Sat Mar 17, 2007 — by Elayne Riggs

Lawsuit happy

Burnett v. Family Guy, NY artists v. Heroes

It's beginning to look like ComicMix needs a Lawsuit Watch correspondent.  Reuters has the details (hat tip to IESB).

On Thursday, two NY-based artists filed suit against NBC Universal and the creators of Heroes claiming the popular TV show stole one of their plotlines from them, basing it "on a short story, a painting series and a short film the couple exhibited in 2004 and 2005." The 2005 exhibit at Hunter College was attended by two people identifying themselves as writers from Crossing Jordan (also developed by Heroes creator/executive producer Tim Kring) and who were believed to have taken copies of the artists' work, thus lessening the likelihood that coincidence is not causality.  As Heroes has tried to depict, nothing's coincidence anyway.

Also on Thursday, Carol Burnett filed a copyright infringement suit against the makers of Family Guy over an episode shown last April featuring an 18-second sequence depicting a "slightly altered version" of her signature cleaning-woman character in a segment last April, basically saying they used the charwoman-clone without her permission. A 20th Century Fox spokesdroid responded that the references amounted to parody, which shouldn't even need to be said.

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