How the fuck did Harlan Ellison successfully sue James Cameron for plagiarizing Soldier for The Terminator?The only similarities are:>A solider from the future goes back in time>He's caught and held for psychological examinationAnd that's it. Completely different stories otherwise. This is like if H.G. Wells rose from the dead to sue anyone writing about time machines (ironically Ellison would be safe as there's no intentional time travel and no time machine in his story).
>why did mcdonalds lose the coffee lawsuit coffee is supposed to be hot
>>220917325I'm watched world on a wire part 1 last night and the matrix stole the phone exit
>>220917325OP, can you just tell me if this thread ultimately inspired my comment that Harlan Ellison is a litigious fuck in a T2 thread a week or so back. It would be gratifying. but don't say I inspired you if I didn't.
>>220917325small studio thought it would be safer to settle than fight
>>220917613that was because there was written documentation the employees, managers, and higher ups knew the coffee was being kept at extremely high temperatures... to dissuade free refills.
>>220917613Was James Cameron repeatedly warned he was making his movies too similar to other films?
>>220917325gibsmedat
>>220917758That woman also got her pussy fucking torched by that coffee.It had to have been just short of boiling to burn her like that.
>>220917698I didn't see that comment. I think this thread was inspired by an Outer Limits thread, but I don't quite remember.
>>220917813>I didn't see that comment. I think this thread was inspired by an Outer Limits thread, but I don't quite remember.Did you read this in the past?
>>220917789it could quite easily be above boiling if they added glycols to it to raise the boiling point.the fact it had already burned employees and employees had complained but... 0.01c a day was just too much
>>220917325>Harlan Ellison successfully suebecause Terminator made 78m at the box office. So some 65k settlement and future credits was no big deal. Maybe if Harlan knew it would go on to make 2b+ as a movie franchise, never mind merch and video games, he might of shot for more. Then again ask small and just get it VS fight for years.>>220917613>coffee lawsuitDo 2 min of research and it's real clear why they lost.
>>220917861>Do 2 min of research and it's real clear why they lost.spoonsneed me pls
>>220917325> A solider from the future goes back in timeBoom. And that’s the entire terminator movie.
>>220917881Plaintiff was a kike
>>220917325Because Cameron literally said in a published magazine interview he ripped off that story.
>>220917835I don't think so. I wouldn't have called them troubled Mexican youths but I guess it kinda fits.
>>220917860>already burned employeesoldfag enough to remember early 1990s McD coffee. I was too young to drink it but just touching the damn cup felt like you where holding lava. It was scary levels of hot giving the flimsy styrofoam cups that felt like they could easy pop like a water balloon.Mom use to basically finish her McMuffin before even trying to drink it.
>>220917886Even if that's all it was it makes no sense to me that such a basic idea could be copyrighted. I guess it's good that Ellison didn't live to see this piece of shit.
>>220917325Cameron said in an interview with Starlog "I ripped off a couple of old Outer Limits episodes"
>>220917613It was too hot. It caused third degree burns.
>>220917613>serve customers boiling hot water through a drive through>already had 700+ incidents by that pointWhy are you siding with the corporation lol
>>220917325he was a jew
>>220917613Fat lot of good it did, that shit is still one step below fresh lava when they hand it to you.The funny thing is, she initially only asked McDonalds to cover her medical bills. If they hadn’t told her to go pound sand they would have skated away for pennies on the dollar.
>>220917979>Cameron said in an interview with Starlog "I ripped off a couple of old Outer Limits episodes"he couldn't possibly be that retarded.
>>220918018>lol>retardedEST
>>220918058NTA, but what does Eastern Standard Time have to do with anything? Did autocorrect prevent you from writing ESL?
>>220918085IYKYK
>>220918085i think he meant every single timebut either way he's a fag
>>220917325>Eighteen hundred years in the future, two infantrymen clash on a battlefield. A random energy weapon strikes both and they are hurled into a time vortex. While one soldier is temporarily trapped in the time limbo, the other, Qarlo Clobregnny, materializes in an alley off a city street in the United States in the year 1964. idk that's pretty terminator if you ask me. according to writer's guild arbitration it's plot structure that matters anyway
>>220918274The setup sounds familiar but what if I told you that most of the story involves sitting around in offices discussing how to translate this guy's futurespeak?
>>220918053He was.
>>220918458link or it didn't happen.
>>220918398then i'd say his estate should have sued arrival too and reiterate that polt structure is what matters in terms of writing credit, not content
>>220918498imnotgooglingthatuuuu.biz/jamescameronbeingaretard
>>220917325is this why everything sucks now?
