Watchmen: Legal Troubles

I try to keep my posts fairly neutral when it comes to politics and stuff like that. The Other Worlds exists to showcase films, television shows, and books to people who may be unfamiliar with them. Furthermore, there are plenty of other people on the internets who have been putting their two cents in on this subject, and normally, I wouldn't feel like it was my business throwing mine in as well. However, I have a perspective on the whole issue that I have not yet seen in any other entries, so I thought that I would share.

For those of you who don't know, there has been a legal battle regarding the movie rights to Watchmen. 20th Century Fox acquired the film rights the comic book many years ago, but never made the movie. I do not pretend to know why. Maybe they tried and never got a script they liked (unlikely though, because they could have an awful script, and people would still turn up to see it). I'm not sure exactly when Fox got the rights, but it has been at least 15 years. Anyway, Warner Brothers finally made the movie themselves (they likely have some kind of rights to the property, because Warners owns DC Comics, which published Watchmen). And then, with about half a year until the film was to be released, Fox sued Warner Brothers for their copyright interest in the film. A few days ago, this happened: a federal judge ruled for Fox. Fox now has some distribution rights, and will likely use them to earn a shit-ton of money from the movie's box office receipts. Even though they did absolutely no work.

As many of you know, I am currently in law school, and I recently completed my first semester. One concept we learned about was laches. Basically, laches prevents someone with a legitimate interest in something from making a legal claim for that interest if they allow too much time to pass. The example given in my handy dandy legal dictionary goes something like this (certain details have been changed for comic effect):

Let's say someone owns a piece of property. We'll call him Rupert. Along comes a builder. We'll call him Zach. Zach believes that he has the right to construct a building on Rupert's property. Rupert says nothing. Zach completes the building and wants to rent out the space to a group of watch makers. Rupert sues for ownership of the land and demands all revenue from the watch makers. According to my dictionary, there are not one, but TWO reasons why Rupert should shove his claim up his ass. First, he knew of the construction, and waited until it would benefit him, and second, he will benefit at Zach's expense. Keep in mind that I am just a lowly first year law student, and there is likely much more at play, but this laches arguments seems pretty solid to me.



Up next: Enter Sandman...