Friday News: Godzilla v. Dallas Buyers Club, lots of people v. Zuckerberg, Oxford’s Inklings, and a cool book map
Publishing Newscopyright / Facebook / Fantasy / Film / fraud / Goodreads / History / infringement / maps / Oxford / religion / trademark7 Comments
Dallas Buyers Club studio suing Australians faces its own monster lawsuit involving Godzilla – After aggressively pursuing alleged copyright infringers in Australia via internet service providers, the Dallas Buyers Club is now facing a lawsuit from Toho, the Japanese company that owns the rights to Godzilla, for shopping around a film that allegedly uses the iconic movie monster without securing the rights to do so. Oops.
Godzilla owners Toho’s lawsuit, filed in California’s Federal Court, alleged the studio is “making a Godzilla film” using its trademark and images of the infamous giant lizard without permission.
“That anyone would engage in such blatant infringement of another’s intellectual property is wrong enough,” the lawsuit stated.
“That defendants, who are known for zealously protecting their own copyrights, would do so is outrageous in the extreme.” –The Advertiser (Adelaide)
Lawyers circling lawyers in frenzied Facebook ownership flap – So here’s a quick summary of this incredibly strange and strangely compelling story: Guy sues Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that promised him half of Facebook back when Zuckerberg was student at Harvard. Zuckerberg claims the contract Paul Ceglia has is a fake. In the meantime, Ceglia is investigated on criminal charges and disappears into thin air. Zuckerberg sues Ceglia’s lawyers, claiming they knew Ceglia was faking the contract. A court allows the suit to go forward. Now the lawyers are fighting back, and they have a forensics expert who claims the contract is real. Also,
They appealed the decision Monday. Among other things, they said Ceglia passed a lie detector test.
“The trial court mistakenly concluded that ‘allegations that defendant deceived or attempted to deceive the court with fictitious documents may be sufficient to state a cause of action for violation of Judiciary Law § 487,’ even where the defendants themselves are not alleged to have participated in creating such documents and their client admittedly passed a polygraph exam concerning the authenticity of the documents,” one of the firms’ appeals said. The firm of Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman also notes that Ceglia hasn’t even gone to trial on accusations that he forged the document. Milberg’s appeal is here. The appeal from the firm of DLA Piper is here. –Ars Technica
Oxford’s Influential Inklings – It was while writing up this story that my computer crashed last night, so I’m going to rush through the description of this piece about a club of writers, philosophers and other artists and thinkers who met weekly at Oxford and called themselves The Inklings. From this group came the likes of Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers, and the article traces the influence of the Inklings on both Oxford and a number of literary genres including fantasy. The deep devotion to Christianity among the Inklings, as well as the myriad influences of two world wars and other powerful societal changes on Oxford, on the group, and their work, makes this essay a pretty fascinating read.
Everyone knows this about the Inklings: that they expressed their longing for tradition and re-enchantment through the literature of fantasy. The Inklings’ penchant for the fantastic is quintessentially English; folktale, fairy-tale, and fantasy motifs permeate English literature from Beowulf, through The Faerie Queene and The Tempest, to the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge.
In the middle of the 19th century, this national love for the fantastic gave rise to the modern fantasy novel. Immediately Oxford moved into the foreground, as John Ruskin, in his neo-Grimm fable The King of the Golden River (1841, written while he was an Oxford undergraduate), and Lewis Carroll, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865, the quintessential Oxford classic), laid the groundwork for a genre brought to early perfection by the Scotsman George MacDonald, their mutual friend, in his three children’s classics, At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883), and his two fantasies, Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895). A few years later, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones (both Oxford alumni), and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood produced novels, poetry, and paintings with fantastic themes, bathed with a lovely, romantic, neo-medieval light that would deeply influence the artistic maturation of both Lewis and Tolkien.
Fantasy, then, was in Oxford’s blood, and it is no wonder that the major Inklings experimented in so many fantastic subgenres (myth, science fiction, fable, epic fantasy, children’s fantasy, supernatural thriller, and more). They chose to be fantasists for a variety of reasons — or, rather, fantasy seemed to choose them, each one falling in love with the genre in youth (Lewis in Ireland, Tolkien in Birmingham, Williams and Barfield in London) many years before coming to Oxford. Their passion arose, in part, from the sheer excitement of the genre, the intoxication of entering the unknown and fleeing the everyday. –Chronicle of Higher Education
The Most Popular Book Set in Each State — in One Surprising Map – This is kind of cool. A map of each state with its “representative book” — that is, a popular book set in that state — marked on the map. Are these the “most popular books” as the title suggests? I guess that depends on how seriously you take the Goodreads rating system.
Each state’s representative fiction book was chosen based on Goodreads scores for series with over 50,000 ratings. If no book from the state reached that vote threshold, we selected the highest-rated in the closest tier of votes. No parts of series that cannot stand alone were included; in other words, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz qualified while Twilight did not. –Arts.mic
Having seen a couple of maps of that sort before, I think this one did a better job, since I’d heard of the one set in my state. I do think they shouldn’t have used The Stand. Do states really still exist in a post-apocalyptic setting of that sort?
Twilight stood alone just fine.
Lie detector test? Lie detector test? Last I heard those were banned from use as evidence in US+UK courts on the basis of their overwhelming uselessness.
I don’t understand the Zuckerberg thing. By suing to prove the contract is fake and they knew it, isn’t the only defense to prove it’s real? In which case, he promised the guy half of Facebook. It seems to me if my nemesis disappeared into the night, I’d do a happy dance and buy a new Bentley.
@k8899: Polygraph results are not banned in US courts. It’s really a state-by-state, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction-, judge-by-judge decision. The Supreme Court has only ruled that courts *do not have to* admit the results, so some states do not allow them, but other states still do, as long as the parties involved and the judge agree to their admissibility. Law enforcement still use polygraph tests, too, and let’s not forget their popularity among talk show hosts.
@Lostshadows: Speaking of post-apocalyptic, there’s an interesting article right under that map about Earth possibly being due for a solar storm that could leave millions without power for as long as two years. How fitting.
Hahahaha, oh Dallas Buyers Club you crack me up. iiNet, one of our ISPs that is fighting their speculative invoicing is working with. Legal firm here in AU to provide pro-bono assistance to anyone caught up in this. IiNet are also pursuing Dallas Buyers Club to pay all of the legal costs involved in the lawsuit.