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So here's the thing: I wrote a zombie comic a while back, published by an established comic-book company. I won't get into details because I plugged it here a couple of times already and that's not the point of this thread. Link here if you want to know more about the book itself.
The comic had some pretty significant deviations from "standard" zombie fare, so it would be pretty easy to spot something derived from the comic, as the basic premise works at such a right angle to traditional zombielicious stuff.
Googling the name today, I discover that some German dude has made a zombie movie with exactly the same name as the comic.
Now, judging from the stills and artwork and my Babelfish translation of the German movie site, this is not a direct rip-off. The qualities that made my book unique seem to be absent from the movie.
On the other hand, it's still a zombie movie with the same name as my zombie comic.
I have absolutely no idea what to do about this.
Messaged the publisher and he's scratching his head too. It's another continent, it's not an overt rip-off, the title was a Severed Heads track title (which I got Tom Ellard's permission to use, in case that's important) so it's not a name I came up with wholesale.
It's entirely possible that this guy is also a Severed Heads fan and a bit dim, so that it never occurred to him to check if anybody else had ever made something with the same title before he plunged into filmmaking; or, as a friend suggests, maybe is so incredibly jerky that he did check and just doesn't care.
And generally speaking, I'm pretty trusting and would normally choose to believe that this is some sort of oversight or mistake or just general ignorance at work, sans malice. And in a way a good thing, because if the movie makes its mark then the name will start generating a lot of interest for my comic.
But.
On the other hand, if somebody wanted to make a movie of the comic, or at least option it (which would be great and has been discussed a couple of times with some people with the ability to maybe Make Things Happen), this would totally fuck that up, because there'd already be "a zombie movie by that name."
My German isn't good enough (or rather, my Babelfish isn't good enough) to really know what the crap is going on with this movie thing.
I don't know if I should write the guy off the cuff and say "Hey, what's the deal? Didn't you maybe run the name of your movie through a search engine before rolling film on this?" But maybe that would be legally disastrous.
The comic's never been copyrighted in the lawyer-and-fees sense, but it's definitely got a long and well-documented history.
So, er.
What do I do? |
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