In a Complaint that reads like a law school exam question, the author R. Lance Hill, aka Davide Henry Lee, who wrote the screenplay to the movie Roadhouse in 1986, MGM for its making of a sequel to the movie Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze in 1988.
Hill alleges that he exercised his termination right under copyright law to terminate the 1986 transfer of copyright for the movie production, which termination was to take effect on November 11, 2023.
So how does AI fit into the equation? Well, Hill’s Complaint alleged: “Defendants went so far as to take extreme measures to try to meet this November 10, 2023 deadline [to complete their remake], at considerable additional cost, including by resorting to the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) during the 2023 strike of the Screen Actor’s Guild (“SAG”) to replicate the voices of the 2024 Remake’s actors for purposes of ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement), all in knowing violation of the collective bargaining agreements of both SAG and the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) to which Defendants were signatories. These are not the actions of companies that truly believe that Hill’s Termination is ineffective. Ultimately, Defendants failed to complete the 2024 Remake until late January 2024, well after Hill’s Termination had taken effect.”
Hill, however, does not claim that the alleged use of AI violated his copyright. Instead, the Complaint alleges MGM’s continuing to make the remake after November 11, 2023 does. That date is key because the Copyright Act allows derivative works made “under authority of the grant before its termination [to] continue to be utilized under the terms of the grant after its termination, but this privilege does not extend to the preparation after the termination of other derivative works based upon the copyrighted work covered by the terminated grant.”