1989 action film screenwriter road house is suing MGM Studios and its owner Amazon Studios for copyright infringement regarding upcoming films. road house Remake and report Los Angeles Times and hollywood reporter. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. Central District Court in Los Angeles, also alleges that Amazon Studios relied on generative AI to replicate the actors’ voices to complete the film. road house It was remade last year when Hollywood’s strike nearly halted film production.
In the complaint, screenwriter R. Lance Hill reportedly said that he filed a complaint with the U.S. Copyright Office in November 2021 to regain the rights to the script. both) road house Amazon Studios’ reboot is based on this). At that point Amazon would have owned the rights to: road house This is due to the tech giant’s acquisition of MGM’s movie library, but the tech giant’s rights to the film were set to expire in November 2023.
However, according to THR, Hill’s original agreement with United Artists (which secured the rights to the 1986 screenplay before being later acquired by MGM Studios) is defined as a “rental work.” According to the U.S. Copyright Office, this term means that the party who hired the individual to create the work is both the owner and copyright holder of that work.
Hill said the employment and labor provisions were merely boilerplate, and that Amazon ignored his copyright claims and rushed to produce a remake, even taking “extreme measures” such as using generative AI. insisted. The lawsuit seeks a court order to block the release of the film, which premiered on the opening night of SXSW on March 8 and is scheduled to be streamed on Prime Video on March 21.
Amazon MGM Studios flatly denied using AI to replace or recreate an actor’s voice in a statement. The Verge“The studio has explicitly instructed the filmmakers not to use AI in this film,” spokeswoman Jenna Klein said in a statement.
“If AI had been used, it would have been done by the filmmakers (during the editing of the initial cut of the film).”
“If AI had been utilized, it would have been done by the filmmakers (editing the initial cut of the film), rather than by the studios who controlled the editing,” Klein wrote, adding that the filmmakers added that they were “instructed to remove the AI and the AI.” non-SAG AFTRA actors” and completed the film.
Amazon also said that “many of the allegations” in the lawsuit are “categorically false” and that it does not believe its copyright effectively expired in December 2019. Roadhouse.
