Is It Possible To Sue a TV Network For Making A TV Series With Many

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RavenKatiasaBliss

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Similarities To A Book Series? Actually, I asked this question before, but (my fault) I didn't make it clear enough. So, try number two!
Someone on a book series fanpage posted something about NBC making a TV show called Grimm. The fanpage is in fact, a fanpage for a book series called the Sisters Grimm series by Michael Buckley.
I didn't find THAT many similarities between the two, but many of the other fans did. I mean, yeah, sure, the main character in the TV show happens to be a descendent of the Brothers Grimm and in the book series the two sisters are, too. But other than a little bit of tiny stuff (like a phrase they used for the TV show, "Once Upon a Crime" is the title of the fourth book of the Sisters Grimm, but that doesn't really matter.) The last time I answered this (I deleted it, by the way), got some pretty good answers, but personally, I found they weren't EXACTLY answering what I was asking, but I kind of have an idea of what they meant.

Long story short. Is it possible that if there are enough little details that are pretty close to one another, could you sue?
@cathrl69
No, no, no! I deleted it because I wasn't clear enough and got the vibe that the question was kind of confusing. And since you can't edit answers (which is kind of a dumb idea... you should be able to!), I had to delete it and do it again. This time I *hope* it was more clear.
 
Not really. There would have to be more than just a handful of similarities before they could sue. There would have to be proof that the TV staff had directly taken the ideas from the book series and that's near impossible to prove.

For example, there was a movie called Repo! The Genetic Opera that came out in the early 2000s. Even before it was a movie, it was a stage musical that had been performed in one form or another since the 1990s. One of the most basic plot lines involved synthetic organs and the repossession of them via repo men.

Then suddenly in 2009/2010 a book and movie combo (Repo Men/Repossession Mambo) came out about a group of men who repossessed synthetic organs but did not have the same identical plot line as Repo! did. (The author claimed to have been working on the book since 1999 but the book was not published until 2009, but there's no actual evidence to back this up. The Repo! creator said he'd been running versions of his musical since 1990, but there's no real evidence to back that up either.)

Even though Repo Men appeared to be a direct copy of Repo! there was nothing they could do about it since they can't copyright ideas. This would also apply to your tv series as well and what allows so many people to do ripoffs of stuff like the Little Mermaid and all of the other various series and movies out there.

EDIT:

And Slim Kitty is right- since both of them use a common source material, there are always going to be similarities. Since the source material (in this case, Brothers Grimm stories and such) is so old that the copyright has expired and nobody can copyright it, people can use it however they want.


The only way they could possibly sue would be if Buckley were to go to NBC trying to get them to approve a show based on Sisters Grimm, but they declined and them later did an almost identical show. You'd have to prove that they were approached with the material and produced the show from the same idea. It's near impossible to prove so 99.9% of the times when people try to sue, the lawsuit is dismissed. You'd have to get one of the producers to admit they plagiarized the writer's work, which would be even harder to prove here since the original source material isn't copyrighted.
 
Same answer I had last time: both the book Sisters Grimm and the show Grimm are based on the Brothers Grimm, hence the similarities
 
See my last answer, assuming you didn't just delete that too. I've got better things to do than type it all out again.

Long story short? No.

In any case, I thought it wasn't you that thought they should sue, but other fans? Did we really not give you enough pointers to explain why not to them?
 
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