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Saturday, 03rd May 2014, 03:30 PM IST During the Mirchi Music awards held in 2013, Mika Singh put up hoardings for his own publicity, which carried a large picture of himself with smaller pictures of the other performers including Himesh Reshammiya, Shreya Ghoshal and Ayushmann Khurrana.
These hoardings also bore the logo of the Mirchi Music Awards and were put up by Mika to promote the awards. However, the official hoardings of the Mirchi Music Awards, which were also put up across the city, were different from the hoardings put up by Mika and OCP Music through Bright Outdoor Media. The official hoardings of the Mirchi Music Awards also featuredpictures of various artistes including Sonu Nigam and these were put up with the explicit permission and approval of Sonu.
What followed is that Sonu filed a case on Mika for unauthorised publishing of his image and infringing his personality rights, his performers’ rights as well as his exclusive rights to publish and exploit his images. His petition also made a grievance regarding the defamatory nature of the hoardings put up by Mika Singh and OCP Music insofar as they contained a puffed-up image of Mika Singh and several times smaller images of the other artistes, giving an unjustified and incorrect impression to the public about the prominence and importance accorded to Mika at the awards as compared to the other artistes featured.
Mika Singh and OCP Music allegedly paid substantial sums of money to Bright Outdoor Media to put up the hoardings and did so without the consent or permission of Sonu Nigam or any of the other artistes featured. Now however, Sonu Nigam has won the case. Mika did not initially submit his written statement in the Bombay High Court, he was asked to pay a penalty of 1 lakh. Later, Mika was asked to be present in Court on April 23. However, on April 23, his advocates informed the Court that he could not be present in Court since he had left for the United States for an awards function to be held in Florida. Sonu’s lawyers that Mika was, in fact, present in Mumbai on April 23 and had left only on April 24. The Court then asked for Mika to be present in Court on April 25. |