What's wrong with these people? Why couldn't Warner Brothers reach out to Tess and say "Hey, we're going to produce a sci-fi film based on GRAVITY. We'd like to work with you and are interested in re-negotiating your contract for a new version of the story." You know, acting in good faith.
Instead they just screw her, no recognition, no money? How is that the default thought process for a company? This may be vindictive but I hope the court sticks it to Warner Bros in the most painful way possible. Something needs to be done to change the decision making process at that company.
1. The movie "Gravity" is primarily an action/special-effects pageant about an astronaut trying to get safely back to Earth after an accident destroys the space station she was on. The book "Gravity" is a medical techno-thriller about a doctor in space fighting a disease outbreak on a space station. Reasonable people can probably disagree about whether the movie, given its significantly different plot, is even a derivative of the book at this point.
2. The lawsuit was not regarding plagiarism, but rather for breach of contract related to the film rights for the book. Gerritsen alleges that Warner Brothers was bound by and failed to observe the terms of a contract she had signed with a company which became a subsidiary of New Line, which in turn became a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. The court found that even if all allegations in her complaint were taken to be true, they still would not establish that Warner Brothers was bound by that contract. This mostly seems to depend on the arcana of contract law and how mergers and acquisitions pass obligations on (or don't pass them on), and suggests that the main issue was either she or her attorney did not sufficiently understand those arcana (given that she apparently contracted for a percentage of net rather than gross, a lack of experience in what makes a good contract for film rights seems likely) in order to build a successful complaint.
> The book "Gravity" is a medical techno-thriller about a doctor in space fighting a disease outbreak on a space station.
Remember that sometime between 1999 and 2002[1], Gerritsen wrote and submitted a third act re-write including "scenes of satellite debris destroying ISS and the lone surviving female astronaut adrift in her spacesuit." (core suspense of Cuaron's script).
Screenwriters re-write portions of scripts all the time, yet are rarely granted writing credit on the script. Every hollywood script has had at least 4-5 writers on it, yet only one of them gets the credit and the royalties. How that's decided, I honestly don't know, but there were stories about the producer's girlfriends getting more writing credits than screenwriters in the 50s and 60s.
> The court found that even if all allegations in her complaint were taken to be true, they still would not establish that Warner Brothers was bound by that contract.
So it is possible that:
1) X sells rights to Y, having Y commit to obligations in exchange.
2) Z acquires Y.
3) Z now has the rights but not the obligations.
I'd guess they either don't have the rights, or don't have the obligations. If you're suing for breech of contract, you'd have to show they have the obligations; if you're suing for infridgement, you have to show they don't have the right.
I didn't see the word plagiarism mentioned anywhere. That's overused, and means presenting someone else's work as your own, not ripping someone off by basing something on their work. If someone else had made the Gravity movie, then the studio took it and released it as theirs, that would be plagiarism, but not stealing plot ideas.
I guess I'm wandering away from the topic here (since the current issue seems more related to contract law than to the ethics of plagiarism)... but I'm not sure it's so cut-and-dried a definition. Plenty of people and academic authorities include the uncredited appropriation of ideas in their definition of plagiarism, not just the wholesale lifting of entire passages/works word-for-word.
"[I]t is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source ... When you use your own language to describe someone else's idea, that idea still belongs to the author of the original material. Whenever you use ideas that you did not think up yourself, you need to give credit to the source in which you found them, whether you quote directly from that material or provide a responsible paraphrase."
Wikipedia and the dictionary on my Mac also make reference to the taking of ideas as plagiarism, so it doesn't seem uncommon to include ideas in the definition.
The notion of an "original" product causally linked to the WB-produced film _Gravity_ assumes facts not in evidence.
Gerritsen alleges that the film she worked with Katja on formed a basis for WB's film by dint of Cuaron's involvement in both projects. In the earlier project, Cuaron is alleged to have been "attached" to the project. In the WB production, Cuaron and his son wrote the entire screenplay.
The film term of art "attached" doesn't have a precise meaning. "Attached" can be an indicator of someone's commitment to a project --- a spectrum from "aware of" through "interested in" through "attached" through "committed". It could also mean that the person is sponsoring the project and shepherding it through the development process.
At no point does Gerritsen allege that Cuaron's screenplay included any of Gerritsen's writing. At best, her claim is to the storyline --- the ideas --- of the WB film.
