Pardon me, but do you have any legal training? I’m thinking of suing someone. My lawyer thinks I’m a crackpot, so I need a second opinion.

Listen to this:

About twenty years ago when I was a volunteer 4th grade teacher I created an adventure aimed at teaching children about government. I instructed the kids to pretend to be on a cruise ship that is blown off course by a storm. They ended up shipwrecked on a tropic island, and in order to survive they had to develop a government.

Fifteen years later, Lost was launched on television and guess what? It’s about a passenger jet that crashes on a topical island. Obviously, to cover their trail they changed my cruise ship into an airplane. Other than that it’s my exact same idea. And look at the similarities! In my story the kids have to organize; On Lost they have to organize. In my story the kids have to eat disgusting things – same as on Lost. So, I’m thinking of suing the producers of Lost for copyright infringement. Do I have a slam-dunk case or what?

Actually, I hadn’t thought of suing until I read that an author named Jordan Scott has brought a lawsuit against bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer alleging copyright infringement. According to Gil Kaufman of MTV. com, Meyer allegedly plagiarized something called The Nocturne written by Scott when was fifteen. She posted it one chapter a time on her website. Here’s what Kaufman writes about Scott’s claim: “Though Scott’s book is set in 15th-century France and details a love affair between a young sorcerer and a teenage girl and Meyer’s book chronicles a doomed teenage love triangle between a human, a vampire and a werewolf set in modern times, Williams said the plot lines and some developments — detailed in more than a dozen examples in the suit — match too closely to be a coincidence.”

My case is at least as airtight as Scott’s. But my lawyer doesn’t want to touch it, even on a contingency basis. Here are some of his reasons why.

  • Except for fifteen or twenty copies I ran off for my students, I never published my school project.
  • The producers and television network had no access to my material. I never submitted my project to them. I never submitted it to anybody. I have no idea how the network got its hands on my property.
  • I never registered copyright in my story.
  • There is no similarity between the “fixed expression” of my story – the characters, the plot sequence, the narrative or the dialogue – and the characters, plot, narrative and dialogue in Lost.

So that leaves the idea itself, and it’s as plain as the nose on your face that the core idea for Lost is identical to my idea. But my lawyer tells me you can’t copyright ideas.

I’m really frustrated because I could really use the money and I figure if a cockamamie lawsuit like Jordan Scott’s has a shot, so does mine. You don’t think I’m a crackpot, do you? Do you?

Richard Curtis


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