The Hindi film industry is slowly and steadily getting corporatised and movie budgets are on the rise. With so much at stake, it is natural that the producers would like to guarantee a 'box-office hit'. That makes them shun experimental ideas and choose time-saving, tried and tested 'formulae' instead. The outcome is a 'remake'.

The concept of remakes is not a stranger to Bollywood. The trend to remake Hollywood movies is nearly as old as the industry itself. But recently, interest has veered towards older Hindi box office hit movies.
The recent spate of 'remake' releases has proved that Bollywood is finding inspiration from within itself.

Few things are more precarious than our hold on the physical embodiments of our cultural and intellectual history. And yet, our understanding of what we are is largely informed by the continuity of our access to the books, and other ephemera that capture its essence and loss of which could be avoided, thanks to digitization. Ironically, however, we may never realize the chance to “save” culture because the very laws promoting the creation of communicative and artistic works turn out to be a barrier to preserving the works once they are created.
The current dispute over the Google Library Project is an example of how copyright laws complicate the preservation of intellectual products.
The purpose of this Essay is to explore whether saving culture and copyright can be made compatible goals and to propose some possible ways to achieve both ends.

Virtual worlds are sophisticated pieces of software that enable their users to project an identity into a generated three-dimensional reality through the use of advanced computer graphics and through the eyes of this digital persona or avatar, interact with other players and wander though this computer-generated reality.  It is ostensibly a free-range graphical environment where users may explore, interact, create, and trade as they do in real life. Second Life accurately simulates the laws of physics in virtual space: flags move in the wind, objects fall to the floor if a character drops them. It gave its users a scripting language and an integrated development environment for building new objects. Users could assemble prefabricated shapes into composite objects and give those objects behaviors.

When a virtual world like Second Life combines the right of its participants to freely trade virtual objects with the right to retain intellectual property rights over those same virtual objects, these real-world rights can be violated by other participants who copy, use, or disseminate this IP without permission.

No one needs to tell you that the age that we live in has somehow passed on to that grand, bright, tacky world of remixes and remakes, while we went about our lives and our dreary routines. It didn't take long for the 'businessmen' in the creative world to cash in on this huge world of opportunities taking the unsuspecting public for granted, thinking they are going to lap it all up and send them laughing all the way to the nearest bank. We have come a long way from that assumption and a majority of them are still sweeping up the financial debris from the studio floor but there are more of the kind, waiting in the wings, with their next big remix idea, already dreaming of that pot under the Bollywood rainbow. So, it was Sholay's turn, naming the new product, Ram Gopal Varma ki Sholay, the Classic production, was dismembered, played around, painted around, reworked and re-modeled into a product worthy of the Factory standards and all this, in the name of creative freedom. Then comes a long and uproarious battle fought in our courtrooms against copyright infringement , and the product name is changed to Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag and even the names of the iconic characters get a makeover. The mother of all gangsta baddies ‘Gabbar Singh’ with his celebrated dialogue “Kitne Aadmi the” becomes Babban Singh, and Basanthi becomes Ghungroo.

The Google Print Project was announced in December 2003. Since its inception the project has been dogged with debates and controversies. This paper aims to examine the various aspects of the 'Google Library Books Project', its repercussions on the internet industry and most importantly the furore over the alleged copyright infringement issue. The arguments contained herein are based in light of three important judgements of the U.S. Courts of Appeals namely, Kelly v. Arriba , Perfect 10 v. Google  and Field v. Google . On basis of the legal precedents and the prevailing industry practices this paper concludes that the Google Library Project does in fact come within the purview of the fair use clause.

With what it described as “a man on moon” endeavor,  on December 14, 2004, Google Inc. announced the ambitious “Google Book Search”  programme (previously “Google Print”), providing for scanning materials from five major libraries and making the resources searchable online.  The Google Book Search (GBS) can make searching, and learning, fun and accessible to the average web user. The project also helps users find out whether a particular book exists, and how to either purchase or borrow the book from a local library so that it can be read in its entirety.
Google’s goal is extraordinary, but it is also controversial. Google’s plans have led to a furious public debate with the publishers holding copyrights on one side and the modern Internet community and defenders of the public domain on the other. In particular, the Authors Guild filed a class action lawsuit in September 2005  alleging GBS as a massive infringement of copyright. Five major publishing companies, members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), quickly followed suit the next month.  Google responded that its Project was “fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine ... and the principles underlying copyright law itself.”

Man has come a long way from stone inscriptions and writings on tamra leave. Gone are the days when one needed to go to a library to read. As the world is becoming increasingly techno savvy, it is now only a matter of logging in on the internet and one can access all the information one needs. But with this are increasing the number of suits for violation of rights and laws in the digital environment. Controversy surrounding the Google Library Project is yet another occurrence.

In this essay, the researcher examines and critically analyses the Google Library Project under current U.S. copyright law. Part II of this essay briefly describes the Project. Part III examines the state of the fair use doctrine and the US Supreme Court’s articulation of the “transformative use” standard in Campbell ; further it discusses the interpretation of this standard in Kelly , Field  and Perfect 10  cases and their applicability to Google’s case. Finally, researcher concludes that Google’s activities cannot be considered to be “transformative” and therefore, Google’s assertion of the fair use doctrine should not be accepted by the Second Circuit Courts.

The advent of modern technology has witnessed the clash of interests between (i) internet search engines and (ii) proprietors of intellectual property rights, being bedeviled, from the outset, by a crisis of legitimacy. On the one hand, there are the copyright holders who urge that the ‘incentive to create’ stands to be nullified if free dissemination of their protected works is allowed, without obtaining their prior permission.  On the other hand, proponents of a free media argue that the entire purpose of copyright law is the dissemination of knowledge, so that individuals can build on and consolidate the existing knowledge base.  An unparalleled illustrative example of the above debate is offered by the Google Library Project (“GLP”). This microcosm of the GLP, within the macrocosm of the boundaries of fair and/or transformative use, forms the focal point of the present endeavor.

G. P. Sippy, while producing “Sholay”, would not have contemplated what flames his cult movie could spread even after three decades of its release. This time though, the flick was not being admired by the audience at the theatre but was being scrutinized by counsels and judges at the Court-room. The Hon’ble Delhi High Court finally reached the conclusion of allowing Bollywood director Ram Gopal Varma to release the remake of "Sholay" by changing the title of the film from "Ram Gopal Varma ki Sholay" to "Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag". To this effect, the Court directed Varma to file an affidavit giving an undertaking that he would not use the title "Sholay" and the name of the popular characters therein like "Gabbar Singh" and "Basanti".

With this decision, undoubtedly, a new leaf has been turned in the ever evolving field of Intellectual Property Rights, in India. Several debates have flared up with respect to the legality of holding copyright and trade mark protection in the title of a movie and the characters therein. But, since the law in India is indeed in a nascent stage in this respect, it would be quite prudent to first analyse similar laws abroad, obtain a holistic view and then trudge forward to provide a legal synthesis.