S Shyam Prasad
Two senior directors of Sandalwood are now locked in a legal battle over who has the rights to use the title “Kempegowda” for a movie and also over issues of copyright over a script for the same movie. Director Nagabharana, writer Pratibha Nandakumar and others have approached a civil court in Bengaluru seeking a permanent injunction against director Dinesh Baboo, producer Kiran Thotambyle and others.
The XVIII Additional City Civil Court and Sessions Judge as allowed an application for interim stay on the defendants (Baboo and others) and ordered that “The defendants, its men, agents, partner, associate, officer, representative and all other persons acting on their behalf are temporarily restrained from transmitting, communicating to the public, reproduction, recording, distributing, broadcasting, advertising, directing or otherwise publishing in any other way and releasing the film titled ‘Dharmabiru Nadaprabhu Kempegowda’ or any other film having the subject and/or form, arrangement and theme of plaintiff’s film ‘Nadaprabhu Kempegowda’, till next date of hearing.”
The next date of hearing the case has been fixed for June 3. Baboo and Thotambyle had announced the film ‘Dharmabiru Nadaprabhu Kempegowda’ two weeks ago. Nagabharana and team have claimed that the opposite parties “colluding together by stealing the story of the ‘Nadaprabhu Kempegowda’ from the plaintiffs and particularly the defendant No.3 colluding with other defendants is making all hectic preparations to produce ‘Dharmabiru Nadaprabhu Kempegowda’ in a deceptive manner.” The third respondent is historian Dharmendra Kumar Arehalli.
Nagabharana and team in their petition have claimed they have already spent over Rs.1 crore on the pre-production of their film titled “Nadaprabhu Kempegowda” in which actor Dhananjaya is playing the lead role.
