From Holden Caulfield to Chulbul Pandey: A Comparative Analysis of Character Copyright and Fan Fiction under US Fair Use and Indian Fair Dealing

Introduction : On AO3 right now, there are thousands of stories being built around Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, and half the Marvel roster, written by fans who own none of the source material. On Wattpad, Indian readers do the same thing with Chulbul Pandey from Dabangg, Bajirao from Bajirao Mastani, and the extended universe of Yash Raj Films. Both sets of writers are doing something identical: borrowing a character someone else invented and taking it somewhere new. If a rights holder ever sued, though, the two writers would be judged under very different legal tests, because the United States and India have never agreed on what a fan is allowed to do with someone else's imagination.

This piece maps that disagreement. It traces how US fair use doctrine and Indian fair dealing law would each treat the same underlying act, using the strongest available case law from both jurisdictions, and asks what happens in the grey areas neither system has fully settled.

Two Statutory Starting Points

Fan made fiction has consistently existed in a legal grey zone rather than a protected one. Publishers rarely take legal action against individual fans, primarily because going after your own fanbase is bad business, not because the law clearly shields them. The trouble starts once fan work stops being a hobby and starts looking like a product: a self-published book, a commissioned artwork, a ticketed event. At that point, everything comes down to the phrasing of a specific law, and the US and India have written very different statutes.

The US relies on Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 1976, the fair use doctrine. It is open-ended by design. A court considers four factors (the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount used, and the effect on the market for the original) and reaches a decision that is genuinely difficult to predict in advance. This adaptability is precisely why fair use has resulted in such varied results in cases that appear similar.

India works under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957, a fair dealing provision. Unlike the American model, it is a closed, specific list: private use, research, criticism, review, reporting of current events, and a small number of other named exceptions. There is no general "transformative use" defence sitting in reserve. If a work does not fit one of the listed categories, the statute leaves little room to argue that it should still be protected simply because it is creative or valuable.

That single structural difference, an open-ended balancing test versus a closed list of exceptions, drives almost everything else in this comparison.

How American Courts Have Actually Ruled

Anderson v. Stallone, 11 U.S.P.Q.2d 1161 (C.D. Cal. 1989), set the baseline for character ownership itself. Timothy Anderson wrote an unauthorized treatment for what became Rocky IV, using Sylvester Stallone's characters. When the actual film was released with overlapping elements, Anderson tried to claim rights over his own script. The court held that Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed were already so highly "delineated" as characters that Anderson's treatment was itself an unauthorized derivative work. That meant Anderson held no copyright in what he had written, since it was built on characters he never owned to begin with.

Salinger v. Colting, 641 F. Supp. 2d 250 (S.D.N.Y. 2009), is the case behind this piece's title. Swedish author Fredrik Colting published 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye under the pseudonym "John David California," imagining a 76-year-old Holden Caulfield. The Salinger estate sued, and Colting argued his book was a transformative critique protected by fair use. The district court disagreed, finding the book was marketed and structured as a sequel rather than genuine commentary, and issued a preliminary injunction against its US publication. On appeal, the Second Circuit vacated that injunction on narrower procedural grounds (the lower court had not properly established irreparable harm post-eBay v. MercExchange) and remanded the case, which the parties then settled, with Colting agreeing not to publish or distribute the book in the US. The underlying fair use analysis was never actually overturned. The lesson usually drawn from Salinger stands: aging up a character, on its own, is not transformation.

SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001), is the case that gives fan creators hope. Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone retold Gone with the Wind from the perspective of an enslaved woman on the same plantation, deliberately inverting the racial politics of Margaret Mitchell's original. The Eleventh Circuit vacated a lower-court injunction against the book, holding that it was a parody entitled to a strong fair use defense, because it existed to comment on and critique the original rather than to serve as a substitute for it in the market. The court was explicit that this reasoning would not extend automatically to any book that retells a copyrighted story from a different character's point of view; the protection specifically tracked genuine critique, not mere retelling.

