Deleted Screenplay Fails To Make Money

mytrip writes to mention the confusing case of screenwriter Nicholas Boyd, who tried to strike it rich by suing SBC, and got more than he bargained for. When an SBC technician accidentally deleted the aspiring screenwriter's work, he brought a lawsuit against the company claiming that a million dollar deal was in the works. Reality disagrees somewhat with his assertions. From the article: "The jury apparently didn't believe the German witness' testimony that a $2.7 million deal was in the works. Jurors found that Boyd could recover out-of-pocket damages of only $60,000 and said that he was responsible for 55 percent of the fault resulting in the deletion of the screenplays ... Both SBC and Boyd appealed. The California state appeals court (second district) eliminated the punitive damages, upheld the compensatory damages--but said Boyd must pay for SBC's legal fees for the appeal, which could easily be in the range of his $27,000 compensatory damages award."

Comments

German witness?

[SteeldrivingJon]

Was it by chance Uwe Boll?

Re:No Brainer

[im_thatoneguy]

It actually does say in the article that he did eventually get a forensic recovery of the data. But he didn't set aside the hard drive and the files were overwritten by Napster and other data.

Does this mean that the entertainment industry can say that it lost another $2.7m to napster?

i've already backed up my screenplay

[circletimessquare]

i've already backed up my screenplay on the intarweb using a patented methodology i call "astroturf steganography":

1. i broke my screenplay up into paragraph fragments

2. i used a script to comment spam these fragments into random blogs with a unique identifying string, namely "I'm making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NY [griefmovie.com]"

3. when i want to recover, i simply do a google search on "I'm making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NY [griefmovie.com]"

voila: instant backup ;-)

oops... i've just given my script away for free to anyone who reads this comment

dang

well, maybe i can sue you under DRM for breaching my cryptographic techniques to access copyrighted material

for reading this comment, you owe me $3,500

awesome!