Twilight hysteria forbidden: Summit entertainment shuts down Saga fansite
Not everything promoting the saga is Twilight-approved. E! News confirms that Summit Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against Twilight.com‘s head honcho, Tom Markson, for illegally using the movie’s trademark to lure visitors into believing it is an official site and making profit.
“Summit learned that defendant is using the Twilight intellectual property on his website in a variety of ways, including posting links to download Twilight recordings, posting links for unauthorized Twilight contests and fake casting calls for the Twilight motion pictures,” Summit’s complaint read.
It claims that Twilight.com is “leading consumers to believe that they had reached the official Twilight Motion Picture Web site.”
This isn’t the first time the production company has dealt with Markson.
In 2009, Summit sent two cease-and-desist letters, and, because Markson “has not ceased his unlawful activities,” are now pursuing him for false designation of origin, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, unfair competition and copyright infringement.
Source: E! online news
May 13th, 2013 at 05:55
Movie studio Summit Entertainment has become somewhat notorious for its ridiculously over aggressive attempts to “protect” what it believes is its intellectual property. Just look at the list of stories , we’ve written about the company. It has shut down fanzines , stopped a documentary about the real town where Twilight is supposed to take place, sued a fashion designer for accurately noting that one of its jackets was worn by “Bella” in Twilight, been involved in a legal battle with Bath & Bodyworks for selling a body lotion called “Twilight Woods,” which had nothing to do with the movies, and pressed criminal charges against a fan who tweeted some photos from the movie set of the latest Twilight flick. This is a company that has a massive entitlement complex, and a somewhat faulty notion of intellectual property law. Its latest move is to sue the guy who owns Twilight.com — which he registered in 1994, eleven years before Stephenie Meyer published the first Twilight book and thirteen years before Summit Entertainment bought the movie rights to the book. The site, which is rather simple, does present some Amazon links to let people buy legitimate Twilight products (something you’d think Summit would like…). The key complaint, once again, shows the technological cluelessness of Summit. The studio says that the site infringes with links to unauthorized Twilight contests and casting calls. But, as THREsq points out in the link above, Summit appears to be confusing the content found in the Google AdSense on Twilight.com with specific links put up by the site’s owner, Tom Markson. One hopes that Markson can find himself a good (pro bono?) lawyer who can explain to Summit and the court that this is not how trademark law works.