Slashdot Mirror
007 Dis(Gold)members Austin Powers
gpinzone writes, "MGM and Danjaq, the British company that controls the Bond
film license, have obtained a cease-and-desist order against New
Line Cinema that prohibits New Line from calling the latest
installment of
Mike Myers' shagadelic spy series
Austin Powers in Goldmember . The full
article is available from E!-Online."
Did you even read the article? It says MGM and Danjaq only want the title of the movie changed.
The characters and the plot do not need to be changed, even though there is a character in the movie called Goldmember.
It is strange how the film companies only want the title changed but not the character that infringes the copyright
--Metrollica
Other articles:
Movies.go.com
Yahoo
BBC news
CNN
From CNN: Rappers 2 Live Crew, for example, took their use of the Roy Orbison song "Pretty Woman" all the way to the Supreme Court, which then reached the explicit conclusion that a parody falls within the scope of the fair-use defense. It would, however, be impossible to market the film as "Goldmember" during that process.
--Metrollica
From a Yahoo story: MGM initially challenged the use of "The Spy Who Shagged Me," an obvious play on the 1977 Bond title "The Spy Who Loved Me." But that dispute was settled when New Line agreed to include trailer play for MGM movies on its Austin Powers sequel.
Yeah, it sucks that there's not some some huge global information network where we could go to learn about fair use issues rather than just speculating about them.
Goldmember falls flat on 2 out of 4 fair use criteria. Fair use is an exception to the very clear copyright law, and it's a civil action, so it's "balance of probabilities" not "beyond all reasonable doubt". It's not prior restraint on publication either, as the name is already being used in marketing (c.f. the recalled material). The copyright owners are well within their rights to take this action, and Mike should have been ready to defend it from day one.
It's no big whoop though. We're looking at a quick out of court settlement, balanced against free publicity for both franchises. A couple of PR guys lose out... unless the whole issue is a well managed PR stunt to scam publicity for all parties.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Ah, but Weird Al can't release the parodies without permission from the song's owner.
There are some songs (Chicken Pot Pie, Snack All Night) which he'll do live but wasn't allowed to release on record, and are not included in the live video. This is because the song's owner wouldn't allow the release of those parodies.
Neil Innes wrote brilliant Beatles parodies for "The Rutles", and despite being a pal of the Beatles, (The Bonzoes hit single "Urban Spaceman", also penned by Innes, was produced by Paul McCartney!), he had the rights taken away from him in court when the owners of the Beatles songs successfully sued. These rights to songs such as "Ouch", "Doubleback Alley", "Cheese and Onions" etc eventually ended up with all the other old Beatles material as being owned by Michael Jackson!
The late George Harrison in later years attemped to buy back the rights for his mate Neil, but with no success.
Neil Innes later successfully sued Oasis for stealing the melody of his song "How sweet to be an idiot", which considering many Oasis songs could be labelled beatles parodies is nicely ironic!
So. Parodies can get you in legal hot water, and if the Bond people want to force the name of the new Austin Powers movie to be changed, there are precedents.
Besides which, the Austin Powers joke got old after the first movie...
"Information wants to be paid"
The idea of "conjuring up" the original work has become both a basis for protection, and a limitation. You can use enough of the original so that the target of your parody is obvious, but you can't simply copy the original, hoping to benefit from its success, and then throw in a few jokes in order to gain protection. Commercial parodies are just as entitled to this protection as non-commercial ones, as well.
You're right, it doesn't. This article does. It's a copyright issue.
Ah, but Weird Al can't release the parodies without permission from the song's owner.
Actually, he can. It's his own decision to not release those parodies that haven't been approved by the original artist.
According to a story on Yahoo!, this time they Austin Powers people did not go through the proper channels to gain permission to use the title. So, if they go through these channels, which they tried to circumnavigate this with Goldmember, they can probably use it.
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
Your mistaking Weird Al's asking the artists as a requirement...it isnt. he does it as a courtesy. The Parody laws doesnt require him to secure any permissions..as long as its a parody.
people can still bring lawsuits though...just becuase there is a law that backs it up people can still work the system to keep the little man down.
-------------- DarkSyd21 -------------- "For Christ's Sake!! Put Some Pants On!!!"
Check the date on the article. This was reported back in September. It said that filming was scheduled to begin in November.
Meanwhile, a few weeks ago I saw a preview for Goldmember. It was still a ways off, but I'd assume they would have changed the name in the nearly 4 months since this article was written if there were still legal issues surrounding it.
