There were some big boasts and big moments. Claims for psychotherapeutic coaching “radically different from that espoused by any other performance coach”—and by a female performance coach, at that, and equally broad and equivalently sneering dismissals of those claims as “indisputably futile.” Exchanges that could have been ripped straight from pages of a “Billions” script because, as the aforementioned performance coach, Denise Shull, alleges, those pages were ripped from her own book and her life more generally, and most especially her closet.
Shull’s “essential argument” concerning unique neuropsychoanalysis method as expressed in “Market Mind Games…” focused instead on the protectability of her fictional persona of a female in-house performance coach.
“The essential argument being that the Shull method, which is the assessment of the individual for their past trauma and how that effects their unconscious in the business of trading … how that was copied by ‘Billions’,” Turkel explained.
We regret to inform you, however, that our favorite real-life courtroom drama and yours—the one so much more compelling and interesting than “Billions” itself—seems highly unlikely to be renewed for further episodes by the judges of the Southern District of New York.
“I don’t mean to make light of it — I really don’t — but I was thinking as I was reading this about a television play in which the psychiatrist says to the patient, ‘why don’t you lie down here on the couch and tell me about your relationship with your mother.’ Now does Freud’s estate get to sue?/“It’s so generalized,” [U.S. Circuit Judge Robert] Sack continued, “one would think that there’s nothing unique and therefore copyrightable….”
“Are you claiming that the concept of a female performance coach at a hedge fund is copyrightable,” asked U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin…. [Showtime attorney Eliabeth] McNamara told the Obama-appointed Judge Chin on Thursday that he “hit the nail on the head.”
“She is trying to a state a claim … on really an abstract idea of a method that is not copyrightable,” McNamara said.
Copyright Battle Over TV’s ‘Billions’ Looks to Freud, or Maybe His Mother [Courthouse News Service]
