Quiery on those murky copyright (copywrite) terrai

[soulfilms]

My friend recently gave me a passage from the book as follows:

We plan our lives according to a dream that comes to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected. How far back is our childhood? Twenty years? Thirty? Fifty? Or ten? I think our childhood goes back thousands of years, farther back than the memory of any race. When we yearn, our yearning come through from deep below. It comes from a deep remembering, from the forgotten dreams of our mingled ancestry. You are my yearning. And this is the night long ago, when our stars first met. They are together now, in the heavens, shedding a beautiful radiance on this night. They are weaving enchantments for us so that we may step through the invisible mirror in the air and enter the fairy-tale we are meant to live, but which we forget.
-Astonishing the Gods
Ben Okri

If I take that as my fundamental 'thought' for a screenplay which I may later sell (because there is no way on earth that i could conjure the budget or man power needed for the film myself), do you think i'll run into copyright problems? even though it's just a passage in a book?

[miker]

If I were you just use it as your premise, your starting point. By the time you've added other elements (like plot, story) then it won't be recognisable and it will belong to you. Unless you copy it word for word of something, then you'll be in trouble.

Take a look at Akira Kurasawa (some famous Japanese director that I can never quite remember how to pronounce/spell)

Elements of his films have found their way into Spaghetti Westerns (Magnificent Seven) and space-opera (Star Wars).

But, I'm sure you'll agree, they are not carbon copies, they are not plagurisms, they are films in their own right.

HTH

[decaf mirth]

Almost every production is inspired by something someone else has said or done.

As miker said the greatest example of that is the mighty Kurosawa himself. I can never watch his movies without thinking of the Westernised spin-offs.

Your idea has to come from somewhere. even if it is from inside your head it still has its origins in something you've seen or read. I think as long as you don't allow your final work to be too easy to link to your source then you're okay.

Hey... you might be inspired by this post. In fact, that's given me a great idea.

Sorry, you guys, but you're not getting any credit for it. When you see the finished piece you'll never know the source was this topic.