With a little over a month to go until the new season of Walking Dead, speculation is rampant over which of the show’s main characters will meet their end, courtesy of arch-villain Negan’s barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat.
But if you’re posting spoilers on social media—and you have a real connection to the show’s production—be careful what you reveal, or you could be in serious trouble.
One popular (and very accurate) online spoiler community, The Spoiling Dead, announced last month that they intended to reveal who perished in the Walking Dead‘s season six shock ending. AMC, the Walking Dead‘s parent network, responded with an announcement of their own: a “cease and desist” letter from their attorney, telling the spoilers that if their prediction was correct, they could face an expensive lawsuit.
AMC told the community that they considered the spoiler, which they considered to be information gleaned from sources inside the show’s production, a “copyright infringement.”
The Spoiling Dead backed off their promise, and told fans that they’d prefer their livelihoods over their fans’ need to know which beloved character gets a barbed wire bat to the noggin. They cautioned, though, that AMC can’t keep the secret forever, that fans would uncover the mysterious death before the season premiere, and that no inside information was necessary. (The Spoiling Dead claims they use the show’s production methods and clues in the show itself to come up with their ideas.)
But the question remains: Is spoiling a show really copyright infringement? The Onion’s AV Club tried to tackle the question, but came upon a legal minefield. It turns out, at least according to modern interpretations of intellectual property law, whether your spoiler is actionable depends largely on how you came up with it.
If you have inside knowledge from the show’s staff (directly or indirectly) or have seen unfinished production materials—whether or not you trade in spoilers for profit—you could be liable. If you’re just an armchair Walking Dead or Game of Thrones theorist, you’re far less likely to face your own arch-villain in AMC’s (or HBO’s) attorney.
For example, when spoilers about Game of Thrones fifth season began to appear online after HBO had sent out press screeners (which are finished products), HBO didn’t send cease-and-desists to online speculators; they simply stopped sending out screeners. But when a source on set leaked information about the show to a YouTube spoiler account before production and editing had ended, and that account broadcast the inside information, they took swift action.
With The Spoiling Dead, AMC cited their track record in making accurate predictions as proof that they had a source inside production—and that
The Spoiling Dead needed good spoilers to stay in business.
So keep sharing those (totally divorced from inside information) spoilers, Internet.
And for the record, our money is on a dead Daryl.
