Pandoran Concerned About Protection of Indigenous Innovation

First off, this lawsuit threat is kind of a joke, so if you’re looking for a substantive post on China IPR issues, best to go elsewhere (just for today – please come back another time).

OK, now that all those serious-minded folk are gone, we can have some fun. Just for the record, though, here is the background on this issue:

An amateur Beijing writer alleges Avatar director James Cameron plagiarized his work and said he plans to file a lawsuit, seeking 1 billion yuan in compensation.

“Eighty percent of the plot and the key elements of the story are similar to my 1997 science fiction novel, Tale of the Blue Crows.

Zhou, said he spent more than seven years composing the 1.2-million-word novel, which recounts the epic journey of six astronauts to a distant planet, home to a race of blue skinned beings.

“I wrote in my novel that their space journey took them six years, but in Cameron’s movie, the journey takes them five years, nine months and 22 days,” said Zhou. “I was shocked when I first saw that. It is too close.”

If you’re already LOL, slow down. That was the real stuff. The manufactured laughs are still coming. Obviously that last bit about the length of time of the “space journey” (it can’t be a coincidence!) is a tip off that this guy’s perspective here is slightly skewed.

One last serious point. As a fiction writer and lover of the Sci-fi genre for well over 30 years, I am sympathetic. Every time you write something, it becomes yours in your mind, no matter how derivative it is. And with science fiction, a story about earthlings travelling to another planet to meet up with humanoids is hardly a new idea, even with the genetic manipulation/avatar tech in the movie, which is kind of cool. Not everyone can be an idea man like Dick or Sawyer.

Without further ado, The Daily Mash has a send up of this hapless would-be litigant. I’m just going to cut-and-paste excerpts, it’s hilarious with no comment needed.

Chinese novelist Zhou Shaomou has sensationally claimed that James Cameron’s Avatar has a plot.

Shaomou, whose name means ‘Michael Jackson lyric’ in Mandarin, is suing the director for £97m after stating that Avatar lifted several key story details from his novel Blue People Of The Allegory Mountains.

He said: “My reputation is in tatters now everybody knows I write stuff that could be turned into something like Avatar.

“I’m an absolute joke in the fantasy fiction community, which as you can imagine takes quite some doing.

“I spent seven years writing my 1.2 million word book, only for James Cameron to make a fortune out of it by trimming it to 18 hours, adding loads of brilliant explosions, marketing it really well, having an innate sense of populist tastes and… well… look, that’s not the point.

“Oh, and then there’s the 3D. Have you seen the 3D? Good lord.”

Shaomou claims he first noticed the similarities when the film passed the $1bn mark at the box office, adding: “I suddenly realised there was something very familiar about all that money.”

Entertainment law specialist, Nathan Muir, said: “Shamou doesn’t stand a chance. Any half-decent lawyer will be able to prove that the Avatar storyline is what happens when a maniac rolls around the New Age section of Waterstone’s covered in Blu Tac.”

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: avatar, copyright infringement, IPR, james cameron, science fiction