Repent, Andrew Niccol
Andrew Niccol is a screenwriter and director best known for scripts with an sf twist--The Truman Show, Gattaca, S1m0ne. He has a new film coming out soon, In Time. It's about a society where time is literally money, and as long as you keep paying, you can be perpetually young, but if you don't keep up payments, you can be terminated. (That's what I get from the trailer, anyway.)
Harlan Ellison is a legendary sf author. He's also legendary as a feisty guy who'll file suit if he believes you're ripping him off. He learned about In Time and has now sued for its similarity to one of his most famous stories ""Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman." "Repent" is about a society where time is strictly regulated and if you're late, time can be taken off your life.
Not having seen the movie (and not having read the story in years), I can't even guess how a court will look at the case. Intellectual property is one of the most fascinating areas of the law because it can be so ambiguous. The concept itself--that ideas can be owned--is so different from what we regularly think of as ownership. If someone steals your car, or burns down your house, that's a very tangible thing, but someone taking your ideas? Telling your stories, singing your songs?
Which leads to the trouble with sf. Speculative fiction writers have envisioned thousands of variations on a dystopian future. In Time isn't even Niccol's first attempt. Any futuristic society that crushes the spirit will be like hundreds of other stories. So even if I thought I was writing something entirely original, how would I know if it wasn't so similar to something else that I might get sued?
BTW, if you come up with something on your own, even if it's very much like something else, that's not a copyright violation. I have no idea if Niccol or anyone else associated with the movie was even aware of Ellison's story, though it's famous enough it'd be hard to miss.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:01 AM
2 Comments:
I read the first paragraph of this post, and immediately thought of Harlan's story.
Maybe I was sublimally affected by the post's title, which I glanced at without comprehension before reading the first paragraph. But I don't think that's it. I think the idea of a society that makes you pay for each minute you want to live is a sufficiently specific (and non-obvious) concept and the derivation was pretty clear.
But for what it's worth, I also tend to think that Outland was stolen from Pournelle's short story "High Justice", and that the dozens of movies and TV shows that have small jelly-like or parasitic aliens that take over human beings, one by one -- including ST:TOS's "Operation Annihilate" -- were all stolen from Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. So maybe I'm just biased in favor of printed sf.
You may be right, but it's a good thing Heinlein wasn't particularly litigious. He might have spent his last few decades doing nothing but suing people.
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