Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker
by kevinmchugh on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:07AM
(#19114182)
So it's an ordering problem? It's only blackmail if I offer to sell my silence before making offers to other parties? So if I have an offer from a movie studio for the rights to my story and then allow the celebrity to make a counter-offer, that's not blackmail?
When I said publishing house I meant book publishers like Penguin Random House. I don't know where news outlets come into it.
You’re not offering the same thing to the publisher and the celebrity. To the publisher, you’re offering your version of certain currently unknown events that they may be interested in publishing. You’ll need to disclose the basic facts first before they will know if they even want to buy. To the celebrity, you’re offering the promise not to disclose even those basic facts to anyone, even to explain what it is you’re offering to other parties.
Whether the medium is a book or a newspaper or a website is legally immaterial. Thinking about the information as news is just useful because no one owns the facts, only their particular descriptions of them.
If you actually had a setup as you described, all of the news outlets would publish the facts of your story, without paying you anything, because facts aren’t protected by copyright. The only thing you could sell would be an exclusive interview.