intellectual property rights

Joss Whedon, Lionsgate Hit With Copyright Lawsuit Over 'The Cabin in the Woods'

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This article by Austin Siegemund-Broka originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter on 4/14/15. The plaintiff in the case is a self-published author.

The author of a 2006 novel has accused the ‘Avengers’ director and ‘Cabin’ director Drew Goddard of stealing his idea.

With just weeks until his box-office victory lap for Avengers: Age of Ultron, Joss Whedon is now facing a lawsuit accusing him of stealing the idea for the 2012 meta-horror movie The Cabin in the Woods.

Whedon produced and co-wrote the script for Cabin with director Drew Goddard, a writer on Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a fanboy favorite in his own right, with credits that include Netflix’s Daredevil (and reportedly may soon include Sony’s upcoming Spider-Man projects). Whedon and Goddard are named as defendants, along with Lionsgate and Whedon’s Mutant Enemy production company, in the complaint filed Monday in California federal court.

In the complaint, Peter Gallagher (no, not that Peter Gallagher) claims Whedon and Goddard took the idea for The Cabin in the Woods from his 2006 novel The Little White Trip: A Night In the Pines. He’s suing for copyright infringement and wants $10 million in damages.

 

Read the full article, which includes a link to the full legal filing, on The Hollywood Reporter.

 

Protecting Your Copyrights Online

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This post by Susan Spann originally appeared on Writers In The Storm on 3/13/15.

In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi refers to Mos Eisley spaceport as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” and adds, “we must be careful.”

Obi-Wan’s wisdom applies to the Internet too.

Regardless of your publishing path, if you write for publication, you should take steps to protect your copyrighted work against Internet-based infringement.

Today, we take a look at how to do that. While no single post can cover all of the ways to protect your work online, here are some tips on things all authors can do to protect and enforce their copyrights:

Perform Regular Copyright / Infringement Searches. Every author should search the Internet regularly (at least once a month) for: (a) the author’s name, (b) the author’s published titles, and (c) any other words, phrases, or marks which might reveal infringement or illegal copying of the author’s work. For example, my searches include “Susan Spann,” “Shinobi Mystery,” and the titles of each of my published works (as well as “Flask of the Drunken Master” which doesn’t release until July. Using quotation marks around the search terms returns only those results which contain the exact phrase within the quotes.

Internet searches are important even if you also use Google Alerts or another monitoring service. While effective, automated alerts don’t catch all infringement, and can’t be relied upon to screen for all uses of an author’s work on the Internet.

 

Read the full post on Writers In The Storm.