Dark Tower lawsuit claims SK is a plagiarist

[Br!an]

I wonder if there are any public informations about that lawsuit, if it went forward etc
Not that the person would have gained much given the film results...

There have been a few developments.

The plaintiff amended the complaint to add several defendants. He is now suing King, Imagine Entertainment, Marvel Entertainment, Media Rights Capital, Simon & Schuster, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

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The plaintiff is still acting Pro Se.

King is represented by:

Sanford Lewis Bohrer
Holland & Knight, LLP - Miami

Vincent Cox
Leopold, Petrich & Smith, P.C.

Louis Peter Petrich
Leopold, Petrich & Smith, P.C.

Scott D. Ponce
Holland & Knight, LLP - Miami

Raymond F. Treadwell
Holland & Knight, LLP - Jacksonville

The other defendants are being represented by King's attorneys: Cox, Ponce & Treadwell

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Discovery due by 2/23/2018,

Dispositive motions due by 3/23/2018,

Final Pretrial Conference set for 7/18/2018 at 10:30 AM in Jacksonville Courtroom 10 C before Senior Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger,

Jury Trial set for trial term commencing 9/10/2018 at 9:30 AM in Jacksonville Courtroom 10 C before Senior Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger.

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The plaintiff moved to file under seal. It was denied.

The plaintiff filed a MOTION for miscellaneous relief, specifically for Witness Tampering and Discovery misconduct sanctions against Marvel. There is a person who does not want to be a witness against Marvel since they are his client and Simon & Schuster is his publisher. He had a casual conversation with a Marvel attorney he knows. That was the supposed tampering. It was denied.

All defendants have filed answers to the complaint.

King denies all allegations. He admits some basic facts.

King Affirmative Defenses

FIRST AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(No Claim Stated)
Plaintiff’s Complaint and each count thereof fails to state facts
sufficient to constitute a claim for relief against Defendant.

SECOND AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(17 U.S.C. § 412)
Plaintiff’s claims for relief are barred and limited by the provisions of
17 U.S.C. § 412.

THIRD AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(17 U.S.C. § 411(a))
Plaintiff’s claims for relief are barred by the provisions of 17 U.S.C.
§ 411(a).

FOURTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Unclean Hands)
Plaintiff’s purported claims for relief are barred in whole or in part by
reason of his unclean hands.

FIFTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Lack of Standing)
Plaintiff’s purported claims for relief are barred in whole or in part
because plaintiff lacks standing to prosecute his claims.

SIXTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Fair Use)
Plaintiff’s purported claims for relief are barred in whole or in part by
the doctrine of fair use, to the extent any such use occurred, which
Defendant denies but here assumes for the sake of argument.

SEVENTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(First Amendment)
Plaintiff’s purported claims for relief are barred in whole or in part
because the purported use of Plaintiff’s purportedly copyrightable materials
constituted a use protected by the First Amendment to the United States
Constitution, to the extent ay such use occurred, which Defendant denies but
here assumes merely for the sake of argument.

EIGHTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(De Minimis Use)
Plaintiff’s purported claims for relief are barred in whole or in part by
the doctrine of de minimis use, to the extent any such use occurred, which
Defendant denies but here assumes merely for the sake of argument.

NINTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Laches)
Plaintiff’s claims for relief are barred by the laches of plaintiff and his
alleged predecessors in interest.

TENTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Protectibility)
To the extent that Plaintiff relies on facts or purported facts, ideas,
scenes-á-faire, clichés and conventions of storytelling, his claims are barred.

ELEVENTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Statute of Limitations)
Some or all of plaintiff’ copyright infringement claims are barred by 17
U.S.C. § 507(b).

TWELFTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(Public Domain)
The allegedly infringed works created were registered improperly and
were published without proper copyright notice, in violation of the
Copyright Acts of 1909 and 1976.

THIRTEENTH AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
(F.R.C.P. 19)
The amended complaint fails to join a party that is required by Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 19.

The plaintiff wanted to file another amended complaint. It was denied.

Several people have filed declarations including, Stephen King, Colin Shields, Ralph Macchio, Jae Lee, David Bogart, Jonathan Golfman, Adam Bergerman, Nikolj Arcel Akiva Goldsman, Christine Birch, Vincent Cox, and Beverly Vincent.

King Declaration

I, Stephen King, declare:

1. The facts stated in this declaration are personally known to me.
If I were called as a witness, I could testify to these facts from my personal
knowledge.

2. I was born in 194 7. I attended college at the University of
Maine, Orono campus, from 1966 to 1970. There, I received a Bachelor's
degree in English.

3. I have been a professional writer since 1967. My first
published novel was entitled Carrie, and published in 197 4. I have written
more than 50 volumes of fiction, and five non-fiction books. I have also
written many short stories and some motion picture screenplays. I am
informed and believe that several hundreds of millions of copies of my
works have been sold in the United States.

4. I am informed that this lawsuit relates to Roland Deschain, the
central character within a series of eight books written by me entitled The
Dark Tower. The Dark Tower tells the story of Roland Deschain's quest to
protect the Dark Tower, located at the nexus of all universes, from the forces
that would destroy it and bring chaos.

5. The table below sets forth the titles and years of first
publication of these eight books that make up The Dark Tower and include
Roland Deschain:
Title
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
39828
First
Publication
1982
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the
Keyhole
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
1987
1991
1997
2012
2003
2004
2004

6. It should be noted that the contents of the first book, The
Gunslinger, were first published as a series of novellas in issues of The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction commencing with the October
1978 issue. In addition, I revised the first volume of The Dark Tower series,
The Gunslinger, for publication in 2003, for several reasons. I felt that the
original version was dry and difficult for new readers to access. I also
wanted to make the book's plot more consistent with the ending of the series
after I had completed the first seven works, and I also added material to
improve the continuity among the volumes.

