John Titor story :Possible publicity plant for indie film?

[jaxshooter]

About 6 years ago,a guy calling himself John Titor appeared on internet message boards claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036 (johntitor.com).He painted a rather dystopian apocalyptic picture of the future and explained away the grandfather paradox associated with time travel by stating that the universe was made up of an infinite number of realities in which all possible scenarios are played out,so that when you traveled in time,you only created another alternate universe.

Most people reading the web info would probably regard the story as a hoax (yet one of the first things Titor did was post a picture and blueprints of his time machine.This had physicists looking at it going "hmmmm" and some from that community said it might actually work),but for what purpose?Could it be that a struggling sci fi writer/filmmaker came up with the story and since it's not "Hollywood" enough with no bug eyed,mucous dripping monsters or high tech space battles or hot babes in skin tight space suits,the writer posed as a real time traveler on the web to try to get publicity.
Looking at the John Titor related websites,it definitely looks as though it's gained a cult following and there's even pictures published on the main site of a movie in the works.

Wouldn't it be interesting to see if a bunch of creative works were done say books,movies and then later someone surfaces as the perpetrator of the hoax and launches a massive lawsuit for intellectual property infringement.

[steve hyde]

....it is an interesting idea. Publicity stunts are great when they make reference to something authentic. I don't know anything about the this Titor character, but I like the idea of creating a fictional character from the future who is trying to communicate with us now in an act of desperation to help prevent a tragedy. YouTube is of course an audiovisual vehicle for this kind of traveling campaign through cyber space.

Steve

[Actor]

Wouldn't it be interesting to see if a bunch of creative works were done say books,movies and then later someone surfaces as the perpetrator of the hoax and launches a massive lawsuit for intellectual property infringement.

In the U.S. such a lawsuit would be thrown out of court. History and true events cannot be copyrighted. Any published work that claims to be factual loses any possibility of copyright protection, no matter how outlandish. In an actual court case a man published a book in which he claimed to be a UFO abductee. He later sued a motion picture company that included material from his book, claiming that the material was so outlandish that they must have known it was fiction and therefore copyrighted intellectual property. He lost his case. The court said it was not their job to determine if something was or was not outlandish.

The movie Fargo has a title card in it which says it is based on true events. It is not. By including that card in the movie the producers leave open the possibilty that someone could make another movie from the same material. However, I personally would not try that since they can afford much bigger lawyers than I can.

[HeathenClerk]

A shame Mr. Titor didn't plant any future knowledge of website design, so that flagship fan sites carrying his namesake wouldn't reflect 1996 so well.

Maybe that's the irony?

Erik :lol: