Filmmaker Tan Chui Mui has responded to the legal letter from creative agency Leo Burnett Malaysia by issuing her own "letter of demand".

This is over Tan's claim that the agency had plagiarised her team's work for the Petronas-commissioned TV commercial 'Rubber Boy'.

"I received the letter of demand from Leo Burnett today. I was asked to retract my statement within 48 hours.

"To retract my statement, Leo Burnett should at least convince me that it did not plagiarise my story.

"I would like to demand three things, so that Leo Burnett could have an opportunity to prove that it is innocent," she said in a statement today.

She said she did not have a lawyer to prepare a legal letter, so she wrote it herself.

The first demand was for Leo Burnett to produce the script for 'Ah Pa's Sacrifice'.

The agency had earlier claimed that Tan and the production house Da Huang Pictures had proposed a treatment to them based on that script, which was developed by Leo Burnett for their client, she said, though they did not go ahead with that treatment.

"For a fair comparison of the two stories, please show us the script of 'Ah Pa’s Sacrifice', which was sent to my team on Dec 22, 2014, that Leo Burnett claimed that my treatment is based on," she said in her letter.

She gave the agency 48 hours to reveal the script, adding that if it is not able to do so by 9am on July 2, she would assume she had been given permission to share the script on her Facebook page.

Since she pitched her story to Leo Burnett's creative director James Yap on Dec 23, 2014, Tan's second demand was for the agency to prove that it wrote a similar story before that date.

She then pointed out that the story she pitched to Leo Burnett was based on a micro-short story she wrote and published on Dec 13, 2011.

Her third demand was for Leo Burnett to prove that a similar story was written and published by the agency before that date in 2011.

Childhood memory

She said she would give Leo Burnett 48 hours to respond to her "letter of demand".

Leo Burnett had issued its letter of demand to Tan and Da Huang Pictures yesterday, to give her and the firm a chance to retract "unfounded" statements on social media over the matter.

Tan in various Facebook postings under the hashtag #LeoBurnettplagiarism had said her team had pitched a story about a rubber tapper's son to the agency in 2014, after she was approached by the agency to develop a concept for a Chinese New Year commercial.

She said the story the team had pitched was based on her friend's childhood memory of the moment he realised how much his rubber tapper mother sacrificed to raise him.

Her friend realised this when as a teenager he tried and failed to lift the buckets his mother carried every day to tap rubber.

Seeing him struggle, his mother lifted the bucket wordlessly and walked away, leaving her son in tears, she said.

The pitch by Da Huang included location recce and potential casts, she said, but in January 2015, Leo Burnett told them their idea was not selected.

Leo Burnett's 'Rubber Boy' commercial was released online in February 2016.

In a statement this evening, Leo Burnett Malaysia said it did not think it appropriate to ventilate the dispute over social media.

"Leo Burnett will therefore be initiating legal proceedings against Tan Chui Mui and other parties to have the matter heard at the appropriate forum.

"In the circumstances, Leo Burnett will not comment further on the issue on social media and will let the Courts decide on the matter," it said.