(urth) OT: R.A. Lafferty estate's problems explained

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:
> How can they have intellectual rights to something as general as freezing time, a fantasy of probably just about everyone who has ever lived?   Absolutely ludicrous.

I think the post is pretty clear that that is not what was going on
there; the studio simply wanted to guarantee that a competing film
couldn't be made. It's a good thing - Lafferty's estate got a rich
reward for nothing. (That it would touch off a stasis as greed took
over is not something that would generally happen to a writer's
estates and could not be predicted in advance.)

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net