Dan Ackerman, editor in chief of the tech-news website Gizmodo, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Monday accusing Apple , the Tetris Company and others of adapting his book about the landmark video game "Tetris" into a feature film without his permission.
it’s history. it happened. Ackerman didn’t invent the story, unless he’s claiming that’s the case…?
If I write a book about The Prohibition, is Ken Burns going to sue me because he once made a docu-series about it?
No but if you wrote a musical about prohibition, submitted it to apple, but apple rejects it, discourages other producers from picking it up and then apple made a musical about the prohibition, you may have a case. I think the issue is the thematic stylistic interpretation was copied over either intentionally or unintentionally, and the court needs to decide if it’s worth a suit
Style isn’t copyrightable, there has to be more substantive commonalities than just that.
It’ll be up to the courts to decide if there is, of course. I notice that a review of the book quoted Ackerman from it:
Which suggests that the book is partly fictionalized, so it’s possible that there may be identifiable elements lifted from it. We’ll see.