Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
Harlan Ellison is a friend of mine. If he were here, he would say, "You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to an INFORMED opinion."
"Work-for-hire" or not, Harlan Ellison has separated rights to City of the Edge of Forever. At least, that's his argument. It's not that they can't rebroadcast the episode endlessly; they paid him for that. But they did not pay him to re-use substantial elements of that script in books and now movies. Now, I'm not a lawyer and you're not a lawyer and neither of us have seen the original contracts so neither of us really knows. But Harlan believes he has a case, and win or lose I applaud him for standing up for the rights of authors. He's even suing the WGA because they *won't* stand up for author's rights. Harlan has been a strong supporter of WGA for decades, but on this he feels they are in the wrong.
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I agree about not having enough information to have an "informed" opinon about this particular case. I merely note that traditionally, Hollywood scripts were written as "work-for-hire" with the copyright to said work vesting with the studio, as part of the "work-for-contract" agreement. In most writing, the author maintains the copyright and therefore all ancillary rights associated with it. However, under "work-for-hire" (which is explicitly separated and defined in copyright law) those rights devolve to the copyright holder, which is not the author. That is why, say, programmers don't receive royalties for their coding every time it's used. It's copyrightable, but being hired as "work-for-hire", the original author of the code has signed away all subsequent rights.
If Mr. Ellison has a contract that allows some form of ancillary rights, good luck and God Bless him. If he is just trying to turn over "work-for-hire" rules, I don't think he has a legal leg to stand on. I will watch with interest, because of the potential ramification to the entire concept of "work-for-hire", having been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years....