What Gerritsen is saying --- informally, in explaining her reason for deciding to pursue the case, and also in rebutting WB's claim that Gerritsen had already conceded the film wasn't based on her work --- is that she had always felt that the WB project had an uncanny resemblance to her own story, but that she didn't have a smoking gun until she discovered Cuaron has been "attached" to the earlier project without her knowledge.
The fact that the author of the book and a contributor to the punch-up of the screenplay was unaware that one of the most famous directors in Hollywood was "attached" to the project suggests that the word "attached" was meant in its more casual meaning.
But the fact that Cuaron and his son wrote a screenplay involving a novice astronaut marooned on the ISS after being made aware of a project with a similar story suggests that there's some link.
The important part to me is why WB says it owes Gerritsen nothing. If the case is "We admit the movie had a relationship to her work, but that doesn't matter because it was New Line's contract not WB's", there is a very big problem here.
On the other hand, if they convince a judge/jury that there was no connection between her book and the movie then fine. Case closed, go home, no worries.
The key problem here is that if a studio can do a neat little legal dance to avoid contract obligations then that is a big deal. If this is simply a matter of evidence not supporting the claims in this instance then not a big deal.
Cuaron wasn't super-famous in 2000. He basically had one mid-budget feature under his belt. Add in the fact that writers usually get left out of the loop on that part of the dealmaking and it's not hard to imagine he was more attached than not.
Which is what the lawsuit is based upon really - that's said, the title is the same, the story is very similar, and it seems extremely likely that the author is accurate, even thus it may be difficult to prove (and easy to disprove, WB can just delete all the files where she's mentioned during the acquisition and then she just has her own word for it, emails being easy to fake and all)
The stories are not similar at all. The similarity is the title, that both are sci-fi, and that there is a female lead. Judge for yourself:
Book:
Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control -- and infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results. Emma struggles to contain the outbreak while back on Earth her estranged husband, Jack McCallum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home. But there will be no rescue. The contagion now threatens Earth's population, and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station -- where they are dying one by one...
Movie:
Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a brilliant medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) in command of his last flight before retiring. But on a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes. The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone - tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness.
Are you intentionally ignoring this claim by the author?
While my film was in development, I re-wrote the third act of the film script with scenes of satellite debris destroying ISS and the lone surviving female astronaut adrift in her spacesuit.
Probably. Their account was created 9 days ago and has only a few comments under it, none of which are meaningful in any sense. They're either a troll or an account owned by an Astroturf network.
Did you miss the part where this was a contract issue? Where the author of the book said, literally, "Yeah, Gravity is a great film, but it's not based on my book"? She's trying to argue that a contract she made with one company would somehow jump across multiple acquisitions, mergers and organizational changes and begin binding a different company that made a movie she admits wasn't based on her book. And that's why it comes down to contract law, and contracts do not represent an easy, straightforward, intuitive body of law.
You don't particularly have to like the way that stuff works, but the simple truth is that changing it to make it work the intuitive and desired way in this particular case would probably result in many more other types of cases suddenly coming out in ways you wouldn't like.
"I, Robot" was a great movie, but not based on the book.
"Starship Troopers" was, as I like to repeat a quip, "based on the back cover of a novel by Robert Heinlein".
"Frozen", while not involving a contract to the long-deceased author, is allegedly based on "The Snow Queen" though I fail to see the connection.
There are numerous other examples of a movie being almost entirely unlike the book for which rights were purchased at significant cost. Producers seem to often go to great lengths to ensure an even tangentially involved author is at least satisfactorily paid. Sure, there are famous examples where the reverse is true ("Forrest Gump", IIRC), but it seems in everyone's interests to err on the side of generosity where due, lest a case like this one codify outright screwing of the sources of ideas - and their eventual defense in substantially less profitable ways.
> "Starship Troopers" was, as I like to repeat a quip, "based on the back cover of a novel by Robert Heinlein".
ST was actually written as a script completely unrelated to the book, and the rights to the book later purchased and superficial changes (character names, etc.) made to align with the book.
Uh? The story is not the same, but the whole universe and political system are exactly the ones of the book, they just basically removed the mech-armors stuff.
The original script was called "Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine". It's possible that the writing team was influenced by the book, but there's no clear indication of that, and in fact the claim is that they were not really aware of the book until well into the process.
