Quentin Tarantino Loses Big In Trying To Paint Gawker As A Copyright Infringer

from the nice-try,-quentin dept

We didn't write about this case when it came out because it just seemed so ridiculous, but filmmaker Quentin Tarantino sued Gawker Media earlier this year for linking to a script he had apparently been working on. There had been a bunch of media coverage over the fact that his script for The Hateful Eight leaked, and was being shared around Hollywood, though not online. Gawker then asked anyone if they'd seen a copy, leading to a followup post which included a link to the newly leaked script.

Tarantino argued that by soliciting from the public a copy of the script and then subsequently linking to it, Gawker was guilty of contributory infringement. Thankfully, a federal court that actually understands copyright law has quickly disabused Tarantino of that bizarre interpretation of copyright law, granting Gawker's motion to dismiss. The big problem: at no point anywhere in the process above, did Tarantino's lawyer show how Gawker's actions resulted in anyone infringing on anyone's copyright. That makes it quite hard to pin "contributory infringement" when there's no direct infringement in the first place:

However, nowhere in these paragraphs or anywhere else in the Complaint does Plaintiff allege a single act of direct infringement committed by any member of the general public that would support Plaintiff’s claim for contributory infringement. Instead, Plaintiff merely speculates that some direct infringement must have taken place. For example, Plaintiff’s Complaint fails to allege the identity of a single third-party infringer, the date, the time, or the details of a single instance of third-party infringement, or, more importantly, how Defendant allegedly caused, induced, or materially contributed to the infringement by those third parties

In a footnote, the court further notes that even if Tarantino's lawyers could dredge up some example of direct infringement based on someone reading the script, the lawsuit still wouldn't make any sense:

Even if Plaintiff alleged that individuals accessed the links contained in Defendant’s article in order to read Plaintiff’s script, such an allegation would still not support Plaintiff’s contributory infringement claim against Defendant. Simply viewing a copy of allegedly infringing work on one’s own computer does not constitute the direct infringement necessary to support Plaintiff’s contributory infringement claim. See Perfect 10, Inc., 508 F.3d at 1169 (where alleged primary infringers merely view pages containing infringing images, but do not “store[] infringing images on their computers,” there is no infringement). In addition, based on the allegations of the Complaint, there can be little doubt that Plaintiff has a strong claim for direct infringement against Doe 1, a/k/a AnonFiles.com. However, Plaintiff has not alleged and it is highly unlikely that Plaintiff will be able to plead facts demonstrating that Defendant somehow induced, caused, or materially contributed to the infringing conduct by publishing a link to the screenplay after it was wrongfully posted on AnonFiles.com.

The court notes that Gawker spent a lot of effort explaining why this is fair use but notes that, "albeit persuasive and potentially dispositive," it doesn't even need to bother with that argument since there's no infringement to defend against fair use here anyway.

Once again, it seems like people who grow up totally immersed in a world of copyright maximalism automatically leap to the conclusion that "something I don't like" must be an infringement of copyright. Thankfully, the law (mostly) doesn't work that way.

Filed Under: contributory infringement, copyright, direct infringement, quentin tarantino, scripts, the hateful eight
Companies: gawker media

Author Sues Production Company For Copyright Infringement For Changing The Script It Optioned From Him

from the moral-rights-through-contract dept

While significant parts of the rest of the world include a "moral rights" component to copyright (which covers things like proper attribution), the US has always avoided it -- even though it's supposedly required by the Berne Convention, of which the US is a participant. The US has mainly gotten around this because it's the US and it ignores international agreements when it wants to -- but also because it put in a tiny bit of moral rights in extremely limited circumstances that are so rare you'll almost never, ever hear about them. However, it does appear that some are trying to sneak in a form of moral rights via contract.

Copycense points us to the news of a writer, Matthew Jones, who is suing the people who optioned his screenplay (which was based on his own novel, Boot Tracks) for changing the screenplay without his permission. He apparently wrote into the contract that such changes could not be made without his permission -- and yet the screenplay was changed to help get funding. There's an obvious contractual breach in there, but Jones is also claiming copyright infringement, suggesting that, by breaking the agreement, they were also creating an unauthorized derivative work. In this case, it's a little more confusing, because there's some question as to when the producer and director actually exercised the option to buy the screenplay/make the film. Either way, it may make for an interesting case and it makes me wonder if we'll start to see more efforts by content creators to enforce such moral-like rights via contract.

Filed Under: copyright, moral rights, scripts

Lionsgate Claims That Reviewing A Fake Script Is Copyright Infringement

from the and-how dept

Khyle points us to an interesting situation in which movie studio Lionsgate threatened a blogger for reviewing a script which purported to be for a movie called Hunger Games. Admittedly, the link here is from the blog in question, Forever Young Adult, and (for reasons totally opaque to me), the blogger chose to paraphrase the conversation with Lionsgate lawyer Liat Cohen -- so take this with at least some grains of salt. However, the gist of the conversation appears to be that Lionsgate claims that (a) the script that the blog reviewed was fake and (b) that review violated the studio's copyright. The blog caved and took down the post, so we can't see the full post to see if what was written really infringed on the copyright, but if the script is fake, simply reviewing it shouldn't infringe on anyone's copyright. The blogger claims that she never posted the actual script or anything -- just a review. There could be other (potentially serious) legal issues with reviewing a fake script, but I'm trying to see where the copyright infringement claim comes in.

Either way, the blogger complied with Lionsgate's demand to take down the review, and issued the following, quite amusing, retraction and apology:

Last week, we received a movie script from an unnamed source. That movie script appeared to be the script for the Hunger Games movie. Acting in good faith, we read the script and then offered up very general thoughts about the direction and tone of the script. At no time did we offer the script up to the internet, nor did we forward the script on to any other bloggers or websites. (Nor do we ever intend to. Frankly I don’t even plan to hang on to it for my own enjoyment, cause it sort of sucked.)