>>220918542Well there's a very common turn of phrase which says that you can't copyright ideas, only your specific expression of ideas
>>220918614you can sue over plot structure. carpenter has done it over escape from new york a couple of timeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockout_(film)#Legal_action
>>220917613>lose the coffee lawsuitthey didn't
>>220917886>And that’s the entire terminator movie.its not though. the soldier goes back in time to stop a super powerful cyborg machine from killing sara conner. The outer limits episode had none of those elements.
>>220917325he is a jew
The Voyage Home steals a scene from The Terminator. When Chekhov is detained by government agents, he repeats his name and rank to no avail, because the "United Federation of Planets" doesn't exist and means nothing to the people of the 1980s. This reproduces the interrogation scene in the Terminator, where Kyle Reese tells cops his name and rank in the future resistance army only to be mocked and dismissed as a madman, but with Kyle replaced by Chekhov.
>>220917325Cameron needed to pay tribute to the jews that's why.
>>220919014IIRC there's a similar scene in one of the original Star Trek episodes from the 60s.
>>220917919thisellison wouldn't have won and successfully had his name added to the credits if cameron didn't steal from his story>>220918053he's a canuck, of course he is
>>220919014A captured soldier having to only say his name, rank, and serial number is freaking ancient.
https://youtu.be/gCBpoDzE2-Q
is that the gorilla nest dude
>>220918053James Cameron is an incredibly pompous, vain asshole anon, of course he is.
>>220917766Yes. Part of the reason his fallout with Coreman
>>220918053Is anon, is
>>220920617>Yes. Part of the reason his fallout with Coremanredpill me on this, anon
Is not Aliens also a shot by shot plagiarism of some gay movie about soldiers fighting giant ants
>>220920631Coreman gave us Cameron. Plain and simple. He started as a matte painter iirc for some of Roger’s stuff in the early 70s then got a break making models. Specifically, Nell (picrel, yes, TitShip) for Battle Beyond The Stars. The story is that he started getting sloppy with ideas and Roger and him had a falling out. Speaking of Ol Cantankerous Harland, did you know he started with Disney until he was fired with extreme prejudice in 68?
>>220920716>Speaking of Ol Cantankerous Harland, did you know he started with Disney until he was fired with extreme prejudice in 68?I didn't know that. Do tell anon. I'm hungry for this knowledge bomb
>>220917973A different Ellison did though. David Ellison, aka the Skydance guy, produced that one
>>220920772Rumor had it he suggested to Walt’s brother, maybe as a joke, singe Der Maus was not doing to well, to make a porno of Cinderella
>>220917613McDs had been warned numerous times they were keeping the coffee at a temp that was way too high. The lady also just asked McDs to cover her medical bills and they said no, which is when she sued
Ellison didn’t win a lawsuit, he received a settlement before it reached court. He threatened to sue Cameron before Terminator released, unless he paid him off and included him in the credits. A successful lawsuit and accusations of plagiarism could have tanked the film, and it was basically Cameron’s directorial debut. Cameron obviously borrowed the opening of Soldier for terminator, but it’s a marginal part of the film that is basically irrelevant. Ellison was royalty in science fiction at that point, at the height of his powers, he was influential, and held grudges. If Terminator’s studio got sued, they would have been forced in turn to sue Cameron for everything, and his career would be over. If there was even a 5% chance of that happening it wasn’t worth the risk. So Cameron told them to settle, I think it was 200k or so. That’s how Ellison ‘won’, he was an extremely influential and aggressive writer who saw plagiarism everywhere, and bullied young directors into giving him money and crediting him with the threat of tanking their careers. Bear in mind that I have never found a single instance of Ellison citing his own influences, and he was apparently hostile when interviewers asked. And he definitely plagiarised some shit himself
>>220921486>Bear in mind that I have never found a single instance of Ellison citing his own influences, and he was apparently hostile when interviewers asked. And he definitely plagiarised some shit himselfis there any evidence of Harlan Ellison plagiarizing others?
>>220921540I haven’t found anyone who has discussed Harlan’s plagiarism outside of comment sections, but plagiarism is so poorly understood and recognised that’s it’s not really surprising no one has noticed. If we use the standard Harlan stood by, which is if someone creates a work with a similar concept to another existing work, this is plagiarism - yes, I think there are many examples in his stories and TV shows. If we use a more stringent definition of plagiarism, I think there’s evidence for that also but it’s harder to prove and I don’t care about Ellison enough to research how extensive it might be.
