As a Stephen King fan on Facebook I occasionally receive news about new projects and such.  This one link caught my eye and turned out to be another legal problem with an aspect of copyright.  This article describes a film company (CAA) that wants to make a prequel to The Shining, a Stephen King book that was made into a movie.  However, another film company (Warner Bros.) owns the rights of making the book into a movie which includes any part of the book including deleted portions.  The prequel that CAA wants to make a movie on is based on a prologue portion that was cut from the book but that is within the rights of Warner Bros.  Therefore, CAA has to get approval from not only Stephen King but Warner Bros. as well.

This part of the law I don’t agree with at all.  Warner Bros. never made any part of their movie about this inexistent portion of The Shining.  The film company shouldn’t receive the film rights to a part of a book that simply doesn’t exist.  In this case it should be completely up to Stephen King who came up with the idea for this deleted portion to give the rights to CAA.  Copyright Laws are supposed to protect people’s ideas, but this prologue to the book The Shining had nothing to do with the movie The Shining and the movie didn’t add anything whatsoever to the prologue.  If a film company buys the rights to a book it should only include the actual book’s story because other deleted parts simply aren’t parts of the book.  In this case Stephen King would allow the creation of this movie and the only thing standing in the way is Warner Bros. who had nothing to do with this deleted portion of the book.