The Gravity of Legal Technicality

[Chris]

Do you remember Gravity? Flailing cameras? Spinning stars? Shrapnel? Sandra Bullock dancing through Earth’s atmosphere? Yes, that Gravity. Well, did you happen to know that Tess Gerritsen is also the person that birthed that particular entity, originally in novel form?

Did you know that she's currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Warner, the company that made the film? Not terribly unusual for authors in this day and age, but this one's an unusual case with potentially big legal ramifications for authors and the rights they have to actually profiting on their own work.

See, Tess originally signed the rights for Gravity over to New Line. New Line was bought by Warner. Warner went on to make the movie--but paid Tess nothing for it. Why? They say that by buying New Line, they had all of the rights to New Line's acquisitions, with none of the obligations that New Line itself had made to acquire those things. I.E. paying someone like Tess in the event they developed a movie from her work. Tess isn't even arguing their right to develop a movie on her work, she's arguing the fact that they're not paying her.

I wrote a little article on the topic, but I'm genuinely interested in how the literary community's reacting to this, supposing they even realize it's going on. What do you all make of this?

(For additional reading, here's the the author's own blog on the subject - http://www.tessgerritsen.com/gravity-...)

[Jan]

Hi Chris,
I read your article and also Tess Gerritsen's blog post. This is such an important topic for authors to read about. I hope all Book Haven authors take the time to read about it. It is particularly interesting to me because there is interest in buying the rights to make I Call Myself Earth Girl into a movie. Please keep us posted as you follow this topic. Best regards,
Jan