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The fight between Anthem Wrestling and Matt Hardy over his
“Broken” character has gotten even more heated. Anthem claims they own the
characters played by Matt, Jeff, Matt’s wife, his father-in-law and even his
son. Matt claims that he came up with the ideas and was allowed to by former TNA
co-owner Billy Corgan so Anthem has no rights to the concepts. There has been a
back and forth between Matt and his wife Reby with Anthem on who actually owns
the gimmick. Before leaving TNA Matt applied for the copyrights to everything
but has gotten a lot of pushback from Anthem Wrestling president Ed Nordholm.
This week he made this statement: "In response to on-going speculation
concerning our position with respect to the “Broken Brilliance” creative, I am
providing this detailed log of our communications on the subject and the
contractual structure of our relationship with Matt Hardy with respect to
intellectual property matters, which is standard to our roster and in the
industry.” His claim is that Impact had no problem with Matt and Jeff using the
gimmick during their brief run in Ring of Honor as long as they got paid for the
usage. He also claims that he contacted the WWE and was told they had no
interest in using the characters. The issue with that is a story already came
out that the WWE were indeed interested in the “broken” characters and that’s
why they reached out to Matt. That was enough to annoy Matt and Reby who
revealed that TNA tried to sell the WWE on a deal that could have had the WWE
reimburse TNA for using the gimmick. She has documentation and recorded
conversations to back up that Impact has no claim to the gimmick and wants this
to be settled in court. Impact’s biggest issue is a claim that the Hardy’s were
basically work-for-hire and once the gimmick was seen on TV they were giving the
rights to TNA. That’s going to be hard to prove since some of the angles seen on
TV were shot by the brothers on their own dime. Add to that the reveal that
Reby’s dad and her son were never under contract to TNA so how can you claim
ownership? |
