Crazy lawsuites

From Ansible #255 (October 2008): "Warner's lawsuit against the non-fantasy Bollywood film Hari Puttar -- A Comedy of Terrors was thrown out by Judge Reva Khetrapal of the Delhi High Court on 22 September. (Times of India)"

I'd actually heard of this suite a while back, & it had taken a moment to register - someone thinks "Hari Puttar" sounds like "Harry Potter"!!! Former is proper Punjabi - meaning either the "son of god" or the "son of a man named Hari", depending on context. And if you are a local, the two don't automatically sound similar until you start looking for similarity (rendering in English loses some sound). Since local words are so much older than Harry Potter brand, I was wondering when someone was going to sue the owners of "Harry Potter" brand for appropriating public words!

Unrelated to rest of this post: I haven't seen "Hari Putter", but a friend came back unimpressed.