After stories and music, it is now websites that are said to be the target of copycats in and around the Hindi film industry. Idealake Information Technologies on Friday accused Percept Knorigin of blatantly copying its code, used to develop the website of My Name is Khan.
Said Viraj Sharma, CEO of Idealake, of Percept Knorigin, which developed the website of the movie Bumm Bumm Bole: "They can't trample over other people's rights. This was not an open source code. They have decompiled our SWF files and blatantly copied them, violating our Intellectual Property Rights.
Sawant said he would take legal recourse on the issue. "We are taking the advice of our lawyers, as we would not tolerate this. This is a case of cheating and there are cyber laws in the country to protect our rights. We want an apology from Percept Knorigin."
Both websites have a similar user interface and the navigation icons on the sites are also identical. While MNIK released worldwide on February 12, Bumm... released on Friday.
When asked, a top executive of Percept Knorigin said the user interfaces of many websites looked the same. He said the website of Bumm... was designed on the client's (Percept Pictures') requirements. "A website is not an application and there is no IPR for the code of a website. There shouldn't be issues if the user interfaces of two websites have the same look and feel," the top executive said, requesting anonymity.
However, Business Standard noted that even the Google Analytics code (UA code) for both the websites were the same. "The person who copied the code did not take enough care to change the UA code, which further proves that it was copied," said Savant. The UA code tracks the number of hits a website gets.
When this was brought to the notice of the Percept Knorigin executive, he said it could have been because of a "typing error". Later in the day, the UA code in the website of Bumm... was changed.
Savant said the cost of designing a website like MNIK was Rs 5,00,000 -7,00,000 and seven to 10 people were employed to develop it.