>>220921705>If we use the standard Harlan stood by, which is if someone creates a work with a similar concept to another existing work, this is plagiarism - yes, I think there are many examples in his stories and TV shows. If we use a more stringent definition of plagiarism, I think there’s evidence for that also but it’s harder to prove and I don’t care about Ellison enough to research how extensive it might be.if you don't care enough to follow the strict definition, show us all the examples you know off the top of your head using the loose definition of plagiarism he used.
>>220921731I’ll give you oneHe created a show called the starlost which lifts the concept and partial plot of Orphans of the Sky and Non-stop, which are both about generation ships where the crew descends into anarchy and form primitive societies, forgetting they even live in a ship at all and not having a concept of anything outside the ship. This is the premise of starlost.
>>220922065Which wasn’t a bad show
>>220922065>He created a show called the starlost which lifts the concept and partial plot of Orphans of the Sky and Non-stop, which are both about generation ships where the crew descends into anarchy and form primitive societies, forgetting they even live in a ship at all and not having a concept of anything outside the ship. This is the premise of starlost.in terms of actual quality, how do they rank? are the originals better, or is the harlan copy better?
>>220922065https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjOOku4RcBcharlan's story about the starlost is worth listening to. basically, they fucked him over and he disowned the whole thing
>>220922065i thought starlost was pretty bad. But its interesting to sci-fi fans since many actors who were in other sci-fi shows like star trek and twilight zone appear in episodes of starlost. https://youtu.be/tNm0K-N4x7g
>>220919661>James Cameron is an incredibly pompous, vain assholeTo be fair, he has good reason to be.
>>220922847his best years were '84-'91, then it's titanic and wasting time on avatar/alita
>>220922299I like it too>>220922312Interesting question. I hate Harlan but he’s not a bad writer. I don’t even know how to rank stuff on quality because I’m probably autistic and have no taste. I like starlost but it was a clusterfuck of budget cuts, I don’t think it’s better than orphans of the sky but it’s a different medium. It also lifted its format from the fugitive, which is generally considered a classic. He wrote a time travel episode for Star Trek that was derivative of earlier obscure stories, and a lot of fans think is one of the best episodes. I have no mouth was better than the source material, except for Colossus, but I’m not sure if that was an influence. In general he rips stuff off and makes a decent product, but then again every big sci-fi franchise is a ripoff. I just hate that he’s a bully>>220922614Yeah, I don’t remember all the details but I think he got his name taken off the credits because they fucked him. He wrote the original treatments and the show’s ‘bible’, would have been cool to how it turned without meddling
>>220918018>700+ incidentsAnd that was the FIRST lawsuit? In lawsuit-happy America?
Depending on the judge and time of these lawsuits, you’d be shocked what gets concludedOne of the crazier ones for me is the copyright trials over songs plagiarising other songs. Sometimes they’re carbon copies and nothing is done. Other times some extremely basic and common chord progression is claimed as unique to some song when it’s been used in countless others and they actually win the lawsuit
Isn't Harlan Ellison a Jew? I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is my favorite short story of all time but if he's a Jew he's a Jew and he inherits that ethnicity's penchant for lawsuits.
>>220917325>Ellison was born to a Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 27, 1934, the son of Serita (née Rosenthal) and Louis Laverne Ellison, a dentist and jeweler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRXB0h7sf70
>>220917325>How the fuck did Harlan Ellison successfully sue James Cameron for plagiarizing Soldier for The Terminator?Check his early life section on wikipedia.
>>220923010I mean, you can have whatever opinion you want but the reality is that of the top 5 highest grossing films of all time, Cameron wrote and directed 3 of them. Two of them are Avatar movies with the first one remaining the highest grossing film ever produced. When you're responsible for not just directing but also writing and producing the 3/5 of the highest grossing films ever made, you have good reason to have a high opinion of yourself.
>>220917325I'm reading a collection of HE right now and Solider has nothing in common with Terminator.Like... at all
>>220924419>he made moneyYAWN
>>220923571No one had it as bad as that old lady. She was really badly burned. She was only seeking medical payment coverage too, not anything higher.
>>220924561Making money from ticket sales isn't some abstract shit like investing in the stock market or something; it's a direct reflection of how many tickets were sold ie how many people wanted to see the film, liked it enough to go see it again, liked it so much that they told their friends and family to see it, etc etc. It's the most objective metric of how many people enjoyed it.
