The producers of Manjummel Boys, a successful and critically acclaimed Malayalam movie that broke records at the box office this year, said that they have not yet received a legal notice from Tamil music maestro Ilaiyaraaja for the use of his song ‘Kanmani Anbodu Kadhalan’ from the film Gunaa. News about the legal notice concerning copyright violation came out late on Wednesday evening, May 22. 

The song was used multiple times in the course of the film Manjummel Boys, a survival drama woven around friendship, based on a real life story. Shawn Antony, one of the producers of the film, told TNM that they had acquired all the rights from the two music companies concerned, for using the Gunaa song.

‘Kanmani Anbodu Kadhalan’, originally rendered by Kamal Haasan and S Janaki for the 1991 Tamil film Gunaa, is a hugely popular song favoured by generations across South India. Shawn said that the producers not only acquired the rights of the Tamil song, but also those of all the other languages it was released in. "One of the companies holds the rights for the Telugu version, and the other for the remaining languages. We got rights from Pyramid and Sreedevi Sounds, the music companies which own the song," Shawn said.

Along with Shawn, actor Soubin Shahir and his father Babu Shahir, produced Manjummel Boys, in which Soubin also plays one of the lead characters. The film is directed by Chidambaram, who made his debut with Jan-E-Man three years earlier.

In Ilaiyaraaja's notice however, the composer has claimed that he is the first owner of all his original musical works, and so holds absolute rights including moral rights, over all his original musical works. He further accused the makers of Manjummel Boys of unlawfully exploiting his song without obtaining any consent or permission or license from him. The credit expressed in the title cards cannot be a substitute, the legal notice says.