The universe and political system are depicted the way those critical of Heinlein likes to depict them, but largely because Verhoeven decided to make a "perfect fascist world" to satirise and criticise it, and Heinlein is often criticised for militarist viewpoints close to fascism.
The absence of the mech-armors stuff reflects this: He's mimicked nazism (the opening has shot-for-shop parallels to a scene from Riefenstahls "Triump of the Will"; the uniforms are modelled on the Gestapo; the architecture is modelled on Speer; the weapons are WWII inspired; the newsreel clips are mimicking WWII era propaganda movies) as he saw it growing up in nazi-occupied Netherlands.
Verhoeven is quoted as saying this about the book:
> I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring,...It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book.
> would somehow jump across multiple acquisitions, mergers and organizational changes and begin binding a different company
"Somehow"? They would do so via a completely standard clause that enjoins any acquiring entity to honour the terms of the contract. I have never negotiated a contract that did not have a such a clause. Neither has anyone else who knows what they are doing.
Maybe she had incompetent representation. Maybe the arcana of this specific acquisition were such that any contractual obligations were effectively terminated.
But don't pretend for a moment that this isn't bog-standard, boiler-plate-level stuff. We know exactly how such contractual obligations would be conveyed across multiple acquisitions, mergers and organizational changes because we are used to writing contracts that specifically say "If you're acquired, the obligations under this contract are on the acquirer."
Neither has anyone else who knows what they are doing.
I don't know the details of the contract, but I know that apparently it gave her a percentage of net, rather than gross, on the resulting film.
Which, when dealing with Hollywood, ought to be prima facie evidence of ineffective/incompetent counsel on the part of whatever attorney represented/advised her during the negotiations :)
> ought to be prima facie evidence of ineffective/incompetent counsel
A much more likely explanation is that the writer and her lawyer know perfectly well the difference between gross and net, but this was the best deal they could get, and it was better than nothing.
Writer and her lawyer: "We demand 3% of the gross."
Studio head: "I'm not offering any percentage of the gross."
Writer and her lawyer: "OK, we'll settle for 2.5% of the gross."
Studio head: "I told you: nothing on the gross. Zero. If you don't like that, get lost. I'll hire another writer."
Writer and her lawyer: "Well, OK, how about 3% of the net."
That doesn't make any sense, though. 3% of the net is not better than nothing. Why would you bother to ask for it? That just makes your contract legally valid, in the sense that consideration is offered, without getting you any benefits.
They aren't being weasels. Everyone in Hollywood already knows there isn't any net. It's rare to get gross -- generally the only time that happens is when the star power is such that it would make a significant difference in the box office. Bradley Cooper gets net, no name writer from Pfugerville gets net, if any points at all.
Exactly. There's no such thing as net. Even blockbusters rarely achieve 'net.' It's the mark of a Hollywood rookie to have net points. Gross is the only way to go. Eddie Murphy famously called net points as "monkey points." Obviously she didn't have an agent who understood Hollywood Accounting. Of course, a new writer or someone without much bargaining power generally takes what they can get.
I think it's completely rational to assume that mergers and acquisitions would assign all assets, liabilities, and obligations to the purchasing entity. Given the history of Hollywood Accounting, I think it's also rational to assume that WB is trying to use legal loopholes to weasel their way out of obligations.
That being said, I thought the bulk of WBs case wasn't that they weren't beholden to her contract, but that the movie GRAVITY is a derivative of a different work entirely.
> I think it's completely rational to assume that mergers and acquisitions would assign all assets, liabilities, and obligations to the purchasing entity. Given the history of Hollywood Accounting, I think it's also rational to assume that WB is trying to use legal loopholes to weasel their way out of obligations.
Absolutely. To argue otherwise would be anarchy. Can you imagine if some company bought Microsoft and decided to start fresh? Like discard all the responsibilities it has to support its software and such. I know this is far fetched but my point is that this is what due diligence is supposed to discover and the acquirer's inability to find it does not mean they are absolved of the responsibility.
Bad example; Microsoft supports its software because it wouldn't be able to maintain market share if it didn't, not because of contractual obligations.
I think it's because large corporations without a public figure at the helm think like paperclip maximizers. There is a process that counts cost vs. reward for various strategies, and the most efficient one is selected. TW is big enough that they don't have to worry about their reputation taking a big hit from doing this once, or even a dozen times - people will still pitch scripts to them.
What puzzles me is why we hardly ever hear of military or even professional reprisals against these companies.
