Copyright War: YouTube takes down both ‘Kriti’ and ‘Bob’

A new development has added another twist to the ongoing ‘copyright’ battle between Bollywood director Shirish Kunder and Nepalese filmmaker Aneel Neupane.

On Tuesday, within a week of its online release, Shirish Kunder’s viral short film titled ‘Kriti’ was removed from YouTube over a copyright complaint filed by the Nepali filmmaker. A day later, the video sharing platform has pulled down Neupane’s short film ‘Bob’ as well.

Kriti, a psychological thriller starring Manoj Bajpayee, Radhika Apte and Neha Sharma was released online on the video sharing platform last week. The initial reactions to the short film were more than favorable, with the film going viral on social media and clocking in over 1 million views on the first day itself.

However, a day after it’s release, Neupane had claimed that the film was copied from his short film titled ‘Bob’ and accused the director of plagiarism. Neupane’s film had been online on Vimeo and YouTube since December 2015 and May 2016 respectively. Following which, Neupane had reported the video to YouTube and the latter responded by taking down the video.

While the makers of ‘Kriti’ were working on getting it back online, the film’s producer Abhayanand Singh from Indie Muviz Pte Ltd filed a complaint against ‘Bob’ and the platform responded by taking it down.

As of Thursday morning, both ‘Kriti and ‘Bob’ are unavailable on YouTube.

Prior to the the film being taken down, Kunder had sent a legal notice to the Nepali filmmaker asking him to apologize for the false accusations and take down his film.

In the notice Kunder mentioned that since his script was present with a few people, and if Neupane’s claims about similarities are well founded, then it’s the Nepali filmmaker who stole the idea for ‘Bob’ from his script.