The courtroom battle over the name Lootere ended with a clear pronouncement—titles, no matter how famous or nostalgic, cannot be wrapped in the cloak of copyright.
The Bombay High Court dismissed a plea by Sunil Darshan Saberwal, producer of the 1993 Hindi film Lootere, who sought to block the streaming of a new web series on JioHotstar carrying the same title. Saberwal argued that since he had registered the title Lootere with the Western India Film Producers Association (WIFPA) back in 2010, the series producers—Star India (now JioStar India Pvt. Ltd.)—had no right to use it.
Justice Sandeep Marne was unmoved. He ruled that such registrations with film industry associations are internal, private understandings at best, and cannot bind outsiders who are not members of those bodies. “A title by itself does not fall within the definition of a ‘work’ under the Copyright Act. Hence, no copyright can subsist in a mere title,” the Court observed.
Saberwal, through his banner Shree Krishna International, maintained that his original film carried both copyright protection and industry title registrations extending to feature films, TV, and web content. Still, the Court noted that these arrangements gave him no statutory right to stop others from using the name.
Adding weight against his plea was the timeline: though Saberwal learned in 2022 that Star India was promoting the series, he only moved the Court in March 2024—days before its release. By then, the series had already premiered and was streaming widely.
With this, the Court concluded that his request for interim injunction had no legs—both because the law doesn’t recognize exclusive rights in a mere title and because the plea came too late.
The verdict reinforces a principle long settled in intellectual property law: creativity lies in the work itself, not in the name it carries.
