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Lucasfilms Nixes Star Wars Live Screening
An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle PI has an article about Lucasfilms sending a cease and desist letter to a local Seattle-based theater company. The company had been planning to do a live parody of Star Wars in which they would turn off the sound and redub it live. This brings up the question are parodies fair use? And if so, should copyright holders be allowed to order people not to parody their work?"
No, you A) Have to pay a license fee to show the movie whether or not you B) want to play the sound is up to you
It's a target of a C&D letter because they didn't get the rights to show the film in the first place. If they got the rights to do show it, then this would be a moot point.
It's not like a bunch of geeks dressed up as star wars characters were going on stage and doing the movie without the original lines, it was showing the movie a la MST3K which they need the rights to do so.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
The problem is that this probably doesn't qualify as a parody under the common law. This is probably characterized as a derivative work, with the video from the film being combined with parodizing content, and so is not protected by fair use provisions. But IANAL.
Parody IS fair use, and, more than that, constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but using actual Star Wars in the background is a violation of their IP.
It's a bummer, but there it is. They could make a parody movie of it (a la "Spaceballs") but they can't reproduce the content exactly, while over-dubbing, without getting permission.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
According to the US Copyright Office the copyright owner has the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works.
Lucas isn't seeing a cent, read the article
If you'll take a look at the little icons next to the story, you'll find that it's cross listed under law and money as well. The way the checkboxes work (someone please correct me if I'm worng on this) is that it'll block out any stories that are listed *only* under star wars. So to not see this story, you would have to have law and money blocked out too. This is the same deal for people who keep seeing the political stories. It's not broken, it just works in a way contrary to what you expect ^-~
You know you've lost it when you begin signing physical documents with =^_^=
They point is that they were not paying those fees. They were showing the movie for profit without going through the proper channels to get permission first from Lucasfilm or Fox. If they were doing it for free, or had gotten permission first, there probably wouldn't have been a problem.
Lucas is a greedy bastard. Does anyone know that he owns the term "android" and its derivatives? He has been suing independent artists and labels left and right that infringe upon his words. He wouldn't sue big guy like Radiohead for their song "Paranoid Android" because that would be big news and might cause a backlash. One example of a small label was a group that called themselves "Dead Droid Records" in Evansville, IN. Here is my question to you: Has the word "android" entered the American vocabulary and become so popular that Lucas should still have the copyright? Before you answer, remember that popular trademarks often enter the public domain as generic words (like scotch tape and aspirin). Also, should a person holding the rights to a single word have the right to selectively sue people as to not start a public backlash against them, or should they sue everyone who infringes regardless of their status?
- The film is thirty years old and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. It is outside of the copyright period in effect at the time of the film's initial release.
- A film seen by so many people becomes public domain as a result of having entered the cultural consciousness. The fact that is not legally secure only proves the absurdity of the USA copyright laws.
Damn. Where the hell did you learn about copyright law?
The US modified our copyright laws to conform to the Berne convention in 1976, thus making Lucas's Star Wars release in 1977 covered by the life-of-author+50 measure. So you're wrong on the first quoted claim.
The second quoted claim, that somehow over-use of copyright can erode it, is a misunderstanding. TRADEMARKS can be eroded to lose their legal meaning (i.e., Xerox), but copyrights cannot. Even if everyone on the entire planet has seen a work and can recite it from memory, the work is still protected by copyright until it expires.
these clowns aren't paying anything.
Username taken, please choose another one.
All the films for MST3K were licensed to be shown on TV. Which is also why a lot of the DVDs are so late: its expensive or hard to relicense some of the movies for DVD release. Simply showing it and making fun of it isn't exactly paraody.
As long as these people CAN convince the judge that what they are doing is a parody, LucasFilm doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Wrong.
Why?
Imagine this. I decide I want to sell Star Wars bootleg videos in the street. So I break out DVDAuthor and superimpose MST3K-ish "parody" subtitles onto the movie. Now, according to you, I can go ahead and distribute my "parody" SW version with impunity?
Fair use doesn't work that way. Just because something's a parody, doesn't automatically make it fair use. In every case, the rights of the defendant must be weighed against those of the plaintiff, and except in very clear cut circumstances, the plaintiff has the upper hand because fair use is an affirmative defense -- you must prove that it applies to your infringement, not just assert it.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The word "android" certainly predates Lucas. Check any dictionary.
