Athena Legal , Partner Siddharth Mahajan shared insights with LiveMint about the filmmakers sparring over rights to scripts whose remakes are in the works, Bollywood’s problems with copyright laws have resurfaced as the industry fails to draw watertight agreements.
On this, he shared that "Disputes with respect to stories and scripts are fairly common and typically arise when rights are not properly identified due to unclear language in the agreement and/or multiple rights are granted by the rights owner." He further added Disputes may also arise when competitors or colleagues in the film industry, by seeing the trailer of the film or series assume that the subject of the film is similar to an earlier film or a story written by them and to which they have rights. However, they do not take into consideration that they cannot have a copyright on the idea and copyright subsists only in the expression of an idea. Many such cases are filed close to the date of the release of the film.