Craig Hill
KC Hill
Paladin
Oracle of DelphiPirates Of The Caribbean Lawsuit
July 18th 2006 08:10
www.wikipedia.com
The recent release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest has got everyone talking. A little about the costumes, a little about Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom but mostly about how disappointing the sequel is compared to the original.
And yet despite all the negative reviews and criticisms, people everywhere are blindly lining up at the cinemas to watch it. In its opening weekend alone, the movie raked in US$135.6 million. And that was just in the US. The original managed to gross US$653 million at the box office worldwide. Makes me wish I were the mastermind behind it all.
But nope, Jerry Bruckheimer, Walt Disney and Buena Vista International got to it first. Or did they?
A screenwriter known as Royce Matthew has recently filed a lawsuit against the creators and producers for allegedly copying characters and images he claims he created in an earlier work.
Matthew says that in the 1980’s he created drawings and storyboards for a fictional movie about pirates. He claims that certain depictions such as the Black Pearl Pirate Ship are copyrighted and thus only he has the rights to those images. Further, the screenwriter alleges that his ideas were previously pitched to Hollywood producers.
What Matthew wants is an injunction by order of the court, to prevent any further breaches of copyright. If successful, this may mean that particular scenes from the movie could be edited or even that the movie could be pulled from the cinemas.
*The image used in this post is a movie poster and is likely to be a copyrighted image. It is believed that use of this image in low resolution format, for the purposes of review and commentary regarding the film qualifies as fair dealing under Australian copyright laws.
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Comment by The Pianist
Comment by Bunbury
Sounds like that Dan Brown thing!!
Comment by Legally Brunette
My Wedding
Bunbury, lucky for me, everything popular DOES have a lawsuit surrounding it, otherwise I'd have nothing to write about everyday