[C]hooseco, a publishing company with eight employees in Waitsfield, is suing TV and movie streaming service Netflix for trademark infringement.
The firm says in its $25 million lawsuit, filed Jan. 11 in U.S. District Court in Burlington, that the Netflix show “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” a live-action interactive movie, infringes on Chooseco’s trademark and disparages the series with violence, murder, drug use and other material.
“The (live-action movie) protagonist, a video game designer, asserts in the opening sequence that his own work is based on “Bandersnatch … a Choose Your Own Adventure book,” Chooseco said in a prepared release. “Fictional ‘Bandersnatch’ is not a Choose Your Own Adventure book nor does the movie adhere to the Choose Your Own Adventure rules about successful interactive storytelling,” the company said.
The Choose Your Own Adventure Series is a series of children’s books where each story is written in the second person, enabling readers to make choices that determine the actions of the protagonist and the outcome of the story, according to the Goodreads website. The series was originally published by Vermont Crossroads Press in Warren in the 1970s as the “Adventures of You” series, according to Goodreads.
Chooseco said the series sold more than 250 million books in 40 languages between 1978 and 1998. The Waitsfield company said in its statement that it was formed in 2004 to re-release many of the titles, license new interactive media under the brand and develop new Choose Your Own Adventure book series.
“The misappropriation of our mark by Netflix presents an extreme challenge for a small independent publisher like Chooseco,” said Shannon Gilligan, the publisher and co-founder of Chooseco, in the statement. She is the widow of the original publisher, R.A. Montgomery, according to Variety Magazine.
“The use of Choose Your Own Adventure in association with such graphic content is likely to cause significant damage, impacting our book sales and affecting our ability to work with licensing partners in the future,” she said.
Chooseco Associate Publisher Melissa Bounty said the Waitsfield company has eight workers in its Waitsfield office as well as two dozen independent contractors in the U.S. and Canada that it uses for services such as layout, design, copy editing and illustration.
Netflix did not respond to a request for comment. Netflix says on its website that it has 139 million paid memberships in more than 190 countries.
