Yup, the time has come for high concept plagiarism lawsuits, because that’s where the money is, of course.

Royce Mathew has sued the Walt Disney Co., Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Touchstone Home Video and 24 other related enterprises that had a stake in the 2003 blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl for copyright infringement.

Mathew claims he’s spent 20 years working on “drawings, screenplays, outlines, blueprints, storyboards, and other original materials” and that he’d filed the lot with the U.S. Copyright Office, to boot. He also claims he’s shown his ideas to Disney people and their cronies, “both privately and through the William Morris Agency and Creative Artists Agency.”

I’m sorry. I realize this may be some poor little fella who’s been slowly draining the very blood of his veins into a creative obsession for his entire adult life (or his golden years, or whatever). But you can’t copyright a creative concept. You just can’t.

If people could copyright creative concepts, we writers would all be doomed. It would be like Internet domain names, a whole mini-industry would spring up aswarm with people copyrighting every conceivable plot line.

So some squatter would own the rights to “girl meets boy, girl denies attraction to boy, girl realizes oops boy is her One and Only” and just like that, every romance/chick lit/commercial women’s fiction writer on the planet would be back to their day jobs.

Via the always worth-the-read Booksquare. With a nod to E is for Editrix, who’s all excited about the eyeliner thing :-)

Update: see also this post on “extreme copyright.”