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Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse
whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."
Why the hell didn't Fox realise this before?
$$$
So in this case, a piece of work written by a couple of guys who are still alive, which was released not too long ago, and someone paid a lot of money for the rights to make and distribute a movie version of, you feel that this is a poor example of copyright law? I actually think this is an excellent example of the system working properly. If this was a work from 100 years ago, yeah, you'd have a legitimate beef. But copyright law needs to exist in some way. And even under the old system which gave copyright for 35 years, which most /.ers agree with that system, this work would still be covered under those conditions.
No wonder Alan Moore gets so annoyed over what's done to his old works...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So in this case, a piece of work written by a couple of guys who are still alive, which was released not too long ago, and someone paid a lot of money for the rights to make and distribute a movie version of, you feel that this is a poor example of copyright law? I actually think this is an excellent example of the system working properly. If this was a work from 100 years ago, yeah, you'd have a legitimate beef. But copyright law needs to exist in some way.
Put into another way, it is a company A (in this case Fox) trying to prevent company B (in this case Warner) from releasing a piece of work (in this case a movie), on the ground that company A still has some rights secured for the corresponding IP.
I actually think this is a wonderful example of how the system is broken. If this was a company releasing a movie without paying the authors, yeah, you'd have a legitimate beef.
But in this case, the authors will get paid anyway from company B. Its just an infight between company A and B with company A trying to get a piece of the lucrative cake, even if it's B who put the biggest part of the effort into producing the movie.
Copyright law exist to protect the original author from abuses, so that the result of their hard working and sweating aren't used without proper compensation.
This isn't the case.
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