Another week, another Avatar lawsuit. This time James Cameron is being sued by album cover artist Roger Dean for the tune of fifty million over claims Cameron copied his ideas for Avatar. This is the fourth Avatar suit Cameron and Fox has had to deal with the past year or so alone. Others in the past have included, author Harlan Ellison and Camerons’ Lightstorm Entertainment scribe, Eric Ryder.

Cameron is not just taking the ideas and saying “Hey! Listen to this great idea I have!” It’s his execution of the idea that makes him such a target. You know why these lawsuits get filed? Because the original creators never had such runaway success. Oh, and money. Lots and lots of money. It was his execution, his actual filmmaking, that made these ideas so popular. He actually went out and did the damn thing. However, Cameron’s self-branding, as a perfectionist “visionary” auteur, could also be a factor here.

I have to admit that I’m of two minds about this whole thing. Writers have a long history of borrowing each other’s ideas; there are lots of classic novels and stories that function as conscious tributes or responses to earlier works. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, for example, inspired Haldeman’s The Forever War, as well as Card’s Ender’s Game and Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. They’re not entirely similar, but you can see a definite lineage running through each work. Samuel R. Delany wrote Triton as an answer to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is clearly heavily influenced by Jack Vance’s Dying Earth saga. And anyone writing a New Space Opera is going to inevitably recall Asimov, Herbert, Niven, Harrison, etc. I haven’t even mentioned the epic fantasy genre, which was dominated by Tolkien and Howard imitators until the rise of George R.R. Martin.

Then again, most writers are pretty straightforward about their influences, and are pretty open-minded about someone else using the same premise or concept in the service of a completely different kind of story. In a lot of ways the Science Fiction community anticipates a lot of features of the Open Source movement; ideas are important, but being able to employ or combine them in a new way is even more vital — as long as you provide attribution to the creators of the original ideas. This is how the genre has evolved over time from the stuff of cheap pulps to a vital and growing world literature.

At a certain point, what I’m seeing is that ideas, themes and motivations are all rather transcendent of the story, though they are elements within the story itself. These themes often repeat themselves not only in fiction, but in life as well. Maybe that’s why we gravitate to them. Injecting yourself into a culture and becoming “one of them” isn’t a wholly unique idea, no matter which way it happens. I don’t say this in defense of Cameron, but in defense of future film makers. Everyone expects films to be unique and untold, but in reality only the costumes change. Themes will be carried over, ideas will be mixed with others. What we get in return are permutations of the same story and that’s okay. Cameron isn’t doing something that other film makers before him have shunned. He’s just better at it.

-Dagobot
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