This has beeen discussed ad infinitum on alt.fan.james-bond many times before. This isn't a copyright or trademark dispute. It's a standard part of the MPAA.
Basically, MGM has a problem with how Goldmember is being marketed (the trailer comes too close to some of the sight gags in Goldfinger, mainly). They're not suing New Line; they've complained to the MPAA panel that governs member's promotions and titling and so forth and convinced them to bar New Line from promoing the film until they work out their differences.
I think MGM/Danjaq/EON are being morons, but this is not a threat to parodies of Bond films outside the MPAA. If you want to make a homemade porn film titled "GoldenCock", you can.
That said, it is nice to see the Bond series getting some play on Slashdot. Enough of those crap Sci-Fi series like Star Trek and Star Wars...
Al doesn't have to get ANY permission from the original writers/producers of the songs. They're protected as long as they are parodies. If you remember Amish Paradise, the rapper who originally did that song wanted to kill him for "Stealing his music" .. When all was said and done - Sorry, protected because it was a parody. please drive thru thnx.
Additionally, he does need permission for songs like The Saga Begins, because the use of American Pie to parody Star Wars doesn't count like that.
I think MGM and Dunjaq will in the end lose the case because of the precedent set by MAD magazine back in the 1950's, where the courts in the end ruled that parody is a protected First Amendment right.
Somehow, both MGM and Dunjaq seem to have forgotten that the entire Austin Powers concept is a parody on the whole idea of spy movies in the first place! (rolling eyes skyward)
While we might at one time have thought the law well-settled concerning the copyright issues of parody as fair use, the truth is far more interesting.
Clearly, we know that a rap reworking of O Pretty Woman, parodizing the song as an unrealisticly romanticized account of the horrific life of a prostitute on the street is fair use, for the Supremes told us so in Campbell v. Acuff Rose.
Alas, the Courts in infinite wisdom have distinguished with a fine hair the parodizing of a work of authorship with the satirizing of a societal issue by reference to a work, for example the Dr. Seuss-esque storybook about the O.J. Simpson Trial, the "Cat NOT in the hat, which was held NOT to be fair use. There was an interesting article about this case in the Cardozo Law Journal. (big pdf file)
Finally, we have the recent reworking of the civil war epic "The Wind Done Gone," which led to one of the more important recent copyright and parody decisions, and an excellent Eleventh Circuit opinion.
And that's just the Copyright issues. There remain the trademark parody cases, which have an even odder range of uncertainty. Certainly, there are a host of cases where trademark parodies have been found permissible and protected (I think "Off the wall-street journal" was an example of one that passed), but apparently there is an invisible (or at least very gray at the fringe) line of cases where the use is so offensive to the trademark that it borders on unfair competition. (I think Jordache with a depicted butt and Cocaine with the Coca-cola commercial style failed, but again, I may be misremembering).
I had a case not too long ago when I analyzed these issues and this absolutely murky hunk of case law. The best I could approximate is the SDR&R standard: "it is ok to parody a trademark, unless you make reference to sex, drugs or rock & roll."
Interestingly, these standards (trademark and copyright) are NOT consistent. The Campbell Copyright case was a fact pattern as egregiously offensive to the Orbison estate as Cocaine was to the Coca Cola Company. Yet there, it was protected expression.
It would be interesting to see a case well-resolved that addresses these conflicting areas of law clearly. But at any rate, I wouldn't presume without seeing ALL the facts and ALL the arguments that either side has a clear win. This is one of the truly gray margins of the law, except in the few arenas where the conduct has already been litigated. Unless your case lies foursquare on the facts of an existing, controlling case, this is as uncertain an area as it gets.
From the article:
MGM and Danjaq, the British company that controls the Bond film license, have obtained a cease-and-desist order from an Industry panel that prohibits New Line from calling the latest installment of Mike Myers' shagadelic spy series Austin Powers in Goldmember.
See the bold part there? They didn't get the cease-and-desist from the Government. This is a private business issue.
And a Motion Picture Association of America arbitration panel sided with MGM.
Ayep. Your friends, the MPAA at work.
If New Line is taking it seriously, then there's probably a contract issue in place here. Chances are, New Line is un-titling their movie because MGM would sue the pants off New Line for releasing it as is, probably a breach-of-contract suit; I would guess stemming from some rules of membership in the MPAA.
While I personally think it's pretty stupid of MGM to push this, it's _entirely legal_. This has nothing to do with copyright law or fair use.
-JDF