The sorting out of all of these agreements is obviously at the heart of understanding this, and we may never have any answers.
Remember, though, that DPC is merely an agent, and has no rights. Whether the rights to Sergel's script(s) can be pulled depends on what the grant of rights to Sergel says. There would be no agreement between the Lee estate and DPC: Lee granted certain rights to Sergel once upon a time and Sergel engaged DPC to license those rights. But DPC has no "rights to license their versions" or anything else. Perhaps you mis-wrote.
You are right that there being different scripts makes this an atypical situation, but whether it's complicated depends on what is in those agreements. (This is more akin to licensing translations perhaps.)
I stand by my guess that the Lee estate is where the complication begins. I cannot imagine that Rudin's deal did not include a restriction on other productions, but the question is, did the estate have the right to agree to that. Normally, exploitation rights do not provide for the grantor's control over productions.
We shall see. |