In this case I guess it would be "You've ripped me off to the tune of a million dollars, so I'm going to cause you a million and one dollars in property damage, this way you'll learn next time".
From interactions previous employer(s)/co-worker(s) have had with Warner Bros., I do not have a good opinion of WB corporate culture (at least at the higher levels).
Someone probably got a promotion for this based on saving the company some amount of money and will see no negative consequences even if the courts stick it to WB financially.
Everyone should stop for a minute and imagine what would happen if this legal precedent spread to the tech startup world. We might then have situations where a highly experienced programmer might sign up with a startup, and sign a contract with that startup, but then have the contract declared null and void if the startup is acquired.
I can imagine a "less likely" and "more likely" way this might play out:
1.) "less likely" would be something bordering on blatant theft -- perhaps the contract specifies options or bonuses, but the parent company, after the acquisition, no longer wants to pay. That would be fairly blatant, though not impossible.
2.) "more likely" would, I think, be issues regarding copyright, which, with software, allows something of a fudge factor, since software is always changing, and no one programmer writes the whole of a large system. I'm thinking of my own startup here: during the years 2000 to 2002 I created a content management system, which then became the basis of a company that was formed in 2002. But the founding documents of that company gave me the right to specific royalty payments for the CMS, even if we eventually agreed to dissolve the company (which we did in 2008). But suppose the company was acquired, and then the acquiring company declared that the requirement to pay royalties was null and void? This is very similar to what apparently happened with Gravity.
Happens all the time, let's say as in this example:
1. initial stock agreement promises acceleration of vesting upon acquision.
2. later on, an acquirer comes along. They want the employees to stay. So, their merger agreement nullifies the stock provision and issues new stock with reset vesting. Don't like it? Don't accept the acquisition, but you can't pretend that your initial contract is going to help you any.
> Don't like it? Don't accept the acquisition, but you can't pretend that your initial contract is going to help you any.
Not true, actually. The acceleration occurs before the acquisition. You are now a minority shareholder with a dissident vote--most states have corporation law provisions for making sure that minority, dissident shareholders are statutorily required to be paid fair market value for their shares. The acquiring company is required to buy you out, and the acquisition price establishes a de facto fair market value.
But that does happen, in way. The most well-known was Zynga - when they were getting ready to go public they did a claw-back on their outstanding options and shares. They screwed over a friend of mine that was one of the early employees.
Marcus Pincus is a piece of shit by his own admission. We should make a six degrees of separation where anyone who does any partnership or collaboration with that piece of shit immediately deserves a boycott as well. Yes, HN this includes even your god and lord Paul Graham...
Just because he admits to common practices instead of hiding behind the usual bullshit doesn't make him any worse than other CEOs. And just to make it clear which way to read that: That's not a defense of Pincus. That's a shot at the other CEOs. Business and moral don't go together, you can read that on HN all the time.
oh god yes and the entire state of Texas which makes the agreements that marcus pincus makes you sign when you join zynga sound lax.
there should be some federal minimum standard so that incompetent and malicious state actors in one state don't try to undercut fundamental economic policies of other states to lure away the companies from states like California... You should not be able to say "Come and incorporate in Texas and you'll own whatever your employees and ex-employees think for their entire lives". Or come to Texas and you won't have to pay a minimum wage to your employees.
Can you shed a bit of light on the details or motivation? It's always bothered me how we never got a full picture of what happened. So they clawed back a portion of options from people who had been awarded options at one level then demoted? Was their motivation just for money? Because it seems like absolutely the worst possible thing for morale and recruiting and I can't imagine them getting back more than 50mm.
(and, in fairness, it's more complicated than WB makes it out to be as well).
Most of the ruling concerns itself with the admissibility of various documents for the purposes of a dismissal ruling, which is complicated by the fact that the court has to stipulate all of the plaintiffs facts as true and still find no cause for a lawsuit in order to grant the motion.
From what I can tell, the meat of the ruling is:
* Gerritsen didn't have a contract with WB, but with Katja and, presumably, New Line.
* Gerritsen's argument depends in part on the notion that Katja/New Line would, absent control by WB, have fought against WB making a picture based on work they'd already licensed. Katja/New Line didn't do that.
* Gerritsen might have a legitimate grievance, but it's with Katja/New Line and its previous owners, who were paid by WB. Gerritsen is thus in effect a creditor of Katja's, and if she's owed something, it's owed from the proceeds of the sale, not from WB's own bank account. Or something like that?