>>220924832>It's the most objective metric of how many people enjoyed it.No it isn't. It just reflect how much money was spent on merketing
>>220917919He didn't. When listing his inspirations, he mentioned "That old episode of the Outer Limits".Ellison, being the vulture that he is, saw his opening. Cameron was pretty clearly referring to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Was_Never_Born... Which is about a shapeshifting radiation mutant from an apocalyptic future who travels back to murder the man who started the war. After meeting a Spunky Girl™, he realises that he overshot and the girl is his target's mother. You may recognise that this story - about a time traveller who seemingly has to kill the woman he has come to love to prevent WWIII - was later pretty heavily plagiarised in an episode of Star Trek.Gosh! I wonder what plagiarising hack wrote that episode!
>>220924888There are literally hundreds of films with much larger marketing budgets than Avatar. Why weren't they as successful?
>>220920716>Doesn't know how to spell "Corman">Doesn't know what he's talking aboutCameron originally left to direct "Piranha 2". When that flamed out, he went straight back to working for Corman. He was the production designer on "Galaxy of Terror", where he met Gale Ann Hurd, and they made "Terminator" together. Cameron didn't want to do it with Corman, because he knew that he was too cheap.
>>220917325>>220924538>Ellison had a reputation for being abrasive and argumentative.[a] He generally agreed with this assessment, and a dust jacket from one of his books described him as "possibly the most contentious person on Earth". Ellison filed numerous grievances and attempted lawsuits; during a contract dispute with Signet/NAL Books over binding cigarette ads into one of his paperbacks, he sent them dozens of bricks postage due, followed by a dead gopher.[67][68]
>>220922065>lifts the concept and partial plot of Orphans of the Sky and Non-stop...Both of which lifted the plot of "Universe" by Robert Heinlein...
>>220925002anon, i don't really think you know what oprhans of the sky is
The whole thing's ridiculous: Terminator is clearly a ripoff of 'Cyborg 2087'
>>220925002Anon, universe wasn’t plagiarised, it is the first part of orphans of the sky. Non-stop was obviously influenced by Heinlein. But what’s your point?
>>220924922Because the marketing budget wasn't spent well duh
>>220924891Damn, nice catch. I’ve been looking for Amok Time’s influence, I figured it was books and short stories, but that’s a good one. I wouldn’t totally disregard Solider though, the opening few seconds of terminator are almost identical to the opening of Soldier, even if beyond that point the similarity is negligible.Do you research influences/plagiarism much?
>>220925193Oh so the reason Cameron has been such an insanely successful filmmaker isn't because of his writing or directing skills but because he's a marketing genius?
>>220925305>Amok TimeCity on the Edge of Forever. It certainly has some literary inspirations, like "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore, or "Random Quest" by John Wyndham I do like tracking the evolution of ideas.
>>220917325Harlan had some good stories but he has a weird ego for a guy who writes cheap paperback sci fi trash.
>>220925512City on the edge of forever, I’m an idiot. Why the fuck did I say amok time.Cool, I also like that, although I lean more on the side of cinematic/stylistic influence. It’s wild how little influence of any kind seems to be understood or studied. I did some research on the x-files and some dudes in the writing staff committed massive, verbatim dialogue lifts in a couple episodes, and apparently no one has ever noticed lolAnyway if you want to exchange ideas or whatever post a burner email or some way to contact you. I have met almost no one who is interested in this shit so it would be cool to chat
>>220925082It’s not clearly a ripoff of anything. It’s inspired by a dozen or more influences. Cyborg 2087 is probably an influence but not necessarily, I’m inclined to say it is because there’s an homage to it T2
>>220917698I get a warm fuzzy feeling when other anons start threads based on my comments posts. It makes me feel like i am impacting the causality of the universe.I saw another anon use this stupid pic of Walken in an OP post and it made my week. Thank you to that anon.
theres shot sequences that line up and jimmy said it out loud. thats like catching someone fucking your wofe pants down. it was also not the first time harlan sue'd a big timer and was successful. look into the future cop lawsuit
>>220920703>gayThem! Is kino, zoomnigger. Alien also ripped of the Ixtl from Voyage of the Space Beagle
>>220925316Yes.He's been a "look at my budget, guys!" guy for 20 years, if not more. Nobody ever praised his writing, characters and stories since the 90s lmao
Sophia Stewart created The Terminator, and she created The Matrix too. They were science fiction metaphors for WOKE before people even started using the term.https://youtu.be/tjrpMZXPyKY?si=M8puErvcv2sZ1XG_
>>220927276now they create kool-aid pineappleswoke WON!
>>220927067Where did Cameron ever admit to stealing from Harlan? All we have is Harlan’s claim that Cameron said it, and that the quote was magically expunged from the interview. Ellison claims to have a copy but he never produced it. And shot sequences lining up is nothing. Every director lifts shots from other films, that is not grounds for a lawsuit.
