The Perils of Selling Your Book Rights

Good Morning from Upper Darby!

I'm up cleaning up around this place! Got laundry to do. Cleaned up the kitchen. Still got to read over Chapter Ten and make sure everything is in order. Sitting here typing this up while I am listening to THIS on my mp3-player;

So I'm out in the kitchen doing dishes and mind you I'm sitting here listening and the one on my mp3 player is different than the one that I just posted to this post...? Huh, I got no clue why that is. O-O? ANYWAY!? So I'm doing dishes at 2am and cleaning up the kitchen, yes, at 2am! Decide to come back in here and restart my laptop and see what's going on right quick because I got a tea pot that's been screaming CLEAN-ME MUTHAFUCKA for nearly 2-weeks! DON'T ASK! All I've been doing is stressing to finish this book before the end of this month and like I said I just found out that I won't get a dime till TWO MONTHS FROM NOW. So I'm gonna be DOING WITHOUT A LOTTA SHIT! HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!
-_-
Wait?
That's not funny.
^_^!
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, yeah it is. Because I fucked up by not reading Amazons terms of payment FAQs and correctly understanding that as an ebook-only self-publisher I fall underneath their Kindle terms of payment. TOTALLY MY FAULT! And lesson learned! Think it MIGHT BE TIME to dig out my Lady Yoma series and get THAT IN ORDER and then get IT UP & OUT TO POST ON AMAZON so I can STAGGER MY EVERY 60-DAYS ROYALTY CHECKS!
^_^!
Notice HOW CONFIDENT I AM THAT I'LL ACTUALLY SELL SOME EBOOKS. Heh-heh-heh-heh, yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I better or else I'm gonna be homeless, HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA, wait!? Now that one ISN'T FUNNY, or is it...? -_- Either way!? I ALLLLLLLLLLLLLWAYS, BET ON BLACK!

 HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! So I'm combing through yahoo news and came across this article where an author is suing because her work was sold multiple times and ends up in the hands of a movie studio that BOUGHT OUT the people she'd sold it to and then made their own screenplay using HER BOOK. It turns out that this is the woman who wrote the book Gravity, which the movie was based on. However all of this started way back in the 90's, which is fucking ridiculous and it is also why I ATTACKED Michelle Rodriguez for claiming you can just MAKE YOUR OWN SHIT and then POOF! Hollywood will just GO WITH YOUR FRESH NEW IDEA!!!!!

Said no one ever.
Even in the above video of Michelle apologizing and then explaining she still clearly doesn't grasp what many of us AS BLACK PEOPLE KNOW, but DON'T WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE. When YOU HAVE YOUR OWN, THEN YOU MAKE THE RULES. PERIOD. If you wanna push something you push it, you wanna put it off or bury it, YOU BURY IT. But when YOU OWN NOTHING AND HAVE NOTHING AND HAVE TO RELY ON SOMEONE ELSE TO DO IT, then? You are actually subjected to THEIR WHIMS, period. So Michelle FAILS TO ACKNOWLEDGE that PUSHING CERTAIN POSITIVE IMAGES, PARTICULARLY OF BLACK PEOPLE, hahahahahahahahahahahah, NO.

So when you read the article BELOW you see ONCE AGAIN HOW WHITES-&-WHITE JEWS TREAT EACH OTHER where fucking each other over, is NOT something that they HIGHLIGHT. You yourself have to be paying attention to see and then UNDERSTAND that, okay!? So this is how they're going-in ON EACH OTHER, now!? How are things gonna go when I come at them with this Black Concept. These Black characters, etc-etc, when they're fucking each other over and then drawing up MORE LEGAL WAYS-N-MEANS to STEAL IDEAS, ETC! Even MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN THEY ALREADY HAVE IT RIGGED UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The reality is that YOU DON'T FEED THE MONSTER WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE TO. This is why I laughed about NOT EATING AND WAITING 2-MONTHS for a royalty check. First and foremost IN NORMAL BOOK PUBLISHING you don't get a royalty check THAT FAST! So that's for starters, BUT SECOND OF ALL? My idea goes STRAIGHT TO AMAZON AND NOT THROUGH WHITES AND QUESTIONABLE-BLACKS, who may not particularly care for having too many Black characters in positions of power and authority and an actual HOLISTIC view where everyone isn't cut from the same cloth and digging in the exact same dirt of ideas.

Here is the article, lemme get back to cleaning up around here!

‘Gravity’ Author Tess Gerritsen Says Latest Court Ruling ‘Could Be Devastating to All Writers’

Variety

Ted JohnsonJune 15, 2015

After a federal judge again dismissed Tess Gerritsen’s breach-of-contract suit against Warner Bros., in which she claims that “Gravity” is actually based on her novel of the same name, the author warned the case holds detrimental consequences for writers.

Her breach-of-contract lawsuit focused on the question of whether Warner Bros. assumed New Line’s obligations when it took control of the mini-studio in 2008.

“This ruling allows me no possibility of remedy,” she wrote on her blog on Monday. “Even if the Warner Bros. film had copied my story word for word, there would be nothing I could do about it.

“The court’s latest decision focused solely on the Warner Bros./New Line corporate relationship,” she added. “It did not take into consideration my novel, or Cuaron’s film, or the similarities between them.”

After U.S. District Judge Margaret Morrow dismissed the lawsuit in January, Gerritsen’s legal team filed an amendment complaint.

But on Friday, Morrow again dismissed Gerritsen’s lawsuit, concluding that she had “failed adequately to allege breach of contract and breach of guaranty claims against defendants on a direct liability theory. The complaint similarly does not allege plausible claims against WB on successor-in-interest, alter ego, and agency liability theory.”

In her suit, Gerritsen said in 1999 she had sold the rights to her novel “Gravity” to Katja, a shell company for New Line.

Like the movie, Gerritsen’s novel “Gravity,” also published in 1999, features a female medical doctor/astronaut who is stranded alone on a space station after the rest of the crew is killed in a series of disasters.

Gerritsen contended that the terms of her sale of her novel “Gravity” to Katja called for her to receive a production bonus of $500,000, 2.5% of the “defined net proceeds” from the movie, and screen credit. She was paid $1 million when Katja purchased motion picture rights in March 1999, just months before the book was published. Her suit claims that director Alfonso Cuaron was attached to the screen adaptation, but she was not told of it at the time.

Some time after 2002, the suit claims, Cuaron and his son, Jonas, wrote a screenplay called “Gravity.” She claimed that Warner Bros., the studio behind “Gravity,” became owner of the feature rights to her book after it took control of New Line in 2008, and owed her screen credit and a percentage of the net proceeds.

But in her latest ruling, Morrow wrote that she couldn’t find that Warner Bros.’ exercise of control over New Line “plausibly suggests” that it also intended to assume all of Katja and New Line’s liabilities and obligations. She wrote that “the facts Gerritsen plead to show ‘total control’ suggest only that WB, as parent, engaged in routine oversight of its subsidiaries, and provided support for their activities.”

Morrow said that Gerritsen could file another amended complaint, but not new claims.

In her blog post, Gerritsen wrote that she cannot file a copyright complaint against Warner Bros. “as my ‘Gravity’ film rights are owned by New Line. The only entity with the legal standing to sue for copyright infringement is New Line – and they will certainly not sue their parent company, Warner Bros.

“The court has again granted me the opportunity to file an amended complaint, for which I am grateful,” Gerritsen added. “I am not by nature a crusader, but the consequences of this ruling could be devastating to all writers working in any media, including film, television, and publishing.”