Knocked Up But Not Out
There’s a very interesting column in the Canadian paper Macleans by a relatively small time writer who has sued a major Hollywood player for copyright infringement. She’s not tiny - she has an agent and a publisher and her book was released in at least two countries - but she is an individual, unlike the writer with Hollywood backing she alleges stole her book for a screenplay that was turned into a movie by Universal Studios and stars some very well known folks. Reading her tale of deciding to and then trying to file a lawsuit says less about our copyright laws than it does about the entertainment industry itself. Read her story here.
The central question in her case is going to come down to this: If a story is very close to another story, but different, how close does it need to be to be a legal infringement of the copyright on the first story? And if the story is similar enough to be an infringement, but there’s no proof that the writer of the second work ever knew about or saw the first one, does that matter? In other words, is it infringment if it really was a coincidence, even if it would be infringment if it was clear that the writer had seen the first work?
There are only so many stories to go around, and rarely do we find a truly unique story. What we generally get are old stories told in new ways and with new characters (if you read genre fiction you know that lots of times you barely even get new characters). It may be that this is like pornography - it’s hard to define when close is too close, but we know it when we see it.
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