Lionsgate has claimed that this script is actually a fake. We have been given no further information than that, and I’m not really sure how they know that what we have is a fake since our post was so very general in nature. I can only hope that as soon as they read the words "Gale becomes a hobo" that they knew something was off, and if that’s the case, then THANK YOU, LIONSGATE.

With no other knowledge to go on, and our dwindling champagne budgets in danger of being seized by a multi-billion dollar company who you would think have better things to do than send nasty emails to YA blogs, we are hereby retracting our opinions on the possibly fake Hunger Games movie script. We take it all back, Internet! Hunger Games movie? What Hunger Games movie? What’s the Hunger Games? Is it, like, Battle Royal but for Americans who hate foreign films?

Of course, all this just makes me think that Lionsgate is a bit too itchy on the trigger finger against anyone who says anything even remotely critical about one of their films.

Filed Under: copyright, scripts
Companies: lionsgate

Fox Sues Woman For $15M Because She Aggregated TV And Movie Scripts She Found Online

from the ouch dept

In the latest example of copyright law gone mad, it appears that Twentieth Century Fox is suing a woman for $15 million, because she aggregated various scripts she found online as a resource for screenwriters (like herself) to learn from. The key issue is that apparently one of the many, many scripts she had put together was of a movie that is still in production, and Fox doesn't want anyone to see it. Apparently she was told of the lawsuit by "private investigators," who questioned her for two hours (it's not clear why she didn't throw them out or refuse to answer their questions).

Of course, those who support the current copyright regime will note that these scripts are, in fact, covered by copyright. However, it's difficult to claim that these scripts are somehow likely to act as a substitute for the actual movie for anyone. It's hard to see any losses from such a collection, frankly, but thanks to the fun of copyright law and statutory damages, actual harm doesn't much matter. All that matters is a giant Hollywood corporation has sued a struggling screenwriter for $15 million because she thought she was helping other screenwriters by aggregating example scripts she found elsewhere online for them all to learn from.

Filed Under: aggregation, copyright, scripts
Companies: 20th century fox, fox, news corp.

Patents Being Abused To Put Your Life In Danger

from the dangerous-consequences dept

For years we've been writing about various abuses of the patent system, and how they damage innovation. There are times when we hear about abuses of the patent system that actually put lives in danger -- often around the pharmaceutical industry. At least in that case, you can sometimes understand the basic reasoning (even if it's actually incorrect). However, we recently came across an example of the patent system being abused in such an egregious manner that it's putting many lives at stake...

Bob Austin, who for many years has worked in major metropolitan fire and EMS departments, had the idea of creating an open source medical dispatch system. Such a system would have numerous benefits. Beyond being a free system, it also would allow best practices to easily bubble up in a way that actively would help save lives. If another EMS department could improve on the system, they easily could do so and contribute it back to the community.

One of the parts of the system was a project called Cards 911, which was a useful document for use by emergency dispatchers. Basically, it gave them a simple script to follow when an emergency call came in, asking where they were, the nature of the emergency, how many people injured, etc. The answers to certain questions would lead the dispatcher to different parts of the document using hyperlinks. The entire document (and, yes, it was just a document) was created in OpenOffice Writer and was offered either as a document file or a PDF file. In other words, this was basically a script with hyperlinks in it, that helped an emergency dispatcher get the necessary information, and help the caller as quickly as possible -- and it was free and open.

Who could possibly complain about that?

Apparently the lawyers for a company called Priority Dispatch Corporation, who sent a legal nastygram listing out ten patents that the company held, which the lawyers implied the Cards 911 project violated. Remember, this is a script written as a document. The lawyers were careful never to actually say which of the ten patents the cards violated, but simply listed them all out and said "Our investigation has revealed that the... Guide Cards may infringe on one or more of Priority Dispatch's patents and/or copyrights." Not only that, but the lawyers then demanded that all physical and electronic copies of the documents be destroyed.

Given the position they were in, as open source developers doing this for the good of the public, rather than as any sort of business endeavor, the folks involved in the project complied with the demands of the lawyer. They destroyed everything, both electronic and physical and agreed not to work on any emergency dispatch systems in the future. The project is no longer available, and our emergency dispatch systems are that much worse off because of it.

Furthermore, in investigating this further, it appears that it would be impossible to craft any sort of competing product that lives up to NHTSA and ASTM official standards without violating Priority Dispatch's patents, based on the what the company seems to believe they cover. If you would like to see all ten patents for yourself, they're listed here:

• 5857966
• 7106835
• 6607481
• 6106549
• 6078894
• 6076065
• 6053864
• 6010451
• 6004266
• 5989187

The whole situation is rather sickening, and I'm really hoping that folks here might be able to help see if we can get this project back on track. Priority Dispatch's decision to scare these open source developers into submission for merely offering up a free project to help save lives is really a rather disgusting use of the patent system, and obviously goes against the very purpose of that system: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Instead, such things are being actively stymied in a way that puts all of us at risk.

The folks working on this project have no money (and no intention of making any money from the project), but they could use some help. In my discussions with them, they simply wanted me to know about their story, and weren't asking for help per se, but it would be great if we could, as a community, come up with ways to get this project moving again, so that we can all be safer. If anyone has thoughts or ideas on how to help Bob, please let us know in the comments, and let's see what can be done. At the very least, please help spread this story and let others know about it.

Filed Under: emergency dispatch, open source, patents, scripts
Companies: priority dispatch corporation