The word "droid", on the other hand, was introduced by Lucas/Alan Dean Foster in the first Star Wars movie. Knowing about all the merchandising that resulted from Star Wars, it's not hard to believe that Lucas trademarked it.
Based on my (somewhat limited) knowledge of copyright and trademark law, he's within his right to ask for damages in the case of "droid" if the word is trademarked. Also, I believe you may use the word "android" all day if you want.
Cheers,
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Even if everyone on the entire planet has seen a work and can recite it from memory, the work is still protected by copyright until it expires.
Good example: the "Happy Birthday" song, which is copyrighted. That's why when somebody has a birthday at a restaurant, the employees have to sing their own dumb little song to embarrass the poor fool.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Nothing can be taken from the public domain; CTEA simply indefinitely prolonged the term of works that were still copyrighted but slated to enter the public domain soon. There was a point raised in EvA pertaining to restorations. If one does a film restoration, one holds a copyright over the restoration, even if the film itself is P.D. (Unfortunately, only around 1 in 20 films from before 1950--and even fewer films from even earlier--retain commercial profitability enough to make restorations viable. According to seven of the justices on the USSC, however, their copyright holders will permit third-party restorations purely out of the goodness of their hearts.)
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Private schools are for-profit
Not all of them. Many are non-profit organizations which simply don't want to follow government regulations in certain areas (many religiously funded schools fall into this category).
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
Even more basic is the fact that you also can't SHOW a copyrighted film in a theater without a contract from the copyright holder. Let alone sell tickets.
You can't take a copyrighted anything and modify it without the permission of the copyright holder.
Under the Compulsory License provision for audio recordings, You CAN take a copyrighted and commercially released song recording and make your own original recording of the melody and arrangement with parody lyrics (a la Weird Al Yankovic)as long as you pay the compulsory license fee to the copyright holder. The copyright holder CANNOT deny you permission to do this. But under this arrangement you can't sample any of the actual audio from the actual original.
If you want to sample actual audio from the original, you can't do it unless you get contractural permission from the copyright holder--and that usually involves licensing and money.
But rights for film, theater and television are called "grand rights" and are different than rights for songs and audio recordings.
The point here is that this theater wanted to use George Lucas' actual film (which is copyrighted) and change the soundtrack. They might have been able to create their own original film, without using any footage or images from the real Star Wars. But what they were trying to do here is clearly a no-go, legally.
A couple of years ago, as reported here on Slashdot, a company wanted to release DVDs of movies like "Titanic" with the nudity hidden, by digitally painting clothing over the nude actors. They wanted to pay the licensing fees to the copyright holders and sell the DVDs to people who were offended by R-rated movies but would be willing to buy them if the reasons for the "R" were removed. The copyright holders, including the film company that produced "Titanic" rightly stepped in and prevented this from happening.
If you create a work of art and you copyright it, you have the absolute right to control the way that this art is seen in public, and to protect yourself from having what you created altered in any way that doesn't suit you.
The "parody" question comes into play when somebody makes a piece of art that is 100% their own creation which parodies an existing work of art (Mel Brooks' movie "Spaceballs," which is a parody of "Star Wars"). But that is clearly not what the theater in question was wanting to do.
So, no, modifying copyrighted material for parody is not fair use. The laws defining the concept of "fair use" don't mention parody at all.
They didn't perform Star Wars but they have done other movies, and my wife and I attended a showing.
http://www.jetcityimprov.com/twistedflicks/
are they adding content which legitimately justifies the price they are charging on its own
They are. That's the whole idea of "Twisted Flicks".
They show the movie without sound, and they take suggestions from the audience. "Okay, I need the name of a place. Sedro Wooley. Okay, now I need a profession. Dressmaker." And so on.
Then improv comedy guys then use the suggestions from the audience to make something up on the fly. They have to think on their feet and make funny stuff up rapidly. What you are really paying for is the improv.
Really, they can use any movie to do this. But there is potentially extra humor value if the movie is well-known; if the movie is itself part of pop culture, then sly pop-culture references might be easy to slip in.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think these guys can hide behind the parody protection laws. They aren't really looking to specifically make fun of the movie, they just need a starting place to hang their improv humor.
They are showing a movie in a theatre, so they need permission from whoever owns the movie.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely