#MoviePitch #IntellectualProperty #CopyrightLaw #Crediting
Have you ever had a great idea for a movie and wondered what would stop a company from taking that idea and not giving you credit? It’s a common concern for many aspiring filmmakers and writers. Let’s dive into the world of intellectual property, copyright law, and the importance of protecting your creative ideas.
Understanding Intellectual Property
When you pitch a movie idea to a company, you are essentially sharing your intellectual property with them. Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, names, and images used in commerce. In the case of a movie pitch, your idea would fall under the category of literary and artistic works.
Protecting Your Ideas
So, what stops a company from taking your movie pitch and not crediting you? It all comes down to protecting your ideas through the appropriate legal channels. Here’s how you can safeguard your creative concepts:
1. Copyright Registration: Registering your movie pitch with the U.S. Copyright Office provides you with legal evidence of ownership and a public record of your copyright. This registration is essential if you ever need to take legal action against someone who infringes on your rights.
2. Non-Disclosure Agreements: Before you pitch your movie idea to a company, consider having them sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). An NDA is a legal contract that prevents the receiving party from disclosing your confidential information to others. This can help protect your idea from being shared or used without your permission.
3. Pitching to Reputable Companies: When pitching your movie idea, it’s crucial to research and approach reputable and trustworthy companies. Established production companies and studios have a reputation to uphold and are less likely to engage in unethical practices.
4. Document Everything: Keep detailed records of your movie pitch, including emails, correspondence, and any documentation related to your idea. This can serve as evidence in the event that your idea is used without your consent.
Enforcing Your Rights
If a company takes your movie pitch and uses it without crediting you, there are legal avenues you can pursue to enforce your rights:
1. Copyright Infringement Lawsuit: If you have registered your movie pitch with the U.S. Copyright Office and can prove that the company used your idea without permission, you may file a copyright infringement lawsuit to seek damages and enforce your ownership rights.
2. Consult with a Legal Professional: Consulting with a qualified intellectual property attorney can provide you with expert guidance and representation in matters of copyright infringement. They can help you navigate the legal process and advocate for your rights.
Understanding the Risks
While there are legal protections in place to safeguard your movie pitch, it’s important to be aware of the inherent risks involved in sharing creative ideas. Here are some potential risks to consider:
1. Limited Protection: Ideas themselves are not generally protected by copyright law. It’s the expression of those ideas in a tangible form (such as a script or treatment) that is safeguarded. This means that if the company uses a similar idea but in a different form, it may not constitute copyright infringement.
2. Public Domain: If your movie pitch is based on a public domain story or concept, it may limit your ability to claim exclusive ownership. Public domain works are not protected by copyright and can be freely used by anyone.
3. Trade Secrets: Not all information shared during a movie pitch may be protected by copyright. If your idea contains proprietary or confidential details that provide a competitive advantage, you may need to seek protection through trade secret laws.
Ultimately, pitching a movie idea to a company involves a level of trust and risk. By understanding the legal protections available and taking proactive steps to safeguard your intellectual property, you can confidently share your creative visions while minimizing the potential for exploitation.
In conclusion, the fear of a company taking your movie idea and not crediting you is a valid concern, but there are measures you can take to protect your creative concepts. From copyright registration to non-disclosure agreements and enforcing your rights through legal action, it’s essential to be informed and proactive in safeguarding your intellectual property. By understanding the risks and seeking legal guidance when needed, you can navigate the world of movie pitching with confidence and peace of mind.
Nothing. Happens all the time. It’s called twin films. Armageddon and deep impact. A bugs life and ants. The illusionist and the prestige. Etc
As soon as you record an idea, for example by writing down the outline of a story, it’s protected by copyright. As long as the work is original, copyright protection is automatic. Copyright ensures works cannot be reproduced or used without your permission. This means you can profit from your creation.
The point is to have a copy of the story dated so they can’t copy it and then claim an earlier copyright. You can use a copyright service to help. Them filching ideas from it is more of a problem but it’s not impossible to prove prior.
Ideas are worthless. It is all in the execution.
Sure, someone can “steal” your idea. But the final result will be nothing like what you envisioned.
Nothing, but bear in mind that ideas are basically a dime a dozen. Ideas are cheap. Any good writer can take a bad idea and turn it into a good story. And a bad writer can take a great idea and make it a shit story. Everything is in the execution.
Any original work of art or writing you create is automatically covered by copyright as soon as you create it. You don’t have to register it, but that helps prove ownership and when it was created. The creator would have to sue and the burden of proof is on them to prove that the company got the idea from them and couldn’t have gotten it somewhere else first.
It happens all the time, and writers and movie studios have been sued by fans who claimed (sometimes rightly, sometimes falsely) to have sent them that idea or something close enough and now demand a royalty.
For this exact reason, many creators have a standing policy that they simply refuse to open any fan suggestions for stories, characters, etc. so that they don’t get accused of stealing them later.
For example, writer JMS has a social media policy that sending any fan suggestions, even obvious jokes and sarcasm, will get you permanently banned and blocked because this has happened to him before.
If you can prove you came up with the idea and that they stole from you, and in your example they did, you can sue and get royalties or get movie taken diwn
Former TV writer here. Had an Adult Swim TV deal. When I was pitching between 2008-2018 I usually signed an agreement acknowledging the general meeting/pitch. Safe guarded both parties involved from “you stole my idea!”. I signed those with Adult Swim, Disney and Comedy Central, but that may not be practice everywhere. But I usually also had documents with my pitches written down in the form of outlines, show bibles or decks. Those had dates attached. At the end of the day, nothing stops nefarious people with desperate intentions to steal ideas especially if they can find legal loop holes but for the most part the serious studios don’t play around with that because it only takes one lawsuit to bring them down.
Copyright law and someone seasoned in the business knows to cover their tracks. However it’s not a perfect system. You can make sure you have solid proof of when exactly you wrote something down that’s more than a piece of paper with a date. You can also keep track of pitch meetings or even go a step further and record them though that’s very rare because it shows bad faith and no studio wants people to know what goes on in their meetings.
But there’s no recourse for when an idea is stolen but changed just enough to be legally unimpeachable, and so it happens all the time. Ideas are stolen, sometimes altered and sometimes not because even if you’re right it’s hard to win any case against a huge studio who can stall enough until you run out of money. So really the only thing that somewhat controls this is the fact that Hollywood is a small circle, everyone knows each other, and as a production company you can’t live solely off of stolen ideas because everyone will know you’re doing it and no one will work with you. So it happens, everyone’s doing it a little, but few are doing it a lot.
First off, IP law is both simple and complicated. It’s simple in the sense that there’s some bare-bones tests that can be put against a case. It’s complicated because at the end of the day it’s really up to a judge to decide if there’s a violation or not.
Movie scripts, like all works of fiction, are automatically under copyright upon creation. So you are protected there. If you pitch a movie to a studio, hand them your screenplay, and then they use said screenplay without crediting you, they’re 100% violating copyright and you could easily and successfully sue them, the *only* hurdle is being able to prove you hold the copyright.
However, ideas can’t be put under copyright, only the *expression*.
If you come up with an idea about school kids who go to a magic school and fight monsters, they can show you the door and turn around and make that movie. That’s just an idea with not enough specific details.
If you write a script about Donny Warlock of Columbus, Ohio whose parents died in a car wreck and he has a sea lion as a familiar, and then they turn around and make a movie about a kid called Donny Warlock of Columbus Ohio whose parents died in a car wreck and he has a sea lion as a familiar, you could claim copyright.
Where it gets murky is it basically turns into a judge’s decision whether or not a “reasonable person” would be confused. If the studio made a movie about ***Danny*** Warlock of Columbus with parents who died in a crash and a sea lion…probably. If it’s Danny but with a seal instead of a sea lion…maybe. If he’s Danny Magicman from Trenton, NJ, and his parents are alive…probably not. I’m using a simple example–in reality, it would be more about the plot beats than the biography–but you get the idea.
Wait shouldn’t *you* know?
Anyhow did you write anything we might know or had something (allegedly) stolen from a pitch meeting?
I imagine you had to sign some NDAs but cmon…
Large corporations usually have an “unsolicited idea submission policy”, which means they explicitly expressed they don’t want your idea, if you sent it anyway, you no longer own it and cannot sue the company for infringement.
Ideas aren’t protectable, so they can absolutely steal it.
However an idea pitch itself isn’t worth much and from the other side, lawsuits are a nuisance. So most companies won’t consider pitches that don’t come in through agencies.
Deep Space 9 looks suspiciously similar to the the plot ‘bible’ of Babylon 5 JMS sent to Paramount.
Make a digital copy of your idea with your name on it and make sure you have a screencapture of the date and time. Take a photo of yourself with the idea and get a video of you reading it aloud, making sure you have the current date and time in the background.
Make a dozen saves of that screencapture and store them on different USB drives
Wait a few months then take it to the producers.
If they take the idea, you have proof
I work in gameshow land, and people tend not to have such meetings for exactly that reason. If the company has something similar under development already they’d open themselves up to lawsuits unless that can prove they never heard the pitch / read the email.
Anyone else used to listen to a podcast I think was called Black Table Reads or something like that? They used proper actors to perform the materia/scripts which had been rejected by studios. Some of those stories were fucking brilliant.
I believe Carrie Fisher used to fix scripts but she stopped because of exactly this situation. They would tell her that they’re not using her ideas and then do it anyway.
Good luck getting them to listen to your idea at all… studios don’t care about ideas, they want packaged scripts with names, details, and, preferably, attached investors!
You just watched Big Fat Liar, didn’t you?
Firstly, ideas are cheap and easy. Everyone has them all the time and if you don’t like it, don’t worry because another one will come shortly after. Good ideas aren’t that rare. The hard bit of making movies isn’t coming up with an idea. You’ve got to get a screenplay done first, and that’s much harder than an idea. Stealing ideas can happen, but as that’s not the hard or expensive part of movie making, it’s exceedingly unlikely. The risk is far, far too high.
Secondly, if you pitch an idea, you should have some sort of contract in place and proof of your idea, so if they do use it without permission, you get paid. This is standard copyright law which is in place to protect ideas like this.