7. The long creative process that led to The Dark Tower series,
including my character Roland Deschain, began in the 1960s. Reading
J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings at that time caused me to
start thinking about creating my own epic fantasy. Another inspiration for
The Dark Tower came from Robert Browning's 19th century poem "Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came" which I read in about 1968 while I was a
student at the University of Maine. That poem depicts a young man, a
romantic hero, on a quest for a mysterious dark tower. The epigraph to the
poem indicates that Browning's inspiration came from lines of dialogue in
Shakespeare's play King Lear spoken by the Earl of Gloucester's goodhearted
son Edgar, when he pretends to be a madman and encounters Lear
wandering on the heath. Edgar pretends to be "Poor Tom," and says, in part:
"Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still Fie, foh and furn
I smell the blood of a British man"
King Lear, Act 3, sc. 4. (emphasis added)

8. A further inspiration for my creation of Roland Deschain was
the character played by Clint Eastwood and known as The Man With No
Name in a series of so-called "spaghetti westerns" directed by Sergio Leone
beginning in the 1960s, in particular the 1966 film The Good, The Bad, and
The Ugly.

9. In about April 1970, I started writing "The Gunslinger." I
worked on it intermittently over the next 7 to 8 years. I came to plan it as
the first volume of an epic fantasy 7-volume series, and I finished the
seventh volume in 2002, about 32 years after I started writing "The
Gunslinger." To the extent that there is a magnum opus in my career as a
writer, it is The Dark Tower series. The protagonist of The Dark Tower
series is Roland Deschain of Gilead, a gunslinger who is an unusual
combination of knight errant and territorial marshal of the old West. His
backstory is that he is a descendant from the line of the old White King,
known as Arthur Eld, and resides in Mid-World, which is one of the worlds
that lies next to our world, though there are many overlaps. In the
architecture of the multi verse within The Dark Tower series of books, there
are places that are doorways or portals between the worlds, and sometimes
there are thin places, porous places, where two worlds actually mingle.
These adjacent worlds are not necessary synchronized in time, so that
passage through a portal can take one to a different era.

10. I am informed that this lawsuit is brought by a plaintiff who
claims to be the owner of the copyright to a comic magazine character called
The Rook, and that Plaintiff claims The Rook appeared in a comic magazine
called Eerie beginning in 1977. To the best of my knowledge I had never
seen or heard of The Rook either as a comic magazine work or as a comic
magazine character until I was informed of the Plaintiffs claim in 2017.

11. I am informed that Plaintiff is claiming that visual depictions of
the character Roland Deschain infringe the copyright that Plaintiff claims he
owns in visual depictions of a character called The Rook.

12. I created the literary character of The Dark Tower's protagonist,
Roland Deschain, over more than three decades, thinking about him in detail
and spending thousands of hours writing more than a million published
words within The Dark Tower series of books. The idea that Roland was
copied from a 1970's comic magazine character is false, but it is not just
false, it is impossible. Throughout the process of depicting Roland's thoughts
and actions in eight novels, the complex character of Roland manifested
itself in a variety of ways that I did not anticipate when I first created the
character. He revealed more about himself as the incidents that made up his
quest forced him to better understand his quest for the Dark Tower, as well
as the lives of those characters around him. As I wrote the books, I was
continually inventing, and thus creating Roland by discovering Roland. I did
not copy Roland from any other work.

13. I am not an illustrator, and I did not create the illustrations or
visual depictions for any of the covers of any of The Dark Tower novels. I
did not create any of the illustrations for any of The Dark Tower graphic
novels published by Marvel Comics. There was never a single "look" for
the character of Roland Deschain. Even the physical characteristics that I
gave to Roland Deschain were not essential to The Dark Tower. I did not
create any of the visual depictions of Roland Deschain for the forthcoming
film, The Dark Tower. I summarized my approach toward writing about the
visual aspects of my characters at pages 202-203 of my book On Writing,
published in 2000:

"I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the
physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're
wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating; if I want to
read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J. Crew catalogue). I
can't remember many cases where I felt I had to describe what the
people in a story of mine looked like-I'd rather let the reader supply
the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well. If I tell you that Carrie
White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion victim
wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can't you? I don't need
to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all
remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine,
it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding
I want to forge between us. Description begins in the writer's
imagination, but should finish in the reader's. When it comes to
actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the
filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much ...
including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's
back.
I think locale and texture are much more important to the
reader's sense of actually being in the story than any physical
description of the players. Nor do I think that physical description
should be a shortcut to character. So spare me, if you please, the
hero's sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin;
likewise the heroine's arrogant cheekbones. This sort of thing is bad
technique and lazy writing, the equivalent of all of those tiresome
adverbs.
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen
details that will stand for everything else. In most cases, these details
will be the first ones that come to mind."

14. Because of the considerations set forth in the passage quoted
above, the text of my The Dark Tower books does not specify a detailed
'"look" for Roland Deschain. Indeed, the character of Roland Deschain in
• I the forthcommg film The Dark Tower is played by an actor who does not
strictly conform to my physical description ofRo~and Deschain in the books
I wrote.

15. Within The Dark Tower books, the character of Roland
Deschain is revealed through his words and actions, and to a much lesser
degree only through the books' verbal descriptions of Roland.
I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct
and was executed in the United States on June lcf, 2017.
Step~~
Drafr;°,..~20Kingl!-~

The plaintiff keeps filing various stupid motions. He wanted some of the attorneys sanctioned for suborning perjury. He wanted injunctions. He wanted declarations stricken. The court issued an omnibus order denying a bunch of the motions. It then went on to deny the rest. The court has instructed plaintiff on procedure, but he doesn't seem to get it.