Line these three cases up and a consistent thread appears: American courts have been far more willing to protect fan work that argues with its source material than fan work that simply continues or imitates it, however well-executed.

What an Indian Rights Holder Would Actually Do

There is no Indian judgment titled "Studio v. Fanfiction Writer." But India has decades of case law on character copyright, adaptation rights, remakes, and, increasingly, personality rights, which together sketch a fairly clear picture of how such a dispute would unfold.

The first move would not be a lawsuit. It would be a cease-and-desist letter, followed by takedown requests sent directly to whichever platform is hosting the work: Wattpad, Instagram, Etsy. Under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, intermediaries retain safe-harbor immunity only if they act on actual knowledge or a court order without undue delay, which gives rights holders real leverage without ever entering a courtroom.

If the infringement is happening at scale (pirated ebooks circulating on Telegram, unlicensed merchandise across online marketplaces), Indian courts offer a tool with no close American equivalent: the "John Doe" or Ashok Kumar order, which lets a rights holder obtain an injunction against unknown, unnamed infringers all at once, without identifying and serving each seller individually. Indian courts have granted these routinely in film-piracy cases, and there is no legal barrier to applying the same mechanism to unauthorized fan-published content sold at scale.

A full copyright suit is generally the last resort, reserved for cases where a fan creator formally publishes a book or releases a fan film. These suits, typically filed in the Delhi or Bombay High Court, would most plausibly rest on Section 14(a)(vi) of the Copyright Act, which reserves the exclusive right to adapt or translate a literary work for the original author, alongside the common-law tort of passing off: the argument that the fan work misleads the public into believing it is an official, sanctioned continuation.

The Precedents That Would Actually Decide the Case

Star India Pvt. Ltd. v. Leo Burnett (India) Pvt. Ltd., 2003 (27) PTC 81 (Bom.), is the Indian character-copyright case most often cited on this question, though its actual holding is more specific than it first appears. Star India sued an advertising agency for using elements resembling its soap opera Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi in a Tide detergent commercial. The Bombay High Court ultimately ruled against Star India, finding no infringement, in part because the ordinary human characters in the soap had not achieved "independent life and public recognition" separate from the serial itself. The court noted, by contrast, that a character such as Superman or Shaktiman would meet that bar. This is the test that matters for fan fiction: a character earns protection under this line of reasoning only once it is recognizable on its own, apart from the specific work it appears in. A figure like Chulbul Pandey, instantly recognizable, endlessly memed, referenced independently of Dabangg itself, would likely clear that bar in a way an ordinary soap character would not.

R.G. Anand v. Delux Films, AIR 1978 SC 1613, remains the foundational Indian authority on infringement generally, and supplies what is often called the "ordinary observer" or substantial similarity test. The Supreme Court held that copyright never protects a bare idea, theme, or plot, only its specific expression, and that infringement turns on whether an unprejudiced viewer, taking the works as a whole, comes away with the unmistakable impression that one is a copy of the other. Notably, the Court applied this test and found no infringement on the facts before it, underscoring how demanding the standard actually is in practice.

Civic Chandran v. C. Ammini Amma, (1996) 16 PTC 329 (Ker.), is the most fan-friendly Indian precedent available, and the closest thing India has to SunTrust. Playwright Civic Chandran wrote Ningal Are Communistakki, a direct ideological counter-drama responding to Thoppil Bhasi's iconic 1952 play Ningalenne Communistakki. The Kerala High Court held that the counter-drama fell within fair dealing for criticism under Section 52(1)(a)(ii), even though it borrowed characters and scenes, because its purpose was genuine critique rather than commercial substitution. The court was careful to note that fair dealing has limits. Copying "substantial portions" purely to attach commentary would not qualify, and the defendant would have needed his own characters and presentation had the criticism not been genuine. It is a narrower win than SunTrust, but it establishes the same underlying principle: critique can survive where continuation cannot.

The Grey Area American Law Doesn't Fully Solve Either: Real People

Both systems get considerably murkier once fan fiction moves from fictional characters to real people, a category enormously popular in both fandoms, from RPF (real-person fiction) about musicians and actors on AO3, to Wattpad stories built around real Bollywood stars' on- and off-screen personas.

