@derekmetaltron - dude, I’m not sure if you intended to, but A) you came off really rude and aggressive and B) are incorrect.
Just from a quick google search (literally 30 seconds or less) : " Perhaps the most famous case, however, is Dmitri Yemets’ Tanya Grotter book series, a “cultural response” to Harry Potter, which provoked a lawsuit from J. K. Rowling."
2
. Salinger v. Colting, 607 F.3d 68 (2d Cir. 2010)
“This case probably presents the closest analogue to run-of-the-mill fan fiction. A Swedish author wrote an unauthorized sequel to the Catcher in the Rye, called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which told the story of what happened to Holden Caulfield decades after the events in the original Salinger novel. The sequel had its own words and plot, but it borrowed the main characters from the original. This case illustrates why a great deal of fan fiction will not qualify for the fair use defense in most courts: A fair use is expected to criticize, analyze or parody the original work. The sequel author here wished to glory in and join the work of Salinger, not to critique it. This distinction caused the Court to find that the sequel was not a fair use”
- Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001)
"We have the notoriously litigious estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, to thank for an excellent lesson about the difference between parody and homage. Mitchell’s estate brought a copyright infringement action against the author and publisher of The Wind Done Gone. Like the Catcher in the Rye sequel, The Wind Done Gone borrowed characters and the semi-fictional universe from Gone with the Wind, and mixed them up into a new story, in which the same events are related through the eyes of one of Scarlett O’Hara’s enslaved women. But here, the Court ruled that it was a fair use. The critical difference was the purpose of The Wind Done Gone, which was to shift the narrative perspective of the original in order to create a savage rebuke of the original’s assumptions about race. This was quintessential fair use.
Compare that with the very different outcome of another lawsuit brought by the Mitchell estate, this one against the producers of a musical stage version of Gone with the Wind called Scarlett Fever. Although Scarlett Fever was different from the original, including because it added jokes and musical numbers, it told the story from the same basic perspective and was a tribute to Mitchell’s work, not a critique of it."
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Anderson v. Stallone, 1989 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11109 (C.D. Cal. 1989)
“Say you draft a fan fiction story with the characters from your favorite television show, and then you send it to the producer of the show? If the producer then uses parts of your story without permission, who is infringing whom? In this case, a screenwriter saw the first three Rocky movies and decided to propose a fourth one to Sylvester Stallone, in which Rocky fights an East German boxer in the shadow of the Berlin wall. When Stallone’s Rocky IV included an allegedly similar but not identical iron curtain theme (starring Dolph Lundgren as Russian boxer Ivan Drago), the plaintiff sued. The Court held that the plaintiff’s work was an unauthorized derivative of the original Stallone movies, and thus did not deserve copyright protection. Moreover, the Court found that, even if Stallone had copied elements from the plaintiff’s script to create Rocky IV (and there was no evidence he had done that), most of what Stallone would have been copying consisted of Stallone’s own characters as infringed by the plaintiff. Put another way, you can’t infringe something that infringed you first.”
There are plenty more. Here’s a link.
