The Asylum is an interesting film production company. On the one hand, I give them props for sheer brazenness. In addition to sharing Sharknado with the world, this is the company that produces direct-to-cable or -DVD films that often bear remarkable resemblances to, and with release dates in close proximity to, major Hollywood films. When I Am Legend came out in 2007, The Asylum released I Am Omega (or I Am Ωmega). (That’s even funnier if you know the Will Smith movie’s predecessor.) Its counterpart to Roland Emmerich’s 2008 film 10,000 BC was entitled 100 Million BC, and apparently had dinosaurs. The Keanu Reeves-led remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was joined, so to speak, by The Day the Earth Stopped. Right before the Brendan Fraser film Journey to the Center of the Earth came out in theaters, The Asylum released a film starring Greg Evigan (the other one of My Two Dads) entitled…..Journey to the Center of the Earth. I guess there’s plenty of Jules Verne to go around. The list goes on and on.

For the most part, The Asylum seems to have avoided serious legal entanglements with regard to their films’ occasional similarity to movies that get actual theatrical releases. Sony, which distributed the 2011 film Battle: Los Angeles in the rental market, took legal action against the directors of 2010’s Skyline because of similarities between the two films. The Asylum’s Battle of Los Angeles [emphasis added], released just before Battle: Los Angeles, did not have the same legal issues.

You might think that The Asylum would have some major copyright problems, with a movie like The Terminators coming out close to the same time as Terminator Salvation. You can’t copyright an idea, though. This is how movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact can coexist.

Where they could get in trouble, though, is in the areas of unfair competition and false advertising. The producers of Battleship, the 2012 film involving aliens that was allegedly based on a board game that never mentioned aliens, sued The Asylum over its film, tentatively titled American Battleship. In additional to federal copyright infringement claims, the lawsuit asserted causes of action under two statutes in the California Business and Professions Code. The Asylum’s film, the plaintiffs argued, was likely to create confusion in the public’s mind—specifically, people might mistake American Battleship for Battleship. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement, The Asylum released its film with the title American Warship, and the public had the opportunity to see Mario Van Peebles and Carl Weathers on their TV screens again.

The pièce de résistance of The Asylum’s business model may have come in 2012 with the film Age of the Hobbits, eventually released as Clash of the Empires. Warner Bros. sued and obtained an injunction delaying the release of the film. It presented survey results, according to the A.V. Club showing that 30-40% of respondents were confused about the film’s possible relation to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The Asylum had a novel defense:

In its defense, The Asylum naturally claimed fair use, saying with a straight face, “Age Of The Hobbits is about the real-life human subspecies, Homo Floresiensis, discovered in 2003 in Indonesia, which have been uniformly referred to as ‘Hobbits’ in the scientific community.” And as though citing “SCIENCE!” were not already rejoinder enough, the company also pointed to the clear disclaimer on its DVD artwork, reading, “They’re not Tolkien’s Hobbits… They’re real.” Nevertheless, a judge ultimately decided that “there is substantial likelihood that consumers will be confused by Age Of Hobbits and mistakenly purchase the film intending to purchase The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey…“

A movie about prehistoric humans actually could be pretty interesting, but it’s hard to credit an argument that a movie about a hominid species nicknamed “hobbits,” scheduled for release around the same time as a huge-budget adaptation of the Tolkien novel of the same name, is purely coincidental. It might not be as big of a problem if they had used any other word besides “hobbit.” Tolkien did not invent the word “hobbit,” but he was the first to use the word in reference to diminutive, hirsute humanoid beings. As far as the diminutive hominid fossils discovered in Indonesia, they are only nicknamed “hobbits,” going by the more scientific-sounding Homo floresiensis in the literature. It is difficult to conceive of any film with a title containing the word “hobbit” that would not cause some amount of confusion.

Now, if you’ll excuse, I heard The Asylum released a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters called Atlantic Rim.