Pop culture writer Kevin Powell has filed a copyright
infringement action in the USA against the executive producers of
the movie "All Eyez on me", a bio-pic about Tupac Shakur,
the hip hop legend who was shot in 1996, because the movie features
content from three cover stories on Shakur that Powell wrote for
the magazine Vibe.
The case is not based on a direct copying of the articles but on
non-factual content of the articles that was created by the author
for embellishment. The central figure of the articles was a
fictitious character named Nigel. Powell claims that substantial
elements of the movie about Shakur were based on interviews he did
with him and that the fictional characters and re-worked narratives
were used in the movie as well. While copyright law in different
countries would evaluate the question of the infringement in a
quite similar manner, from a procedural point of view, the case
would look quite different in a European perspective.
