- (1.) The Court:- The parties have agreed to a form of order suggested by the Court without prejudice to their rights and contentions in the suit and the present interlocutory application.
(2.) The plaintiffs claim that pursuant to the rights conferred on the first plaintiff by a document of November 5, 2014 issued by the second defendant, as the present owner of the copyright pertaining to certain novels of deceased author Nihar Ranjan Gupta, the first plaintiff nominated the second plaintiff for making a Bengali film based on the story Ratibilap. The grievance in the suit is that the first defendant has cited a subsequent purported assignment of the copyright in such work to complain to the Eastern India Motion Picture Association and other authorities to thwart the release of the film produced by the second plaintiff.
(3.) The first defendant issued a cease and desist notice dated October 22, 2016. The first defendant suggests that it was only subsequent to such notice that an ante-dated document was created by the first plaintiff and the second defendant for the purported conferment of certain rights pertaining to the story Ratibilap in favour of the first plaintiff. The first defendant refers to the assignment of the copyright in respect of the total contents of volumes 6, 7, 10 and 14 of "Kiriti Omnibus" and short stories. The first defendant seeks to assert by placing such document that there was a clear representation by the second defendant that the rights assigned in favour of the first defendant under the document of May 29, 2015 had not been licenced or permitted to be used by any other. Ratibilap is a story from one of such volumes.;