I'd have to say you're ignoring the first part which clearly says don't send us any unsolicited material, and pointing to the latter part that says if you do, don't blame us if we use anything that looks interesting.
-Derek
I think that the key phrase is "ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques" -- which is very similar, if you were to go the Library of Congress site on what is and is not copyrightable in the area of what is *not* copyrightable.
NBC isn't spelling it out but what they are really saying is -- anything that you send us that isn't *copyrightable* -- isn't your property. And since it isn't, we can do whatever we want with it. But, of course, they aren't taking any particular legal right from you. That isn't a contractual right. You aren't giving them anything.
That is no more true for NBC than for me, or a perfect stranger or Osama bin Laden or anybody else.
Whatever there is about your particular work that is not copyrightable is fair game for anybody. And that includes the "idea" of your story, concepts, the "plot" etc., etc.
Of course, they're not really interested in taking your ideas. They don't expect that an unwanted or unsolicited manuscript off the street will contain anything of interest. It is extraordinarily unlikely that they would do anything with such a document other than immediately feed it into the nearest shredder.
What they want to do is protect themselves because everybody thinks that they've just come up with an incredibly brilliant new idea -- boy meets girl.
Or you name it. Or they've come up with a great new idea for a show -- not realizing that with a staff of a dozen writers working twelve hours a day, tossing out ideas for shows day after day after day, that they've got files full of ideas for the show, premises for shows, treatments for shows, outlines for the show, half-written episodes of the show. Episodes that got written and they decided they didn't quite work, not to mention all of the outlines for episodes for next season.
The chances of an outsider, who doesn't have access to all of that material actually coming up with something that nobody has thought of before is amazingly slim.
So the last thing that a network wants is for somebody -- or more likely dozens of somebodies -- coming up with "great ideas" for a show, submitting them -- and then seeing a show "just like my idea" a year later and turning around and suing.
As an example, I worked on a show called "Monsters" - which was an anthology show -- and we accepted submissions from anybody who would sign a release form. And really, the only requirement was that it was no more than four characters, two or three locations and a monster. You'd think the chances of any two stories being the same -- what are the odds?
Pretty good, actually.
Over the time I worked on the show, we must have gotten three or four submissions based on this, "monster under the bed/monster in the closet" idea -- and they were all basically the same.
You had the scared, imaginative little boy who keeps seeing the monster under his bed (or in the closet). He had a kind of tough guy, mean dad who doesn't believe him. He wants his kid to toughen up, stop imagining things, etc., etc. And in the end, the monster comes and gets the dad.
Every one of these things -- completely different writer, no relation to one another. Same exact thing.
Trouble is, in our earlier series, Tales from the Darkside, we'd done an episode called, strangely enough, "Monster Under the Bed" -- and it was about an imaginative little boy who kept seeing a monster under his bed -- he had this mean tough guy father -- etc. etc -- in the end the monster came and got the father.
Exactly the same. And I'm prepared to bet that none of the people who wrote those treatments saw that episode. If they had, they'd have never submitted to us, because they would have seen that we'd already done it.
It's just the whole "monster under the bed" premise pretty much yields an automatic "first take" -- okay, what do I do with that idea -- that follows an almost automatic line of least resistance.
And that line of least resistance ends up with this version of that story.
And all of these unrelated writers ended up with that story. And I've no doubt that, had we taken one and made it -- but for the release form, we'd have had another three or four suing us.
NMS
