These kinds of situations also likely hurt the editor's feels pretty bad too. We once had a story that was told through found VHS recordings of the show Friends that become increasingly disturbing. I loved it. However, it put us at risk of being sued by NBC, which is not something we could afford to risk, so we offered to work with the writer to find a way to make it so NBC's intellectual property wasn't the entire core of the story, but he wasn't down for that, so we had to let it go. I'm still sad about that, lol.