Dead Rising 2 Delayed by... Romero?!?

[Danny]

i wrote a report on it for uni, it is, and when you compare merchandising for night adn dawn its pretty obvious, night has like 7 times every media format ,comics, dvd's, laserdiscs, vhs, ect. than dawn and hardly any two things are made by the same person.

[DubiousComforts]

For example, if I were to go out and make a movie in which I have a character that was burned horribly and wears a glove with blades on it's fingers and inhabits your nightmares making it possible to be murdered in your sleep, I would be infringing on someone's copyright (I would assume). No, you wouldn't unless you also call your character "Freddy Krueger," title your movie A Nightmare on Maple Street and had nearly the same characters and story as any of the original films, etc., etc. Even though your film might not be very original, the bottom line is that you can't copyright an idea (i.e. the dead returning to life and eating the living). However, if your movie begins to have too many similarities to another copyrighted work and/or trademarked character, image or name, that's where you get into trouble. Trust me, Rubinstein has a very good case because of the way that trademark protects goods and services, and it doesn't matter one bit if we believe that he hasn't done a very good job in licensing the property. The only thing worse than not effectively marketing your trademark is not enforcing your rights to the registration. The problems with Night of the Living Dead stem from the filmmakers not having the legal clout to enforce their copyright. It's a similar situation to the way that Charlie's Angels ripped off Ted Mikel's The Doll Squad. It's an academic point 40 years later, but I don't believe for one second that Night of the Living Dead actually fell into public domain.