Nambiar contended that the appellant had sold his authorship for a sale consideration of Rs 3 Lakh and so he is neither entitled to get the credit of the film regarding story or screen play nor entitled to stop the release of such a big-budget film.<\/p>\n
In deciding the issues, the Court analysed\u00a0the Copyright Act, 1957\u00a0and emphasized on Section 2(d) which gives the definition of word \u2018author\u2019, Section 18 which explains \u2018assignment of copyright\u2019 and Section 57(1) of the Act which prescribes that even after assignment of the copyright in a work, the author of a work will have special rights to claim the authorship of the work.<\/p>\n