Ben Child
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 19 December 2012 11.44 EST
Green light … Emma Thompson's period drama Effie is set for a May release. Photograph: Juan Naharro Gimenez/WireImage
Emma Thompson has won a landmark US ruling allowing her to move forward with her forthcoming period drama Effie, about the famous love triangle between art critic John Ruskin, his teenage wife Effie Gray and pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.
Thompson had been accused of plagiarism by the American writer Eve Pomerance, author of two unfilmed screenplays about the Victorian scandal titled The King of the Golden River and The Secret Trials of Effie Gray. The timing of the ruling in the Oscar-winning actor's favour could not be more vital, since Effie is due for release in May, with Thompson herself joining Dakota Fanning, Orlando Bloom and Robbie Coltrane in the cast.
New York district judge J Paul Oetken noted the difficulty of determining copyright infringement in the historical fiction realm where US laws did not protect repetition of known historical facts, only the purloining of imaginative ideas relating to them. In a 61-page ruling, he granted Thompson's production company Effie Film a declaration of non-infringement, the British writer having sued following threats of litigation from Pomerance.
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