Content area
Full text
THE RIVER Kwai in Thailand, where 6,000 Allied prisoners died building the notorious railway to Burma for their Japanese captors, exists only as a trademark of the entertainment giant Sony, lawyers have claimed.
The claim has infuriated surviving British prisoners of war, whose treatment at the hands of the Japanese army was immortalised in David Lean's 1957 classic The Bridge on the River Kwai. The film was made by the Hollywood studio Columbia, now owned by Sony.
Columbia Pictures has made the trademark claim as part of a long-running action involving another Sony subsidiary, Tri-Star Pictures, which has prevented British film producer Kurt Unger from distributing his 1989 film Return from the River Kwai in the US.
Columbia, which bought the rights to The Bridge on the River Kwai from its producer Sam Spiegel, whose estate is also involved in the litigation, claimed in a three-day trial in New York earlier this month that it owns the right to use the words 'River Kwai' in any film. Lawyers for the Spiegel estate claimed in court that the River Kwai was not a real place.
'Where do they think I was in 1942?' asked Sid Tavender, vice-chairman of the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors' Association of Great Britain. 'I was on the River...