Mumbai, Aug 3 (TOI): The Bombay high court on Thursday questioned Maharashtra government on the absence of a law requiring registration of agreements to assign film rights in Bollywood.

A division bench of Justices Naresh Patil and Girish Kulkarni asked the government to look into the issue, citing the large number of disputes over film rights that are filed before courts. The bench was hearing a plea over the rights of the Anil Kapoor-Aishwarya Rai starrer ‘Fanney Khan’ that is slated for release this Friday.

“You make it mandatory for landlords and tenants to register leave and licence agreements for amounts that often involve a few thousand rupees, but not for the film industry where agreements are worth crores,” said the judges, “There must be some regulation and transparency. Investors in films must be assured that their investments are safe and secure.”

Advocates Birendra Saraf and Vibhav Krishna, who were appearing on opposite sides in the case, agreed with the bench on the need for registration for transparency over film rights.

Under the Registration Act, there are documents that have to be mandatorily registered such as a gift deed, assigning rights to immovable property. The Transfer of Property Act requires that sale or lease of property or land has to be mandatorily registered. Similarly, the Rent Act requires that leave and licence agreements have to be registered before a sub-registrar. There are other set of documents where the requirement to register is optional. For instance, a will is not required to be registered. However, people prefer to register a will before a registrar, with two witnesses signing it, to lend it legal sanctity.

In the industry, rights over a film are not registered. Legal experts say the usual practice in the film industry is to buy stamp papers and keep it. This results in antedated agreements being drawn up to sell film rights. Often, multiple agreements are drawn up using stamp papers where rights of the same film are sold to different people.

“In case of property, one can visit the sub-registrar and search from the records if it has been sold earlier to another person. In case of film rights, there is no such mechanism for keeping a record,” said advocate Saraf. “For films there is no way to find out if its rights have been assigned to another person, except through a public notice in a newspaper. Film rights are worth crores and registration should be made mandatory.”