Tho most likely they wouldn’t pay out any royalties and if there is legal action, they’ll just count it against the profits of the movie and record the whole thing as a wash and pay no taxes and no royalties.

> We already have precident on that topic via that short story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s.

... do you mean precedent of a scifi premise from social media being turned into a movie? or the precedent of a piece of media using a piss-tank's levels as a means of communication?

I meant the precedent of wherever he'd be able to get royalties for something he wrote on a social media website.

you're giving full copyright to the social media website you're posting on. If someone wanted to buy a licence to use this - whatever it might be - the discussion would be between the social media platform and the licensee. the original author of the work would not have any stake in that theoretical situation.

If you were wondering which specific case I'm referring to, ForHackernews linked to the wiki article. there is a small note on the licensing issue at the end there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509955

From what I remember, he had gotten a WB offer - which ultimately didn't pan out because a licensing agreeming couldn't occur. He'd have had to rewrite the story off-reddit for them to be able to license it. And that never happened.

(Well, he did rewrite it - but probably took too long, so the window of opportunity had already closed and it was never made into an actual movie)

Your claim is simply untrue AFAIK.

A social media site typically takes a soft licence allowing it to store and reproduce your content (which is needed to be able to function), and maybe use it in marketing. Some go a little further, but please show me one mainstream site that takes over all your (copy)rights when you post?

You might be correct that I'm mistaken wrt the intellectual property of comments. I'm not an IP lawyer and cannot state it with confidence one way or another.

What I feel comfortable stating is however that we have precident for the exact scenario the person I responded to (wanting royalties for a storyline they posted on a social media website) and this precident showed that are least the lawyers of WB were of the opinion that a rewrite outside of any social media platform was necessary.

> We already have precident on that topic via that short story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s

Can you please talk about this some more? A cursory search did not give me anything. What short story are you talking about and which adaptation of it?

Probably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome%2C_Sweet_Rome

Fwiw, this sounds like a take on the novel and subsequent franchise 1632. This sci-fi/historical fiction has a quarterly fan fiction compilation that has continued even after the original author’s death.

Such a sad tale. I’d love to watch a documentary about this.

That's not what I took from that article?

> On October 21, 2011, Reddit administrators explained that the licensing terms were designed to protect the site from potential legal action, and that they did not intend to block the production of the movie.