India has, in the last few years, developed a distinct and increasingly aggressive body of law here that the US does not have a direct equivalent to. Personality and publicity rights are treated as an extension of the right to privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution rather than as a copyright question at all. In Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors., CS(COMM) 652/2023 (Del. HC), the Delhi High Court granted Anil Kapoor a sweeping interim injunction protecting his name, voice, likeness, and even his catchphrase "Jhakaas" against unauthorized commercial use, including AI-generated content. Similar relief has been granted to Amitabh Bachchan and other public figures. None of these cases involved fan fiction directly, but the reasoning would apply with real force to any fan work that commercially exploits a real actor's persona, voice, or catchphrases rather than a purely fictional character, a distinction fan writers rarely think about but that Indian courts increasingly do.

A related and unresolved question is fictionalized biography: stories built around a real, living or recently deceased public figure's private life. In Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A. Saraogi & Ors., 2021 SCC OnLine Del 3145, the family of actor Sushant Singh Rajput sought to block a biopic on the grounds of privacy and personality rights. The Delhi High Court declined to grant a pre-release injunction, holding that free expression and the public's right to know generally outweigh such claims absent clear defamation or a direct privacy violation, a result that notably cuts in the opposite direction from Anil Kapoor and shows just how unsettled this specific corner of Indian law still is.

Where This Leaves Fan Creators

Set the two systems side by side and the underlying instinct looks similar: both tend to protect fan work that argues with its source material and penalize fan work that simply continues it. SunTrust and Civic Chandran won for essentially the same reason, two decades and one ocean apart. Salinger v. Colting and the likely fate of an unauthorized sequel built around a well-known Indian character would probably lose for the same underlying reason too.

The difference is how much room each system leaves for that judgment to operate. American fair use weighs replacement-versus-critique openly, through four flexible factors a court can apply to genuinely new fact patterns, including the RPF and biopic disputes that will only get more common. Indian fair dealing offers no equivalent elasticity: a fan creator either fits inside one of Section 52's named categories, most plausibly "criticism or review," or they do not. There is no invitation for a court to ask whether something new and valuable has been created. It is only a question of whether it technically counts as commentary. And layered on top of that closed statutory list, India has now added a separate, expanding body of personality-rights law that has no direct American analogue and that courts are still visibly working out case by case.

Fandom culture in India is, by any measure, as large as its American counterpart, built on the same platforms, around characters and stars that are arguably just as culturally central. The number of fans on either side of this comparison is roughly equal. The legal ground they are standing on is not.

Bibliography

United States

• Anderson v. Stallone, 11 U.S.P.Q.2d 1161 (C.D. Cal. 1989).

• Salinger v. Colting, 641 F. Supp. 2d 250 (S.D.N.Y. 2009), vacated and remanded, 607 F.3d 68 (2d Cir. 2010).

• SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001).

• Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994) (parody and fair use factors, cited in SunTrust).

• 17 U.S.C. § 107 (Fair Use).

India

• Star India Pvt. Ltd. v. Leo Burnett (India) Pvt. Ltd., 2003 (27) PTC 81 (Bom.); also reported at 2003 (2) BomCR 655.

• R.G. Anand v. Delux Films & Ors., AIR 1978 SC 1613; (1978) 4 SCC 118.

• Civic Chandran & Ors. v. C. Ammini Amma & Ors., (1996) 16 PTC 329 (Ker.); MANU/KE/0675/1996.

• Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors., CS(COMM) 652/2023 (Del. HC, order dated 20 September 2023).

• Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A. Saraogi & Ors., 2021 SCC OnLine Del 3145.

• The Copyright Act, 1957, ss. 14(a)(vi), 51, 52(1)(a).

• Information Technology Act, 2000, s. 79.

Author: Anushka Sharma in case of any queries please contact/write back to us via email to content@khuranaandkhurana.com or at  Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorney.