He’s probably more famous for The Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly, both of which have been made into major motion pictures, but Philip K. Dick’s book Adjustment Team enjoyed rejuvenated popularity when it was recently made into the film The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.
But not everyone’s happy about the film.
It grossed nearly $130 million worldwide, for a profit of about $77 million. Everyone got paid in full and everyone was thrilled, except, Reuters says, for the author’s estate, the Philip K. Dick Testamentary Trust.
Initially, the film’s director and production crew had agreed to buy the rights to Adjustment Team for somewhere between $1 million and $2 million, plus another six figures if the film broke even. But when the production crew discovered there might be an argument to be made that the book was by then in the public domain, they went for it.
And now the Dick estate is coming after them, although with limited success: after having several of their October 2011 claims dismissed by an LA District Judge, they have reportedly “moved to have [their] claims dismissed without prejudice.”
Adjustment Team first made its way into a magazine in 1954, which would have made it public domain. But attorneys for the Dick trust have argued that it was unauthorized. Instead, they say, “the first authorized publication of ‘The Adjustment Team’ was in the 1973 collection ‘The Book of Philip K. Dick.’” If true, it would be a case of gross copyright infringement—and yet to this date the estate seems to have had little success in making that point. It may not be the last we hear on it, but the suit is shaping up to be a failure for the executors, who made this parting shot against the organizers of the film adaptation:
Motivated solely by greed, defendants seek to establish themselves as a de facto ‘Adjustment Bureau’ of Hollywood. Using heavy-handed means, they seek to ‘adjust’ agreements entered into long-ago agreed, ‘adjust’ determinations made long ago by the U.S. Copyright Office, and even ‘adjust’ history so as to hoard any and all monies rightfully earned by the estate of the man whose genius inspired what is indisputably a highly successful film.
