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Comment by chamanbuga | Hacker News Reader

As of late I keep hearing/reading/seeing that the original author of Terminator and the Matrix is Sophia Stewart. It seems even the FBI ruled in her favor, yet both wikipedia pages have not mentioned her at all. Is this a case of really good fake news, as of late, or Wikipedia simply hasn't caught up?

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https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/05/instagram-...

I don't know which FBI you're speaking of, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't rule (adjudicate) on anything.

The courts threw her case out. No, she didn't invent those.

Yeah, her deal strongly sounds like "coincidental invention" type stuff. Especially for me with The Matrix. As a Matrix fanatic I could point you to dozens of works for which you could make this sort of argument.

There were even two other "people stuck inside simulated reality" SciFi films released within two months of The Matrix (Existenz and The Thirteenth Floor).

The plot is a very close take on Solider by Harlan Ellison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_(The_Outer_Limits)

I don't think they needed to steal it from anyone else :)

Not close enough, IMO, after reading the wikipedia page. It says more about US legal practices than about the stories.

Ellison really only won his case because James Cameron had made some careless comments about cribbing some ideas from Ellison's works.

Says more about Harlan Ellison than about either.

Ellison's claims are BS.

He says it stole from Soldier and Man with a glass hand, but anyone who's seen those can see that it's not even remotely close.

You don't own "time travel", man.

Terminator is already listed as having copywright issues with another author though.

what do you mean by this?

Harlan Ellison got a settlement when he said that Terminator was based on his story from The Outer Limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_(The_Outer_Limits)#The...

Which, if you've seen that episode, is about like saying The Wizard of Oz ripped off Alice in Wonderland... but Harlan's gotta be Harlan.

https://electricliterature.com/was-1984s-the-terminator-a-ha...

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