No, if you buy a company, you buy it lock stock and barrel - that includes outstanding debts, existing deals, and obligations.
Otherwise it'd be trivial to make a company go millions in debt, then sell it to an accomplice who would keep the assets and poof the debts.
This still happens, of course, but there are fraud laws against it, and successful attempts when they happen generally require wriggling through a lot of loopholes.
> No, if you buy a company, you buy it lock stock and barrel - that includes outstanding debts, existing deals, and obligations.
It depends on what you mean by "buy", and what you mean by "company".
Companies can assume the assets of another in a number of ways. The two most common are share purchase and asset purchase. If you buy assets, you do not assume liabilities. Whatever you use to purchase the company may pay off the selling company's creditors, but the new company assumes none of those liabilities. In a share purchase the obligations generally travel with the company.
The assumption of liabilities can also depend on whether the company being purchased is bankrupt or insolvent, as in those cases the shareholder rights often cease and in any case with very few exceptions lower in priority to creditors. It is often left to agreement of the parties (selling company, purchasing company, and creditors) or a bankruptcy judge to determine the rights through purchase.
The above is an oversimplification and somewhat jurisdiction-dependent in the commonwealth, but the gist is that a company can (and many often do) assume the rights of others without obligations.
Readers may find the story on Old GM and New GM interesting. Here is an article by my friend and colleague David Skeel, who testified before Congress on the unfairness of assumption of assets without first satisfying obligations in the case of the GM/Chrysler bankruptcies: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023037453045763616...
Let's turn it around. If they (WB) feel like they didn't buy it all, they shouldn't have the intellectual property to make a movie based on the book. Seeing it this way, they never bought anything.
The author clarifies in another post on her blog[1] that she isn't claiming that the film is sufficiently similar to the book that it would infringe on her intellectual property. Rather, she is arguing that she has a contract which guarantees her certain compensation if the studio make a film "based on" her book, and that "based on" doesn't require that the film be so similar to the book that it would infringe her copyright. She references an earlier court case (about the film "Coming to America") which distinguishes what would count as copyright infringement from what would count as a film being "based on" a story, when the words "based on" are used in a contract[2]. This does seem like a slightly headache-inducing legal subtlety.
Writing and story credits are determined by the producers (based on union guidelines), and arbitrated by the Writers Guild if there's a dispute. That arbitration process is a nightmare from all accounts, but it's what everyone agrees to use.
What I don't know is if "based on" is outside those terms. From looking of the WGA website, it looks like it might well be.
Where I think she'd be out of luck for sure is that the changes she made to the script (which are the places of greatest similarity to her book) would have been work for hire for the studio, and they'd own those changes outright. Which makes sense if, for example, the studio requested those changes from their side. Even if they didn't explicitly give her notes to make those changes, she did so while she was hired by them, and was compensated for making them.
I'd be interested in hearing from a highly experienced screenwriter or screenwriter's agent. There are indeed a lot of subtleties at work that aren't readily apparent. I think there's a good chance the studio is in the right here.
I likely miss something, but I find it intriguing that the movie isn't apparently based on her work, yet she wants the original contract being honored because the movie IS based on her work: if the movie isn't based on her work, the contract isn't in play here.
So if the movie isn't based on her work, how can it be seen as a result of the contract she signed?
The last third of the ruling covers the cases under California law in which an acquirer gains successor-in-interest liabilities, and they seem to address exactly the kind of fraud you're referring to.
Also, Gerritsen specifically alleged "fraud", and so the ruling considers whether sufficient facts were presented which, stipulated as true, would have led to a colorable fraud claim.
> Most of the ruling concerns itself with the admissibility of various documents for the purposes of a dismissal ruling, which is complicated by the fact that the court has to stipulate all of the plaintiffs facts as true and still find no cause for a lawsuit in order to grant the motion.
To add some more color: Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8 only requires a complaint to allege facts, which if proven true, would make out a cognizable legal claim. A defendant may make, under Rule 12(b)(6), a motion to dismiss a complaint on the basis that the plaintiff fails to raise a cognizable claim.
In evaluating such a motion, a court cannot look beyond the four corners of the pleading, and to certain authoritative documents (official records, etc). So a defendant cannot attach a bunch of documents to negate the allegations in the claim, because at this early stage the plaintiff has not had the benefit of discovery and so cannot challenge the defendant's documents with his own. Frankly, courts can get pretty sloppy about this, but the judge here did a good job and excluded from consideration most of the documents Warner Bros. attached to their answer.
