The Pirate Bay
A Swedish court on Friday found Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, the three men that founded the popular bit torrent site The Pirate Bay guilty of aiding in copyright infringement by linking to songs, films, TV shows, audio books, comic books, video games and other similar material. Carl Lundstrom, the man that provided financing for The Pirate Bay, was also convicted.
Each man was sentenced to a year in prison. They were also ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages to Warner Brothers, Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox, Sony BMG and EMI.
The defendants have maintained that they were innocent because they never actually hosted any of the copyrighted material on their servers. They only directed people where to go to get the material in question.
As of now, The Pirate Bay is still up and running. The last I read, most of their servers are no longer still even in Sweden.
New ‘Watchmen’ lawsuit, this time it’s over coffee
Massimo Zanetti, the maker of various crappy grocery store coffees including Chock Ful o’Nuts, is suing Warner Brothers, DC Comics, and the Organic Coffee Cartel over coffee that looks an awful lot like a can of Chock Ful o’Nuts. The coffee, Nite Owl Dark Roast, is being sold online with a percentage of the proceeds going to charity.
Clay Enos, the official still photographer of the Watchmen movie, came up with the idea to sell the coffee. Shortly before the movie was released, he was a guest on the Ron and Fez show where he talked about taking photos for the movie as well as his $100 photo book from the movie.
He also talked about this coffee.
Massimo Zanetti is asking the courts for an injunction against any further sale of the coffee, plus they want a percentage not from the coffee sales, but from the actual movie.
Boycotting 20th Century Fox over ‘Watchmen’ legal dispute
Some people are trying to form a boycott of 20th Century Fox over the studio’s insistence that they still own rights to any motion picture based on the Watchmen graphic novel. A federal judge recently agreed with 20th Century Fox. From the Facebook Free Watchmen group:
20th Century Fox is trying to prohibit the release of Warner Brothers’ upcoming film, Watchmen. Watchmen is one of the highest regarded pieces of work in the comic and literary world. It was on Times 100 best novels of the 20th century.
Scheduled to release next year, Fox is trying claim rights even after sitting back and allowing WB to pour time, money, and talent into. Now, after an abysmal summer for Fox, they are reaching out to try and stamp out another studio’s success.
I propose a boycott of all 20th Century Fox productions in protest of their detestable actions.
I actually think it’s kind of funny the Warner Brothers would make a movie based on a property they don’t have the rights to. With all the lawyers they have at their disposal, they couldn’t figure out that 20th Century Fox still owned the rights to a Watchmen movie?
It would appear that maybe they knew all along.
From
These three filings in particular provide detailed allegations as to how Warner Brothers got into this mess. In a nutshell, Fox claims that it has evidence that Warner Brothers initially relied on an inaccurate chain of title provided by Paramount. Once Warner Brothers was aware of Fox’s documented claims, it nonetheless decided to proceed in a deliberate “business calculation” that it would be more profitable to deal with a court case than clear the rights before making Watchmen.
Warner Brothers royally screwed up. They made the wrong business decision to make a movie they knew they didn’t have iron clad rights to. 20th Century Fox isn’t the villain here.
Judge rules 20th Century Fox owns rights to ‘Watchmen’ movie
A federal judge in Los Angeles has announced that he intends to rule that 20th Century Fox indeed owns a copyright interest in the Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. The movie, directed by Zack Snyder, is based on the DC Comics epic graphic novel of the same name.
Watchmen was published in 12 issues from 1986 and 1987. It was written by acclaimed comic book writer Alan Moore and drawn by artist Dave Gibbons. Most comic book fans believe that it’s the greatest graphic novel ever published.
20th Century Fox’s claim to Watchmen stems from the fact that it purchased the rights to a Watchmen movie in the late 1980’s for producer Lawrence Gordon. 20th Century Fox ultimately declined to make the movie for themselves. Gordon then later shopped the movie around with different movie studios before coming to an agreement with Warner Brothers.
Warner Brothers also owns DC Comics.
The movie is scheduled to be released sometime in March. I’m guessing that Warner Brothers will end up having to pony up a bunch of money to secure the rights from 20th Century Fox.
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