SRK Pathan’s poster infringes the copyright of Idris Elba’s beast.

As the King of Bollywood celebrates 30 years of ruling the industry, his most awaited movie Pathan’s motion poster has been released recently. Shah Rukh Khan is seen holding a gun with his back towards the camera and his face somewhat visible and covered in blood and sweat. As soon as the poster was released, fans’ excitement skyrocketed but, the internet noticed that the poster is very similar to the poster of Idris Elba for a recent Hollywood flick released in 2022 named Beast. Now, there is a chance that the poster may be “inspired” but, is it copyright infringement? Let’s discuss!

If a movie poster were to be copyright protected, it would be done under section 13(1) of the Copyright Act as an “artistic work”. One of the main elements of this is originality. It basically means that skill or labor of the creator is put into the work, then only it is protected. So, the Pathan poster can obviously be protected under this section, but is there infringement?

Copyright law protects expression, not an idea and this is called idea-expression dichotomy. In India, this concept was first discussed in the landmark case of R.G. Anand v Deluxe films. To explain it better, let’s say there is a photography competition, and the theme is the beauty of nature. Here, the idea is the theme of the competition, and the expression is the photographer’s interpretation through their pictures of the theme. Now, let’s discuss the poster through this dichotomy. The idea behind both the posters is to have the actors face their back towards the camera and hold a gun and depict that they have just been in some violent fight. The photographers do not have many ways to express this idea which means that the expression is bound to be similar. The idea is the pose, the expression is the actual poster and as mentioned above, ideas are not copyrightable. Even if the producers of Beast decide to bring an action, Pathan’s team can argue that they only copied the pose without actually using the poster as a whole. So, according to us, this is not copyright infringement.

In fact, this is not the first poster that attracted attention for the wrong reasons in Bollywood. The 2014 movie P.K.’s poster has stirred the pot quite a bit when the users of the internet noticed that it is the exact copy of the cover art of a single released by a Portuguese musician Quim Barreiros in 1973. One of the posters for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2013 movie RamLeela was “inspired by” the movie Gone with the wind. There have not been many cases where copyright infringement for a movie poster has been claimed but, with proper lawyering, we believe that proving infringement is mushkil hi nahin namumkin hai!