Seth MacFarlane sued over ‘Ted’

Celebrity animator and producer Seth MacFarlane, who is known for creating series like ‘Family Guy’ and ‘American Dad’ has landed in a copyright infringement case over raunchy comedy animation movie ‘ted’ which released in 2012 and had Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg in leading roles . The movie was the 12^th highest grossing movie of 2012 and was a commercial success.

Bengal Mantle Producers allege that the animation movie ‘ted’ is heavily inspired and ‘strikingly similar’ to their series "Charlie the Abusive Teddy Bear," the central character of the series with the similar name, a series of Internet videos which were aired in 2009, claiming that Ted infringes on the copyright of its videos due to the Ted bear largely matching the background story, persona, voice tone, attitude and dialogue of the Charlie bear. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said “Both Charlie and Ted reside in a substantially similar environment; including that both Charlie and Ted spend a significant amount of time sitting on a living room couch with a beer and/or cigarette in hand. Charlie has a penchant for drinking, smoking, prostitutes, and is a generally vulgar yet humorous character."

MacFarlane has not commented on the controversy and is busy making a sequel to the film title ‘Ted 2’. It is interesting to note that it is not the first time that the characters created by him have created controversy, especially in terms of content borrowing. Animated series ‘family guy’ has been criticized in the past for being too similar to animated series ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘South Park’. His own series ‘family guy’ ‘American dad’ and ‘Cleveland Show’ have been criticised for being ‘too similar’ to each other in plot and characters. On October 3, 2007, Bourne Co. Music Publishers filed a lawsuit accusing Family Guy of infringing its copyright on the song "When You Wish upon a Star", through a parody song entitled "I Need a Jew" appearing in the episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" (although it was ruled in 2009 that since the song was taken for comical use it was not an infringement).

Will the latest lawsuit affect the release or commercial success of the movie Ted-2 is yet to be seen, but it leaves us with a question of inspiration vs. infringement in creative endeavours. How much inspiration leads to intrusion is still debatable. What happens when a person repeats their own work, would that be infringement of one’s previous work? When is really the time when a designer realizes that their work is getting copied by someone else and it is time to file for an infringement suit?