Interactive books that let you dictate how a story goes isn’t exactly new and have been around for decades. Interactive television on the other hand is new in which Netflix has attempted to bring into the mainstream with the launch of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. This is a movie based on the Black Mirror franchise where users can make choices throughout the movie that will affect its ending.However it seems that not everyone was particularly thrilled by the movie, where the publisher of the Choose Your Own Adventure book franchise has since filed a lawsuit against Netflix alleging that the company had infringed upon a trademark, and had unlawfully used the publisher’s intellectual property and caused them “reputational harm”.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, it is the story of a programmer who attempts to adapt a fictional book called “Choose Your Own Adventure” into a video game. The publisher of the series claims that Netflix had used the brand to “capitalize on viewers’ nostalgia”, and that they object to being associated with the violence depicted in the movie. It should be noted that Netflix and the publisher were apparently in licensing discussions dating back to 2016, but were never granted the permission to use the brand.
According to the company’s cofounder and publisher, Shannon Gilligan, “We have received an unprecedented amount of outreach from people who believed we were associated with the creation of this film, including parents who were concerned that we had aligned the CYOA brand they knew and loved with content that surprised and offended them.”
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