Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and production banners the Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures have been accused of copyright infringement over their 2012 film “Django Unchained”.
Tarantino and the distributors were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed on December 24 in federal court in Washington, by Oscar Colvin, Jr. and his son Torrrance J. Colvin.
The Colvins assert that the defendants have infringed on the copyright of their screenplay “Freedom”, citing what they allege are extensive similarities to Tarantino’s Oscar-winning script for “Django Unchained”, reports variety.com.
The film starred Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson in lead roles.
Set in the late 1850s in the Old West and antebellum South, the film has elements of spaghetti Westerns and serves as a tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film “Django”.
According to the lawsuit, the Corbins registered “Freedom” with the Writers Guild of America in 2004 and took it into Creative Artists Agency and the William Morris Agency. The Corbins also placed the script on Triggerstreet’s script website.
“There are a plethora of similarities between ‘Freedom’ and ‘Django Unchained',” the suit asserts.
“Defendants would call them coincidences, however, the intentional use of our work is neither an accident nor coincidence,” the suit further read.
Referring to the “Freedom” script, the suit said, “Before Django Freeman, there was an escaped slave named Jackson Freeman who desired to purchase his family’s freedom from a malevolent plantation owner.”