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Judge Rules Fox Has Copyright Claim To Watchmen
fermion writes "According to the NYT, a judge has decided that Fox owns the copyright to Watchmen, not Warner. Is this an example of copyright law becoming so complex that companies can abuse the court system to prevent competition, or just extreme incompetence by Warner? In the current business environment, either explanation is believable. Yet it is unbelievable that seasoned producers would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a movie that they can't even release. It seems the judge didn't want to bring this to a jury, and maybe daring Warner to appeal, or Fox to settle." The article says that Fox acquired movie rights to the Watchmen story in the late 1980s, but budget disputes and personnel changes have muddied the waters; Wikipedia has a bit more on the "development hell" which has plagued the film project.
I don't know how you can cram that entire graphic novel into a 2-hour movie.
Theres no way to keep 100% of it unchanged and uncut, but that's true of any media conversion. Many people seem to consider the original comic book form to be perfect, many of those people are going to be disappointed with the result no matter how good the movie is of it's own right. Some because they read the comics first, some because of a warped sense of elitism. That doesn't mean the movie is doomed to be worse than the comic books to an unbiased judge. It could be changed for the better.
Fox might hold an exclusive license to the movie rights to the material, but that's a very different question.
If you actually bothered to RTFA carefully, you'd see that they have been ruled to have a copyright interest.
Since you're clearly ignorant on the matter and think "copyright interest" means "copyright" or "exclusive movie rights", try educating yourself instead.
I know it comes as a shock to all you fifteen year olds, but IP law is simpler than "Cory Doctorow says I can give my stuff away and copyright is bad!"
Please help metamoderate.