There are actually two issues with copyright as far as Paramount's pictures are concerned. One of them is copyright, the other is trademarking. If you're writing software, there's also the issue of patent.
As far as copyright is concerned, copyright subsists on exact copies but not on new works which plagiarise the original. Who decides which is which? Usually lawyers. There was a time when it was sufficient to change two bars per page of a piece of music to avoid copyright suits. These days you would simply be done for copying the all-but-two bars. On the other hand, a tune which is merely 'like' another tune is generally acceptable. There have been enormous law suits about this.
As a starving musician, if you write a tune, registered-post it to yourself as a way of validating the date you wrote it, and then you share it with someone else who goes on to have a hit with something quite similar, you will probably be able to persuade his record company to give you a joint credit as the songwriter. Contrary to popular belief, you are actually more likely to persuade the record company than you are to successfully sue them in court. There are two reasons for this. The first is that record companies need to be seen as good citizens in the music world, otherwise the supply of new talent will go elsewhere. The other is, if they are convinced that you were the main brain behind the hit, they will probably be interested in employing you again.
On the other hand, if you couldn't demonstrate that you had shared your song with the other person, and that it wasn't available publicly, you would be in a much weaker position: copyright does not protect you against someone coming up with the same idea, only with copying yours.
On the other hand, as a starving visual artist, you may find yourself in a much weaker position if you do a piece of work which is then lifted almost wholesale by an advertising company and used in their advertisement. This is because copyright does not protect the idea, only its execution. But see below on patent.
As far as Paramount would be concerned, the issue of trademarking is probably more important than copyright. If they have trademarked the name for a particular series, and you then make a plugin of that series, they are obliged to do something about it to defend their trademarking -- otherwise they risk it lapsing into the public domain. Their copyright cannot be affected by misuse, but the trademark is more vulnerable.
Frequently, a trademark protects a name within a particular market which would otherwise be in the public domain. For example, the company I used to work for owned the Lucas trademark for the automotive and aerospace industries. Their trademark, however, would not limit the activities of George Lucas, unless he decided to start manufacturing commercial air or spacecraft, instead of making films about fantasy ones.
As far as the Paramount issue is concerned, they would certainly see their trademark as being under threat, since TV and computer games would be classified together as the entertainment industry.
Patent is the only way of protecting ideas, and it usually only applies to ideas which have some kind of practical industrial or technological application. It's also very slippery. At one point I wanted the company I worked for to register a patent on a particular kind of braking compound. More experienced managers objected: the information contained in the patent application would have given our competitors a huge head start in developing the next generation of products.
Sometimes secrecy is the best policy.
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M A R T I N T U R N E R
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