On the latest This Week in Tech, guest panelist and sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle has an interesting anecdote about his involvement with a copyright squabble between Fox and Universal in the 1970s concerning Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. As noted on Wikipedia:
Battlestar Galactica was finally produced in the wake of the success of the 1977 film Star Wars. In fact, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (the studio behind Battlestar Galactica) for copyright infringement, claiming that it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from the 1972 film Silent Running (notably the robot “drones”) and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1940s.
Pournelle says [go to about 1:15:45 of the TWiT episode] that after Universal was sued by Fox, he was paid $20,000 by Universal to help show that BG was not too similar to Star Wars. Pournelle says that to write a brief showing there was no plagiarism. He says,
I looked at it, and said, why, that’s easy. If you ask me which is the better movie, then no question, Star Wars is the better one. But if you ask me which is the most original, there ain’t an original frame in either one of ‘em! They’re both derivative from fiction that was published centuries ago–for instance the male-pair bonding between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker was echoed in Battlestar Galactica–I said, yeah, and they both got it from Homer, didn’t they?
See also Battlestar Galactica Dubbed “Too Expensive” and “Star Wars Ripoff”; The Top Five Most Ridiculous Legal Disputes Involving Lucasfilm, the latter of which lists the #1 most ridculous lawsuit as follows: “Star Wars blatantly rips off Universal’s Silent Running. Universal’s Battlestar Galactica overtly steals from Star Wars. No one acknowledges that every sci-fi movie is a variant of other sci-fi movies. Lawsuits are filed.”
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And you’re STILL a state-franchised hypocrite, “attorney.”
@yomamma:
You mean the same way a battlefield surgeon is? Face it: sometimes you got to make a deal with the devil to protect people from him.
*sarcasm* I, too, am a hypocrite like Kinsella, since although I favor private roads, I use public roads to get where I need to go.
I am also a hypocrite like Kinsella, since although I am against all forms of taxation, I pay my taxes every year.
I, too, am a hypocrite like Kinsella, since although I favor uncoerced, commodity money, all of my daily transactions are made in government issued fiat “dollars”.
No, I am Spartacus.
I’m a Mac.
Silent Running was sentimental crap. The robots, though, were terrific.
if its called sci-fi…isnt much science a given…so any furtherance of science would have to be somewhat similar to other science within fiction.
were there spaceborne fighters in movies before starwars?? lazer shooting ufo type things?
wasnt the force absent BG but replaced somewhat by a polythiestic legend of finding earth again??
sounds thematicaly quite different to me.
bullshit fake article probobly.
You could just as well say that any movie that features, or even mentions, robots is plagiarized from “R.U.R.” (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1921 play by Karel ÄŒapek. It introduced the term “robot”. I’m sure ÄŒapek’s heirs would be much interested in the income boost.
I’m Linux.
But seriously, I remember a TV show right after StarWars really took off, about an old-west trainee gunfighter “for good”, training under an old master, using something very much like …. well, remember Dustin Hoffman having to get “snake eyes” and having his gunfighting skills get so much better? Same thing.
Anyway, there is SO MUCH cross polenation in movies, stories and literature, that the extents of copyright as presently being enforced are insane.
spartacus is mine. you owe me.
As a direct descendant of Lentulus Batiates, owner of the Thracian slave Spartacus, it’s you who owes me, kubrick.
i’m the creative one. i answer to no one. people will pay me, or they’ll speak to my attorneys. spartacus’ words, his sword-movements, and all associated merchandizing are mine. the tunic, the thongs, the sword, the whole slave-look thing.
i, the creative one, will be obeyed.
I AM A big fan of star wars.
kubrick, Stultus Scelestus. . . You are both wrong. I hold legal claim to Spartacus, since I distributed the 1960 film. You will hear from my lawyers shortly.
I read that at junior college George Lucas studied and was strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” which basically says that there is really only one story in literature and all stories are derived from it.
I remember a similar case from many years ago when a lounge pianist sued musical jingle writer Haygood Hardy for plagiarism over a hit record he wrote. As I recall it, the expert witness testifying on behalf of Hardy brought a piano into the courtroom and demonstrated that all Western music is based on nothing but a lot of elaborations on the same 4-chord progression (I-II-V-I) and that nothing that either the plaintiff or the defendant had ever written could be considered in any way original since, as he put it, nothing really innovative in the way of tonal Western music had been composed since the time of Beethoven.
So much for intellectual property in literature and music.
There is so much cross polenation in movies, stories and literature, that the extents of copyright as presently being enforced are insane.
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