Unsolicited artistic contributions to many, many places will get you a cease & desist letter, because, and I’m just regurgitating stuff I’ve read on the internet, accepting these contributions opens the recipients to possible law suits in the future. You can find many examples online where young kids wrote to someone they admired and loved and received a C&D letter from a bunch of lawyers. I blame the horribly broken copyright system.
I think I read something somewhere about this sort of thing happening with movie scripts. The issue is that if somebody sends in the script and anyone in the studio actually looked at the script, and then didn’t make a movie based on it the scriptwriter now has all sorts of opportunities to sue the studio if they ever make something that uses so much as a single word used in that script (not literally, but things like broad concepts might be replicated between scripts). Because they could argue they are not being compensated for their work. Even if the studio never even wanted the damn script.
This was a major plot point of the movie Airheads. The record label guy wouldn’t accept their demo so they took over a radio station to force it to be played publicly so the record execs would be able to hear it.
This happened with a little kid who sent Steve Jobs some ideas. TV news made a big deal about it (local, probably) because whatever. Oh look, here’re some cats in hats on sail boats! Everybody do a dance.
Unsolicited artistic contributions to many, many places will get you a cease & desist letter, because, and I’m just regurgitating stuff I’ve read on the internet, accepting these contributions opens the recipients to possible law suits in the future. You can find many examples online where young kids wrote to someone they admired and loved and received a C&D letter from a bunch of lawyers. I blame the horribly broken copyright system.
I think I read something somewhere about this sort of thing happening with movie scripts. The issue is that if somebody sends in the script and anyone in the studio actually looked at the script, and then didn’t make a movie based on it the scriptwriter now has all sorts of opportunities to sue the studio if they ever make something that uses so much as a single word used in that script (not literally, but things like broad concepts might be replicated between scripts). Because they could argue they are not being compensated for their work. Even if the studio never even wanted the damn script.
It happened when that one guy sewed Paramount over Star Trek: Discovery season one using a space tardigrade.
Well that’s a bit different because he never actually sent them a script so they actually did steal that.
The court also found that although both works employ the concept of a tardigrade flying in space, this concept is “associated in popular culture with the tardigrade and not original to plaintiff’s work,”
This was a major plot point of the movie Airheads. The record label guy wouldn’t accept their demo so they took over a radio station to force it to be played publicly so the record execs would be able to hear it.
This happened with a little kid who sent Steve Jobs some ideas. TV news made a big deal about it (local, probably) because whatever. Oh look, here’re some cats in hats on sail boats! Everybody do a dance.