10.07.2006

Trademark News

Paramount Submits Complaint
Film over World Trade Center claimed to infringe Copyright

The final-year Yale student Chris Moukarbel had made a 12-minute film concerning the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The budget was tiny but its influence turned out to be great. The American film studio Paramount perceived the short film to be a potential threat to the success of its own film ‘World Trade Center’ and submitted a complaint against Moukarbel for copyright infringement and danger of confusion. The Paramount production, based on a script by successful director Oliver Stone, should be hitting American screens in August.  A marketing campaign costing millions is already under way.

In the complaint from the studio submitted in Washington (published under thesmokinggun.com) it says that the film made by Moukarbel is based on a stolen copy of the Oliver Stone script. Exactly as in the cinema film, Moukarbel's film is concerned with a team of rescue workers who find themselves trapped within the rubble after the collapse of the Twin Towers. As a part of their complaint  Paramount enclosed nine pages of the script which Moukarbel is alleged to have used for his own film. By making this direct comparison,  the studio want to prove the similarity between the two pieces.

According to the accusations, it is feared that potential viewers  who have watched the short film on the Internet  will not feel inclined to actually go to the cinema in order to see the ‘original’ with Nicholas Cage in the lead role.  Moukarbel can ‘make any World-Trade-Center-film that he wants to, but not our film with our script’ said a speaker from Paramount  to the Associated Press agency. The studio wants to obtain  a provisional injunction  to prohibit the distribution of the short film.

Moukarbel has taken the film off his homepage. On the site pointsofdeparture.net he gave out a statement in which he confirmed that he based his work on a dialog from Stone’s book. His artistic contribution, which was a part of  his final-year academic project,  made a comment on the power of Hollywood to write history and thereby its political influence. He had at no time pursued commercial intentions. He identified  his film as a statement  against the 60-million-dollar film from Paramount.

juk

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