Copyright pulls down children’s joy

A news article in TOI dated 12th October 2007, mentioned the pulling down of pandal in Kolkata, which resembles a quite famous, Harry Potter’s Hogwarts castle.
Hiranmoy Roy Chowdhury, the president of puja committee, which has high profile West Beangal Minister, Subhash Chakraborty as a patron has received a notice from Delhi high court, that they may have to pull down the pandal over the Copyright violations.

Children of the locality day that they don’t want to know about what is Copyright as they felt agitated over the notice. Some of the children felt that the pandal would have made J.K. Rowling among Kolkattans.
Organisers are keeping their fingers crossed as they have deployed a number of eminent lawyers including a SC advocate to plead the case.

Isn’t it weird that the court made such a fuss on a simple Gowgwars castle which was brought up keeping in mind the enthusiasm among children about Potter.

The workers of Kolkata displayed their skills beautifully and proved that they don’t need computer and other electronic help for bringing up the castle.

I have a few questions to ask the petitioners-

- Did J.K. Rowling hire an architect to bring up the castle in her mind and was the plan of the castle registered anywhere to make it a copyright violation??

- Almost everything that we ever see has been shown in one or more movies somewhere or the other. Does it mean that everything comes under the Copyright act. Isn’t it a clear violation of the basic freedom of thought of the artist.??


- Wright brothers made airplane. Was it a violation of Copyright of Jules Verne??

Even J.K. Rowling had thought of Hogwarts while writing her books and even many others would’ve had thoughts like that but never wrote them down. I give full credit to Ms. J.K. Rowling and thank her for bringing us a cult of informed children which are much more interested in books now.
Can’t we see that this is another step in the same direction and has nothing to do with copyright.
We can see it in another way. This was a good thought for bringing together the quite popular historic mythology in synchronization with today’s mythological Hero, our very own Harry Potter
It is a sheer wastage of precious time of our honorary courts which really need much more time for millions of cases already pending there.