TheAndrewBrown
So his claim is just that they copied the “spy thriller” tone of his book? I did a single PowerPoint slide on Tetris last year and got a pretty similar vibe from the Wikipedia page, so I don’t think it’s impossible they came up with that independently. Ultimately I think it’ll be difficult to prove unless there are fictional scenes in both that are fairly similar. Anything that actually happened that’s similar he couldn’t prove they got from his book. All this to say it’s definitely not impossible they were inspired by his book, I imagine stuff like that happens all the time. I’m just not sure he will be able to prove that enough to win.
He submitted the book to the Tetris Company, but Apple is who he’s suing. Also, it’s fairly common for large companies to receive unsolicited materials and reject them without reviewing them in order to protect themselves from lawsuits like this.
But yeah, if any evidence comes up in discovery, that would change things.
Some updates here. The Subscribed feed seems to work more consistently, but not always. I just opened up the app (which defaults to All) and it worked but then I refreshed the feed and it said No posts again.
What makes you suspect the people they hired to provide first-hand accounts wouldn’t have done so? They wouldn’t even need to prove that they did, just the fact they had a source they could’ve gotten the information from would be sufficient, as long as the sources don’t testify that they explicitly didn’t give them that information.
And like I said, the story reads like that without much fluff. He may have been the first one to sell a book written like that but it’s not a huge leap at all. I got the same vibe just from reading facts on Wikipedia.
I’m not sure what your last paragraph means. The author can prove he sent the book to the Tetris Company but I find it unlikely he currently has any evidence that Apple read the book and used it in the screenplay. Tetris could’ve easily immediately rejected the book without reading it because they already planned to sell the rights to someone, in fact that’s very common with large companies, specifically to protect themselves from lawsuits like this.
It might get settled, but that would only be because Apple wouldn’t want the press or there’s evidence that hasn’t been revealed yet.
It’s not like the strategically interviewed people they think could give them the anecdotes that were already in the book, the two people that are central to the story (including the person Taron Egerton plays) helped in the screenwriting process. The movie (and I assume the book) are literally about them. They are fully allowed to give out anecdotes for a multiple projects. It’s their life, they can tell as many people as they want.
Sure it’s possible Apple did that, but it’s not about what’s possible, it’s about what you have evidence to prove. It’s also possible this is someone looking to get 15 minutes of fame or hoping they’ll not care much and just settle (which is possible). Or maybe they’re just bitter that they had a good idea but someone else had the same good idea and made way more money off of it. All of those possibilities have equal amounts of evidence supporting them.
I think this is a great move until we have something rock solid to prevent this. There are tons of image hosting sites you can use (most of which have the resources to already try to prevent this stuff) so it shouldn’t really cause much inconvenience.
