Karan Johar can lay claim for being one of the most harassed movie makers in India, for having his Freedom of Expression throttled at multiple stages. His movies like My Name Is Khan, Wake Up Sid and most recently Ae Dil Hai Mushkil faced troubles from goons for various reasons. Even when he was involved in the AIB Roast, various issues were raised for his insensitive jokes. Given this, you would think Johar would probably empathise with artistes who get bullied into submission under various garbs. But think again.
Meet Jaby Koay. He is based out of California in the United States of America, and is a filmmaker who reacts to movies and trailers and shoots some of his own work. He also does trailer-reactions to Indian movies by the dozens and has a substantial fan following, earning him requests from Indians to do more Indian movies. And this is probably because he does a good job, and is not the usual condescending American.
Recently, Koay had been getting fan requests to do the trailer of ‘Dear Zindagi”, the upcoming movie starring Shahrukh Khan and Alia Bhatt. But he just wouldn’t do a trailer reaction for the movie. This obviously had his fans a bit bothered and hence, Jaby decided to make a fresh video, explaining why he didn’t do Dear Zindagi:
Jaby explains that few months back, when he did the trailer reaction to Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (ADHM), he got his first “copyright strike” from the team of ADHM. He explains that a “copyright claim” is where companies say someone is using their material hence they will demand a piece of his revenues. On the other hand, a “copyright strike” is much more serious and when a youtuber gets three such strikes, his channel gets shut down. And from here on he explains that ever since he got that notice, he is scared, and hence has avoided any movie which has any remote connection with Dharma Productions, and which is why he will not touch Dear Zindagi, which is also co-produced by Dharma Productions. He even tweeted about this when he got the notice, asking for help:
https://twitter.com/jabykoay/status/771758523382235136
https://twitter.com/jabykoay/status/780904740091682816
So here is an American youtuber, who does hundreds of movie trailer reviews across the world, and he manages to get threatened into avoiding all of Karan Johar’s movies, because a source of income for him is at stake. Why? just because he used ADHM’s movie trailer.
In his video he expresses his surprise and bewilderment as to what he did to deserve this notice. Hence he asks his fans to politely ask Dharma Productions, to allow him to do Dear Zindagi’s trailer reaction. His reaction is pretty understandable since he has done this for hundreds of movies, yet he gets a notice only for ADHM!
While Jaby was clueless, some Ajay Devgn fans were prompt to suggest that this had something to with Jaby’s positive reaction to Shivaay’s trailer. So is this what a victim of “censorship” Karan Johar does to other artistes? We hope Dharma Productions don’t sue us for using their movie’s poster!