Bluesman Mike Lindner Wrote:Naw. There have been plenty of songs called "Love," for example. It used to be that you couldn't even copyright ideas, just the arrangement of words used to express them. But Murray Leinster got a nice piece of coin from the producers of the film ALIEN for ripping-off his story BLACK DESTROYER (or so I've heard...) BLACK DESTROYER was Leinster's first published fiction, so maybe he felt a little propriatorial about it. So I guess I should think twice before submitting my THE CRYPT manuscript, featuring Handyman Hank, to a publisher...
Mike, I think that was A.E. van Vogt whose first published story was DARK DESTROYER. (..and who gave the name to Abe's "sporting goods" store)
James Cameron also wound up paying Harlan Ellison some hefty coin and inserting a credit into the video release of TERMINATOR for appropriating some elements from two of Ellison's OUTER LIMITS scripts ("Demon with a Glass Hand" and "Soldier".)
And while we're on the subject of the ALIEN series...
Forgive me if this has been brought up before, but...
Has anyone else noticed how close the scene in ALIENS (released in 1986) where Ripley enters the alien queen's egg chamber to rescue the little girl is to a certain scene in THE TOMB (published in 1984) where a certain protagonist we all know and love enters the Rakoshi's egg chamber to rescue a little girl...?