With gratitude to Eric Goldman for drawing my attention to more opportunities to blog about the Twilight franchise, the U.S. District Court in California on January 12 granted a preliminary injunction to Summit Entertainment (the movie studio that produces the Twilight movies) for copyright and trademark infringement in relation to the unauthorized activities of a fan magazine. The decision (Summit Entertainment v Beckett Media, 2010 WL 147958 (C.D. Cal.)) is fairly unremarkable although there’s a few nice comments about the defendant acting outside the scope of an implied license by Summit to use publicity stills made available on its website. So maybe someone could come up with a good copyright exam problem based on this kind of scenario.
In other Twilight court-related news, there is/was an action also in California by a writer claiming that Stephenie Meyer plagiarised an earlier work by the plaintiff in writing the fourth book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn. The action was filed in August last year (based on copyright infringement), but I haven’t been able to track down what’s happened to it since. If anyone knows any further developments, I’d love to hear them. It sounds like this could be a useful example of a discussion of “levels of abstraction” in the copyright infringement context – or just a publicity stunt by a Stephenie Meyer wannabe…