At one point the judge rebuts one of Gerritsen's arguments, regarding the nature of WB's control over New Line, by acknowledging "judicial notice" of WB's 10-K filings while refusing to evaluate them for truth. What does it mean to "take notice" of something without "considering it for truth"?
The court can take notice of the fact: "the SEC filing says WB took control of New Line."[1] It can't take notice of the fact: "WB took control of New Line." Here, we care about the actual fact of the merger, but sometimes we just care about what the SEC filing said about a merger or sale. For example, if a statute of limitations is in dispute, what matters is that the SEC filing says a merger or sale happened--putting investors on notice, not the actual truth of the merger.
[1] Although at this stage, the author merely has to allege, not prove, the fact of the merger. It appears she failed to allege the relevant facts in her complaint, and tried to get them in by referring to the SEC filing. But she should just be able to amend her complaint and allege the facts directly.
Even if they honor the contract she will get nothing besides being credited. Her contract states that she gets a percentage of the profits - and the movie will probably never make a profit.
Return of the Jedi never made a profit "despite having earned $475 million at the box-office against a budget of $32.5 million" (Wikipedia "Hollywood Accounting")
"Even if they honor the contract she will get nothing besides being credited."
She mentions that the contract also entitled her to a "production bonus", which sounds like some kind of lump-sum payment if her book is made into a movie.
One wonders why not everyone just negotiates gross then?
Is it because people are that inexperienced, that some rookies will still fall for net profit thing? Heck, I'm not in film, and even I know not to ask for net. :P
> One wonders why not everyone just negotiates gross then?
Sometimes inexperience. Sometimes you just don't have the leverage.
In this instance, she probably got paid some fixed amount up front and wanted her name in the credits.
From reading the article, it really sounds like the only thing that's contentious is the fact that they didn't give her credit. She probably assumed that the whole percentage of net was actually as useless as expected.
Everybody obviously wants gross, but unless you are a big star that the studio really really wants you'll basically be laughed out of the room for even suggesting it. Realistically your options are 0.00% or Gross or a few points of Net. Given those options most people will settle for the net on the off chance it might be worth something at some point down the line.
If it is well known that the studios use various accounting methods to hide profits, why do the people in the industry still accept contracts based on profits?
A better question is, why do US federal laws allow that kind of number mangling and contract swindling?
Since any contract can be full of tricks, it just means you need an army of lawyers even for the simplest things. It then gets really hard to actually do anything. And if you're poor, you're bound to get exploited by some obscure loophole.
Nobody takes net points. Plenty of people take points on the gross, which is fine. Studios know that talent has wised up to net points, but that doesn't stop creative accounting from screwing you over in other ways.
For example, one of Peter Jackson's main grievances when he sued New Line was that he had been promised a cut of the revenue from merchandising right sales. New Line sold the merchandising rights to its own sibling and subsidiary companies using a closed bidding process at well below market rates.
Unreal: "A WB receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper. This is especially unusual, given that the Harry Potter film series is the highest-grossing film series of all time."
piracy prevention has not once been about morals, even their very thinly disguised propaganda (ala the "you wouldn't download a car" ads) is basically not about morals, but about profits.
The short version is that the system has become so complex that the outputs are becoming less correlated to the inputs. The money coming out is losing its relationship to the motion pictures going in.
This is alarming, but not surprising, especially in Hollywood. However, once they amend the complaint, I have a feeling WB will have a hard time arguing that both the contract gives them the rights to the story, and that the contract isn't enforceable or binding. This will be interesting.
I had a similar problem a good while ago, on a much smaller scale, when a company that was buying land to put solar panels on it went bankrupt - essentially, they bought the panels, installed them on land that was actually belonging to another company that belonged to the crook's wife, and then declared bankruptcy after setting up some deal with the wife's company whereby it would get first rights to the assets (the panels) which were liquidated for pennies on the dollar. End result, they got free solar panels for their land.
I did an electrical design for them, and ended up not getting paid because the debt was with the defunct company, not the wife's company.
When I asked for my father's advice, he told me that legal channels are powerless in these cases, and offered to loan me a construction crew to go to the land at night and either steal or destroy as many panels as I felt was fair.