Thirdly, are you sure your idea is that original? As a games publisher, we don’t even look at ideas sent in unsolicited as they might be the same as something we already planned. It’s not unusual for people to believe they’ve been ripped off when in fact they came up with something someone else did.
“Coming to America” was a stolen pitch, and once it went to court, they had to pay the writer $150K
In addition to everything everyone here has said, another thing I’ve heard said is that it’s way easier, cheaper, and safer for any legitimate studio to just BUY your pitch/idea/script if they’re interested in your idea, even if they have zero intention of using any part of your actual script. Why would any reputable big company even risk the possibility of a lawsuit and bad press (which is probably scarier to them than any monetary damages from the lawsuit) if they can just give any hungry starving screenwriter 50-100k and be done with it? Movie studios have tons of scripts in their back pocket that never ever get made. Those scripts come from these situations where they hear a pitch and are interested in it, throw that person a little money just so they can claim the idea even if 90% of these buyouts turn out to never be made into a movie.
In the movie “Big” Josh goes to a toy product meeting and torpedoes a new transformer toy by just asking “couldn’t the robots turn into bugs” and everyone is amazed and blown away and he gets a promotion and a raise and a huge office. “Big” is not a documentary.
(Paul Davenport is the original Frank Grimes.)
Although unsuccessful with having my pitches produced, I registered the draft/synopsis with the WGA, and was very discerning about which networks/production companies with whom I took meetings. It is also important to note that IP and copyright protection is only as effective as your ability to hire lawyers if you go to litigation. I once had a disagreement with Disney, and realized they had an army of IP lawyers on their side of the argument, so I settled…
Had a teacher in high school who wrote a book and submitted it to a major studio. They rejected it. A few years later it became one of the top grossing movies when it was released. Teacher sued the studio for $140 mill. Iirc he settled out of court, but I don’t know for how much. I do know that he was certainly the wealthiest teacher at our school.
So here’s my idea for a movie. We start with the protagonist. They get a call to action which they reject but circumstances force them into it. There’s a little fight as they cross the threshold into the new scenario but fortunately a mentor figure comes to rescue them and empower them…
Oh, there’s also a plucky sidekick.
If you make any movie similar to my idea then I will sure…
Ideas are cheap. Nobody wants to pay a lot for your idea or your pitch. Develop it a little then chat.
Studios seem to have an easier time getting away with theft of IP that wasn’t presented to them due to the contracts that are put in place for that reason.
Nothing unless you protect yourself. On a smaller scale it’s why now if you’re in SAG and you’re at an audition and they ask you to Ad Lib they have to pay you and give you a writers credit. A bunch of actors would go in, tell a joke they made up, miss out on the job and then 3 months later see the joke they invented get said on TV by Chris Pratt
An idea is not a treatment, and only a treatment can be copyrighted. IP law from The Copyright Handbook: [What Every Writer Needs to Know.](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Copyright-Handbook-Every-Writer-Needs/dp/1413327834/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2NGU1YOP7D413&keywords=the+copyright+book&qid=1703868336&sprefix=the+copyright+book%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-4)
Nothing really. General ideas for a movie aren’t generally legally protected. An actual script could be copyright protected, but if they change it enough it’s just another in a long line of “twin movies.”
Look at all the movies which are pretty much the same idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films
Or even the entire catalog of Asylum studios. General ideas and plots aren’t protected.
No studio or production company would risk their name/brand over an unproven movie or show.
The movie can flop for all we know and the company is on the hook for legal obligations over a movie that flopped
There’s a lot of great answers here but I also wanted to touch on an aspect that I haven’t seen mentioned: sometimes the ideas do get stolen because the ideas are just stupid and barely an idea.
As others have said, ideas are a dime a dozen. I didn’t work for a movie producer but I did used to work for a company which made products that people frequently submitted ideas for. We’d get stuff mailed to us, emailed, and I even sat in on a good number of in-person meetings. Some ideas were great – a person would have a very thorough, unique plan with lots of work put into it with drawings and written stuff, etc. That’s the kind of thing you pay for if you like it because it’s so well-crafted. That was only some of the ideas though.
Other times, the idea was basically “you should do this obvious thing, but pay me for it”. I once took an in-person meeting with a guy who over the course of 30 minutes or so essentially pitched “you should make stuff using zombies because zombies are popular, here’s some drawing of some zombie stuff” and it was like, zombie playing cards or whatever. That was dumb. Funny enough we were actually in development at that time on some zombie stuff, and while his ideas weren’t bad they were just so basic that it was like, “why would we pay you for this?” I’m sure he saw our zombie stuff later and swore to the heavens that we owed him money but as far as I know nothing ever came of it.
Another guy pitched us a board game about two alien races that would frequently come together to settle disputes by playing this game where they would take to teams of whatever size, meet at a rectangular quarnax plain, and each team would try to get the zylax sphere into the xorgon ring to score zipzop points, or something. It was basketball. He was pitching us basketball and wanted us to pay him for the idea.
Obviously we could’ve made a basketball game and somehow alien themed it without owing him a dime had we wanted to. I imagine that’s how a lot of movie studios are too.