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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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.