from the seriously? dept
This one is a bit lacking in detail, and the story seems to raise more questions than it answers, but assuming it's accurate, it's yet another example of the sort of bizarre legal situations that people are put through because of bizarre beliefs about who "owns" their likeness. This one was sent in by
Ry Jones and it involves a small portion of an incredibly long and rambling blog post by Carnival Cruise's "senior cruise director," John Heald. You have to scroll about two-thirds of the way down to
find the story of the cruise line allegedly being sued by a guy demanding royalties because a "welcome show" was filmed and shown on the ship. Here's how Heald describes the situation:
Anyway, the facts are that I chose six volunteers to come on stage with me for the welcome aboard show. Amongst them was a fine young man who got into the whole spirit of the show and all was well. However the next morning he demanded to speak to me telling me that I must remove the show which had been recorded and was playing on the cabin televisions. The reasons behind his demands were that he was an actor and if I played the show I would owe him royalties.......lots of royalties. I respected his request and had the entertainment technical manager edit out his interview portion so there was no speaking although I kept the spoon game section in as it involved all six of the guests.
This made Mr Cloonpitt very unhappy and he demanded I remove the entire show which on the third day of the cruise I eventually did.
He spent the rest of the cruise telling me I owed him money and that he would be contacting his agent which.......I guess he did. Now I have cleared all of the above with the Carnival lawyers and they have no problem with me telling you about this because amongst other things Mr Cloonpitt volunteered to do the show and there is a waiver thingy within the ticket policies. However, I now I have to write a formal report about this and that's got me mad as I wanted to spend the afternoon with Kye and Heidi. I had Googled the actors name and nothing came up on IMDB.com .............he hadn't even played a dead body on ER.
Assuming this is accurate, Heald is right that Carnival's lawyers should have a field day with this guy, and he'll likely realize pretty quickly that he's got no legal leg whatsoever.
Filed Under: actor, copyright, cruise, royalties
