Copyright

Copyrighting is where a person creates there own piece of work such as a book or a song or even a film and then has it copyrighted so that no one else is allowed to use it without there permission. Anyone who uses the idea can be sued by the creator for thousands of pounds.

Depending on what the creator has created the copyrighted item can last an extremely long time. If it’s a literary, dramatic or artistic piece of work copyrights will last for 70 years after the year of the known authors death. If there is more than one author then its 70 years after the last author dies.

If its something such as photographs then they again are copyrighted for 70 years after the photographer dies.

However if it’s a piece of work such as sound recordings, broadcasts, cable programmes or computer generated works the copyrighting lasts for 50 years from the end of the year they were made, released or first broadcast.

Not so long ago the creator of avatar James Camron started being sued by a lot of people who say that they has the idea for avatar first. Take Emil Malak for example he is a restaurateur from Vancouver. He is suing James Cameron and 20^th century fox over the biggest movie in the world to date Avatar. Malak is suing Mr Cameron because as amazing as the film Avatar was it bares to much resemblance to his movies idea “Terra Incognita” which he wrote back in the year 1996. He claims that the characters and the screenplay are his own.

Mr Malak does not imply that James Camron stole his idea but he did have the ideas from “Terra Incognita” in mind when writing Avatar. Therefore he used his idea to get started on the film which Mr Malak should be taking credit for. Malak claims that he came up with the idea when his sons suggested it to him. After giving him the idea he used all his funds and hired a screen writer and a graphic artist to create the movie and its characters.

The similarities between the movie “Tarra Incognita” and “Avatar” are the fact that both films can be found in the premise of humans mining another plant for rare minerals. Also the tree within “Avatar” that keep the collective memories of the people from space is also in the film “Tarra Incognita”. Also the blue characters from the “Avatar” are much like the characters within Malaks story the characters all have yellow eyes, spotted faces, flat noses and braided hair.

I think that yes the similarities are very close between the two story ideas but I do not think that James Camron stole the idea for “Avatar” from Mr Malak there are a lot of ideas in the area about aliens which means some are going to resemble others.

By Lauren McNeaney