The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Wednesday admitted a petition filed against ‘The Legend of Maula Jatt’, produced and directed by Bilal Lashari, for hearing on April 25.
The plea moved by Sarwar Bhatti of Bahoo Film Corporation, the producer of the original 1979 Punjabi film Maula Jatt, accuses Lashari of using the title, script, characters, dialogue, poetry and music of the original Maula Jatt without permission of the original’s producer.
Bhatti urged the court to suspend “illegally issued censor certificates for Lashari’s remake”.
Earlier in March, the LHC had stayed the unauthorised use of the title of the film Maula Jatt, and dialogues, characters, making/shooting and exhibition of work identical to the movie.
According to Bhatti’s lawyer, 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.
He 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.
