The worst has struck Roshans. Music composer Ram Sampath, who moved court asking for Rs 2 crore as damages from the Krazzy 4 producers for copying his tune to compose four tracks, has won the legal battle today. Giving its verdict on an appeal filed by 32-year-old ad jingle music composer, the Mumbai High Court has ordered the Roshans to remove the title track ‘Krazzy 4’, before it hits cinema theatres tomorrow.
Sampath, had stated in his appeal that the Roshans copied his 60-second music titled ‘The Thump’. The young composer had created the title for a mobile phone television advertisement last year and the Roshans had used the same tone in the title track of their upcoming flick ‘Krazzy 4’ without his consent.
Apparantly Roshans know that the stakes are too hish and their desperation was evident in court. Within hours of offering Rs 2 lakh per month to Sampath as ad-interim relief, the offer was raised to Rs 25 lakh and then “any amount that the court thinks appropriate”.
In the meanwhile the court instructed the Roshans to delete two songs if they want to release the film tomorrow.
"To my untrained ear, the music appeared to be similar", Justice Karnik, who listened to both Sampath's work for a Sony Ericsson cellphone advertisement, and the two songs composed by Rajesh Roshan for the film, said.
This means that Hrithik and SRK's Break Free item numbers will have to be removed from the film, which seems like a daunting task as the film prints have already been dispatchedfor the overseas release, as well as territories outside Mumbai.
Though Roshans’ lawyer Arif Bookwala pleaded the court not to stay the release of the film on Friday, Sampath’s lawyer Virendra Tulzapurkar said that mere monetary compensation would not suffice. “The SMS-s sent by Hrithik establish that they knew the music was not created by them. They have done this knowingly and deliberately.”
He added that his client was a “small time artiste” and needed to be protected when his work was plagiarised by such “big people”.
He also presented the opinion of Shiv Mathur, an independent expert, who confirmed Sampath’s allegation of plagiarism. Tulzapurkar added that the defendants were earning Rs 7 crore per month simply from ringtone downloads and Rs 2.5 crore per month from the sale of the music.But Roshans' woes don't end here. We hear that their Krazzy 4 is a straight copy of the Hollywood film The Dream Team.
The posters of the two movies are similar and both the films are about four mentally unstable men and how they get out of a mental asylum to figure out that the outer world is as crazy as them.
In his defense, director of the film Jaideep Sen said that the similarity in the films is “sheer coincidence.”
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