Wachowski brothers stole Matrix idea from someone else?

[dirtydx]

its so hard to come off as original nowadays.. no matter how good or honest an idea is, 3000 people are gonna claim it as their own. If she came up with the idea she shoulda made the movie, otherwise STFU, and stop trying to leech off people who got the job done.

[tenguzero]

This is quite a crazy scenario, altough not unheard of. I should hope she pulled the race-card thing only in retaliation, perhaps for some comment made toward her in that vein -- otherwise that's kind of a cheap shot on her part.

I've always had a sort of hunch that The Terminators and The Matrix do indeed share a sort of kindred bond (actually, I can remember telling people in the past that I thought The Matrix was eerily similar to The Terminators in its fundamental premise.) But then again, authors like Stephenson and Gibson had already covered this territory, and before them Assimov and Dick, and so on. This, I suppose, is indeed the flaw inherent in this woman's claim. Everything she could present is technically circumstantial. Unless of course, Fox and the Wachowski brothers utilized actual NAMES, LABELS, and perhaps DIALOGUE from her works. But what the court is to decide on.

I could write and publish a book about humans who are trapped inside a construct created by machines and computers, and the ongoing liberation efforts of a select group, set it in a future world, and have the protagonist be a brooding computer hacker utilizing the handle "TenguZero." And I wouldn't be in violation of anything beyond that of sheer unoriginality. Now, if I wrote and published a book about a construct called "The Matrix," where a character named "Neo" battled in a cyber world designed by "The Architect," THEN I might be in for some trouble.

The woman's claims, while seemingly legit enough, are still, really, nothing more than an interesting point for comparison. Unless she does indeed have HARD EVIDENCE directly linking the films with her own work.