Copyright Trolls Making Anti-Zombie Movies Just to Sue Downloaders?
At The Zombie Rights Campaign we try to be flexible with copyright; after all, we release all our content via Creative Commons licenses. The important thing for us is the Zombie Friendly message.
So seeing a nexus between copyright law abuses and Living Supremacism is particularly disheartening:
Over the years, as rumors of the potential profits spread, more and more companies have got involved in copyright trolling, to the point where opportunities to generate additional revenue from settlements are becoming as important as the profit to be made from traditional sales.
Essentially the situation is this: some, ahem, filmmakers produced a movie called ‘Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection’ (or maybe ‘Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation, see below), which has absolutely no relation to Mr. Romero, Mr. Russo, Mr. Savini or anyone else from the Living Dead series. It’s a pretty crass attempt to cash in on their work, and was made in three weeks for a total budget of $20,000. Now they’re suing 21 alleged infringing downloaders and offering to settle for up to $10,000 a piece.
Which, if you do the math, means they could make almost 1000% pure profit without selling a single ticket or DVD, without getting a single actual viewer – just some people who downloaded what they probably thought was a movie made by someone else. Worst of all, from a legal perspective, there’s NOTHING illegal about downloading ‘Night of the Living Dead’ – it’s in the public domain. You can go get it from the Internet Archive anytime you want, for free, without violating anyone’s rights.
I’d wager some of these 21 individuals tried to do just that, and while I can’t praise the influential, Zombie hating film, the ZRC owns a copy ourselves – it’s historically significant. We won’t condemn you for wanting to watch it.
But be careful to download the right thing, or you might end up paying for the production of an extremely low budget Anti-Zombie film instead, which I’d wager is only SLIGHTLY more painful than watching ‘Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection’
Hat tip to Horror Society for this one.
Update: As a commenter below pointed out, it is not entirely clear who is suing over what film. As in, even the Plaintiffs, who filed the suit, do not appear to know.
A notable apparent screw up on this case is that in the motion to take early discovery, the movie listed is “Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation,” and not “Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection.” This appears to be a normal sloppy screw up made by Trolls who are apparently too busy to keep their shenanigans in order. Picture The sad thing is the court didn’t notice the error when they approved Plaintiff’s motion. It still needs to be corrected and I hope some Doe decides to bring it to the attention of the court.
Indeed, if you look at the graphic they excerpt from the original filing, the PLAINTIFFS are confused as to which movie they own.
However, with enough Googling, it seems to be the Re-Animation one, not the Resurrection one.
Normally this is where I’d apologize for the error, but I can’t bring myself to feel TOO badly when the error in question was introduced into court documents by one of the interested parties. That’s going to be embarrassing later.
Thanks to our astute readership for catching what certain hired gun legal eagles didn’t!
About The Author
There is a gross misrepresentation in this case. The people suing these downloaders are Dimensional Dead, an American company who made Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation, NIOT Night of the Living Dead Resurrection which was made by a British company. So the film Dimensional Dead are suing over is Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation. But in some legal documents it has been mistakenly called Night of the Living Dead Resurrection. The Makers of that movie have NOTHING to do with this debacle so please correct the article.