The Supreme Court of India granted filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh a major victory by terminating all criminal charges that had been brought against him for copyright violations related to his 2016 film Story 2: Durga Rani Singh.
According to a report by Bar and Bencha Bench which included Justices PS Narasimha and Alok Aradhe found the complaint to be without merit because it did not provide sufficient proof that the two contested works were comparable.
The court discovered that the allegations were ambiguous and lacking evidence because the complainant did not demonstrate any similarity between his script and the film.
The case stemmed from a complaint filed by Umesh Prasad Mehta who alleged that his script titled Sabak had been copied for the film. He claimed to have shared his work with Ghosh in 2015.
The Hazaribagh magistrate court issued summons in 2018 after the magistrate court received the complaint under Copyright Act provisions. Later the Jharkhand High Court declined to quash the case stating that the matter warranted trial.
Ghosh filed his case at the supreme court through his lawyer Senior Advocate Siddhartha Dave who demonstrated that the complaint lacked any proof which would show the scripts matched.
The Supreme Court approved these arguments which demonstrated that the magistrate’s summoning order and the High Court decision both lacked required judicial examination.
The complainant’s witness statements failed to prove that any section of the script had been duplicated according to the evidence presented.
The ruling reached its conclusion because the Screen Writers Association Dispute Settlement Committee discovered both works shared no similarity. The court noted that this crucial detail had not been disclosed to the magistrate at the time of issuing summons.
The Bench demonstrated that Ghosh had registered his script for Story 2 before the complainant created their own script which made the infringement claim against him invalid.
The apex court stated that courts need to protect themselves from baseless and malicious lawsuits.
The court required that judges should analyze all relevant facts before deciding whether criminal laws were being abused in these situations.
The court declared that all judicial processes between the High Court and the trial court had ended after it nullified both the summoning order and the High Court decision.
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