Frankly I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, although I am guessing that it's more of a Mediterranean thing than an Anglosaxon thing. The general consensus among Italians and Greeks to whom I told the story is that this was a fair manner to solve the issue, the general consensus among Americans and Canadians to whom I told the story is that my father proposed a criminal action (This whole thing happened in Italy).
Virtue probably lies in the middle, but I wouldn't know what the middle ground for this sort of thing is...
This stuff does happen in the US at least. I've only heard stories, but always from the "technically guilty" (e.g. the guys that destroyed/burned things down as retribution). One thing that's consistent in the stories I've heard is that the crooks always failed to carry insurance. Their "cheap" nature extended even to protection policies on their own ill-gotten gains.
It sounds like the stories are rather unrelated. The similarities are what, a female astronaut in space has problems? The film is basically a dumb action movie about a woman jumping around the world, while the book is supposedly about a medical issue.
Even if the director had saw her book and thought "cool setup, a woman in space", why should that be legally enforceable? Even the author admits there's no copyright claim involved.
Remember this isn't about copyright - its that the original company had a contract for a film "based on" the book, and the company that bought out the first company is arguing that their film is not connected to the book to get out of honouring the contract.
But imagine another studio had made a film with a story so similar to the book; with the exact same title; and screenwritten by the guy who was down to direct the first project. I bet Warner Brothers would have sued them to hell and back, and the inherited contract would have been portrayed as solid as a rock.
Her contract stipulated she gets "based upon" and a percentage of net profits.
Now I know nothing about Hollywood but I do know that if you have a percentage of the net then everyone you meet sees a great big L on your forehead. Almost no movie makes a net profit.
You get a percentage of the gross or you are not taken seriously.
"You get a percentage of the gross or you are not taken seriously."
Correct, but you also have to be taken seriously to get a percentage of the gross. Not everybody who asks for gross points gets them. Generally speaking, you need to be on the A list, or have a killer agent, or have a property that incites a bidding war between studios.
Large shops have huge bull's-eyes painted on them. If they act in bad faith, they will eventually lose reputation and business, spectacularly. This is why top VC's aren't going to do things that tiny VC's might try to get away with.
Also it's worth nothing that going out-of-your way to be fair isn't just "being nice," it selfishly reduces risk of issues, especially in small, highly-connected industries where reputation is the first consideration.
So if we are to take her account at face value, it seems like WB misjudged that word would get around and then lawsuits. (An expensive lesson in hubris.)
Until this eventual case of loss of reputation and business happens, they're laughing all the way to the bank. If it even comes. Lots of horrible and criminal corporations continue to exist and are successful.
To me, that's extractly a move to aviod paying what Tess should have from Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers just took an unspeakable way to gain money, but this could ruin its reputation. Tess should fight for her own right, and stand up for others with similar situations who don't have the backbone to fight.
It seems to me a safer way to sell intellectual property rights would be to place a legal caveat that if the purchasing company is dissolved/acquired for any reason, the contract is null and void and the rights revert back to the original owner.
Sadly, I imagine Tess will be blacklisted from doing future business with the entertainment industry. Hollywood has a history of doing exactly that to those to sue over issues like this.
"Hemingway famously said that the best way for a writer to deal with the
movie business was to arrange a quick meeting at the California state line:
'You throw them your book, they throw you the money. Then you jump
into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.'
(quoted in: Hemingway Lives! by Clancy Sigal)
Good luck to that guy. A lot of lawsuits over movie plots seem to be frivolous and I've supported the film company more than once, but that one seems to be the exception to the rule.
I upvoted you. Actually your parent should remain ungreyed as extremely civil and couched in terms of a personal opinion, which elicited a thoughtful response from you. If you delete your first sentence and downvote complaint we get:
Mandatum 31 minutes ago | link
I don't believe this is HN-relevant.
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LukeB_UK 28 minutes ago | link
Derivative works and licensing are a huge part of the software development industry and open source.
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Agreed. I guess this is akin to workplace environments and retina displays. It's part of our industry, but I still think it's a stretch considering the lawsuit is over a contract between a writer and a studio vs a programmer and company. Similarities admittedly, however I think there's enough more relevant cases to look at than this.
Instead they just screw her, no recognition, no money? How is that the default thought process for a company? This may be vindictive but I hope the court sticks it to Warner Bros in the most painful way possible. Something needs to be done to change the decision making process at that company.