Prospero Delayed
I just took down the banner ad for my friend’s, Aron and J’s, Kickstarter project. It had been going really well with them making their 3000 dollars with 12 days to spare and they were going into their home stretch when someone another author, DR O’Brian, in Scotland who was doing a Shakespeare/Lovecraft as well and found out about it and decided they were infringing on his project and filed DMCA takedown request with Kickstarter.
This is ridiculous of course. Both the Cthulhu Mythos and the Tempest are public domain but companies like Kickstarter, Youtube and others get very paranoid about copyright issues and will respond to these claims with hardly questions asked.
So Kickstarter put the campaign on hold which has lots of previous donations being revoked as well. This is made even worse that their original plan for the campaign wasn’t just about publishing their comic, Prospero’s Price, it was about marketing it at the Emerald City Comic convention so this was a hit on their schedule in more ways than one.
The one good thing that’s coming from this in a “no such thing as bad publicity” kind of way is they are getting tons of support from everyone so I’m sure things will be all right in the end. But until then they have to make a counterclaim to Kickstarter and jump through lots of other hoops along the way. Not to mention all of the damage control they are going to have to make on their campaign.
Anyway here’s hoping everything goes their way and I’ll have their ad back up when it does.
This self-described “reasonable man” is full of nonsense. First of all a not-yet-created work cannot be infringing because it does not yet exist. Second, Aron & J. are reworking characters and scenarios that are very clearly public domain – the “reasonable man” needs to show that Aron & J. are appropriating from ‘his version’, whining that they are also using Shakespeare and Lovecraft is not enough. Third, it is not possible to copyright, trademark, or patent, an idea – and that includes scenarios. Mr. ‘Reasonable Man’ has about as much standing as the makers of “Noah’s Ark (1928)” had to sue the makers of “Noah’s Ark (1995)”, or that either of them had to sue the makers of “Noah’s Ark (1999)”, or that any of them had to sue the makers of “Noah (2012)”, or that any of them had to sue the makers of “Noah (2014)”, or that any of them had to sue the makers of “Noah: And the Last Days (2014)”. Mr. “Reasonable Man” is acting like a jerk.