The legend of Maula Jutt is facing a legal battle against the producers of the original classic released in 1979. The Lahore High Court on Wednesday admitted the petition filed by Mohammad Sarwar Bhatti of Bahoo Film Corporation, the producer of the original 1979 Punjabi film Maula Jatt, for what he called Lashari’s allegedly unauthorised and illegal usage of the title, script, characters, dialogue, poetry, music of the original Maula Jatt.
In the petition, the applicant claims that Lashari’s film is an illegal remake as it was made without the permission of the original’s producer. Bhatti contends that Lashari and others involved are infringing on his legal rights.
Furthermore, Bhatti has urged the court to suspend what he called illegally issued censor certificates for Lashari’s remake.
The court has set April 25 as the hearing date for Bhatti’s petition.
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There has been quite the debate on whether there was any copyright infringement or not regarding the script, name, cinematography and dialogues of the original film being used in the remake. Bhatti’s counsel Ahsan Masood had at the time argued that the petitioner possessed the rights in relation to the movie, including the title and cinematographic works, and the censorship certificate was also issued by the censor board in the name of the petitioner as producer.
Masood had said that the respondent producer and his team were making The Legend of Maula Jatt having same dialogues, characters and script of the 1979 film, which under the law they were not entitled to do.However, at the time Barrister Ahmad Pansota and another counsel for the respondents had argued that they were not using any unauthorised copyright or trademarks, anyway. They said their clients had a valid copyright certificate on the script for The Legend of Maula Jatt.
