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Torts Report

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Submitted By petershair87
Words 553
Pages 3
Peter Lightfoot
BMGT 380
REPORT
A. Facts presented in the article: Time Warner Inc. won a temporary court order blocking a small production company , Global Asylum Inc., from releasing a straight-to-DVD film titled "Age of the Hobbits" four days before the theatrical release of Warner Bros. Pictures' $200 million movie "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” In early November, Warner Bros., along with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and Saul Zaentz Co., which own the movie rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's novels "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," sued Asylum for trademark infringement and false advertising, among other complaints. Global Asylum argued that the hobbits referred to in their film were a human sub-species with the Latin name Homo Floresiensis that scientists had nicknamed hobbits. The court found, however, that Asylum's argument didn't hold up, since the subspecies was named with Tolkien's characters in mind. The company was ordered Monday by a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles to refrain from advertising, selling or distributing "Age of the Hobbits."
B. Authors’ point of view on the subject matter covered in the article: The ruling casts a spotlight on "mockbusters" or knockoff films that are typically distributed as straight-to-home-videos released to coincide with the major releases they mimic. Such movies have become a cottage industry among a handful of production houses looking to catch the crumbs of the entertainment giants' marketing campaigns. The practice has irritated major movie studios eager to protect their products, particularly in an era in which the movie going market is increasingly splintered by home-entertainment options such as streaming websites and video-on-demand cable channels. In its own statement, Warner Bros. accused Asylum of seeking to "create confusion in the marketplace" in order to piggyback on the studio's costly marketing efforts. To help convince the court those potential moviegoers would be confused by the films, Warner Bros. commissioned Nielsen National Research Group to conduct a market survey that showed people tended to believe "Age of the Hobbits" had been made by the same company that produced the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy. Asylum said Monday that at the next court date, in January, it would present its own market-research study to dispute the notion that anyone would confuse the two movies. This isn't the first time Asylum has faced pushback from a Hollywood studio. Before releasing "Battleship" earlier this year, Comcast Corp.'s Universal Pictures sued the company over its film "American Battleships." The companies settled.
C. Your own point of view on the subject matter and suggestions: Time Warner Inc. is taking the necessary steps to protect their intellectual property. Global Asylum Inc. is producing unoriginal film ideas with the goal of making money by deceiving movie patrons with similarly titled and plotted movies to their major studio counterparts. Then Global Asylum is attempting to legitimize their products by abusing the U.S. legal system with insubstantial claims of originality with the intent of bypassing intellectual property laws. Global Asylums products are meant to be changed just enough to prevent a lawsuit while maximizing similarities to major motion pictures they are mimicking. Their business defrauds the customer, undermines copyrights held by major movie studios, and compromises the integrity of the studios and their products.

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