Dodgeball: So Unoriginal Anyone Could Have Written It
Jacob Sullum | February 23, 2007, 12:33pm
At first, it seemed quite plausible to me that Rawson Marshall Thurber, who wrote and directed the 2004 Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn comedy Dodgeball, stole ideas for the movie from a screenplay co-written by a struggling actor named David Price, who charges Thurber with violating his copyright. The idea of adults playing dodgeball as a spectator sport just seemed too weird to have been independently conceived by two different people around the same time. But then I learned that the spectator sport, which I had thought when I saw the movie was an entirely fanciful invention, actually exists. In fact, David Price's screenplay was based (very loosely) on his own experiences playing it.
So the basic idea is not unique. Still, some of the similarities between Price's screenplay and Thurber's are pretty striking, as U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin decided when she allowed Price's lawsuit to proceed. Part of Thurber's defense, The New York Times reports, is that "any similarities between the two scripts occurred because both relied on formulaic plot elements." Does every athletic underdog movie feature a fat misfit named Gordon and a coach in a wheelchair who dies in a bizarre accident and comes back as a ghost to offer advice?
Jacob Sullum | February 23, 2007, 2:50pm | #
SxCx: I will be the first to admit I'm not very interested in sports and don't know much about them. But as you can see if you read my post carefully, what surprised me was not the existence of dodgeball--which I, like pretty much everyone my age (I assume) played in gym class and during recess as a kid--but the fact that it was a quasi-professional spectator sport played by adults. I thought that part was a joke, on the order of professional tag.
Stephen Macklin: My post was not meant to elucidate my position on intellectual property rights, let alone
Reason's official position, which does not exist. As Carrick notes, libertarians differ on this subject. I myself tend to be skeptical of intellectual property. I am troubled by, among other things, the tendency of I.P. defenders to shift back and forth between moral and pragmatic defenses, the way intellectual property rights interfere with physical property rights, and the arbitrariness of details such as the length of copyright terms and the kinds of intellectual creations than can be copyrighted or patented. As for your hypotheticals:
A. Stealing someone else's movie idea(s), like plagiarism generally, is unethical, but that does not mean it should be illegal.
B. I am agnostic on the ethics of downloading an unauthorized copy of a movie, which, in the absence of a contract barring unauthorized use, hinges on the question of whether I.P. has the same moral status as physical property.
C. Companies have a right to use whatever DRM technology they see fit, although they should be prepared for a backlash from customers who can no longer use music and video products in ways to which they have become accustomed. If it's done right, DRM might be a workable substitute for the protections afforded by copyright law.
But I was not trying to raise any of these issues by commenting on the
Dodgeball lawsuit. I just thought it was a funny story, and I wondered how plausible Thurber's defense was.
