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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?"
The vast number of Star Wars parodies that exist show that parodies are protected. What isn't protected is charging people $10 to see the movie and then talking over the whole thing.
From the article:
That is not an unreasonable demand.If you ask me it sounds like Lucas was protecting Seattle. If anyone should be suing, it's Best Brain.
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IMHO, as long as they pay the same fee that any other theater would pay to screen the movie, they should be free to pariody it as they wish.
It seems like the "Your Rights Online" section of Slashdot has outgrown its name into a pure copyright-bashing area. Where's the "online" in this story? All we have here is a group of artists who wanted to do a live performance while showing the video half of a still-under-copyright movie. Having copyright laws that block that from happening against the copyright-holder's wishes may be annoying, but it's the law and they've gotta deal with it.
The connection to online is just plain not there... either this story belongs in the main index section instead, or this section needs a new name.
What it comes down to is (a) the movie will be shown without its soundtrack and (b) some people will be talking in the theater while the movie is showing.
Sorry, but how the hell can this be the target of a C&D letter? Point (a) is up to whoever's showing the movie, and point (b) has no relation to the movie itself. Where does copyright law come into this at all?
Parody is not talking over someone else's movie. Parody is making your own movie. It's a very, very, very clear distinction. Whether Lucasfilms was being jerks or not is up for debate, but this has nothing to do with parody.
When I was a kid, some mates and I refilmed the entire orginal trilogy in about two hours. It was tricky as I was both Vader and Skywalker and we only had one Storm Trooper so we kept stopping and starting the camcorder so that this one Storm Trooper could run in and get shot repeatedly. It also led to the immortal line, "That's not a moon, that's a football."
All of this utterly irrelevant however, unless any of my mates are reading. For me, the issue is not the legality or not, but the actual effects of the performance. First - does this harm the film company? Well, it's unlikely that people will go to see the theatre company's version instead of the original and I don't see how else it would harm their profits. And I doubt that it will be grossly defamatory to the people involved with Star Wars.
So why should anyone have the right to stop them? Yes they are profiting through it, the article says $10 a head. But it doe sn't cost Lucas anything. It's money out of nothing and it's creative. Everything new evolves from something that came befor e. To put a lock on anything that grows out of your work is to kill the whole line of it's artistic descendants.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Okay, this makes Lucas look like an enormous ass. But, oh, wait, that's long since been established. We already know that Lucas likes to tell Star Wars fans where they can shove their opinions, so he's not really losing anyone's respect here. If Episode II didn't piss you off, Episode I did... if it wasn't the prequels, it was the remastering or the remastering of the remastering...
But I digress.
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--this brings up the question, "What constitutes a parody?"
There's a lot of precedent for parodies being protected under fair use. And certainly, copyright holders should not be allowed to order people around with regard to parodies.
I think the real issue here is, the parody in question employs a public screening of Lucas' films. It would clearly be a protected parody if the movie were re-shot or acted out live. But actually putting on a public screening of the film--even with sound replaced--is not quite so clear cut a situation.
Maybe we'll get lucky and this will go to court and we'll get a favorable ruling. But it probably won't make it so far.
Here's proof. Free 27" flatscreen TVs.
Well, they're getting some press alright.
ILL Clinton - Maker of Machinima Movies
It may be, but at first glance it is a gray area. Not all parodies are fair use, live or not. Without knowing what the theater group has planned for his copyright work, he is justifiably skeptical. Granted it probably is fair use, but Lucas does not have the time to go around checking what every person with a parody is doing. Corporate lawyers have nothing to lose by being overly zealous. Win or lose, the individual lawyers will laugh all the way to the bank.
Unfortunately, once the attack dogs (a.k.a. lawyers) are on the scent, the situation turns ugly and expensive. Hopefully when the dust settles Lucas will get enough $100 bills to burn in his fireplace to keep him warm on his large estate, and the theater group will be free to perform their act under fair use provisions. Time will tell, probably once the new DVDs sell enough and Episode III is through with its theater run.
George is worried about his legacy...well, he's killed his legacy himself.
George needs to learn that money is not everything. Piss off your hardcore fans and suddenly you find yourself in a world of shit. With the Internet to unite fanboys worldwide, he could face organized boycotts, negative reviews, and negative word of mouth advertising. I, for one, hate the man. He had some great visions and great films, but he shows his true colors over and over: greed unfettered with respect for his loyal fans.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
[Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer; these are just my personal understandings as a member of the public. I am an advocate of existing strong controls by copyright owners. I am also, however, a strong advocate of the existing special protections for the work of parody authors. I myself am an author of works of parody that would not be possible absent such protection.]
As I understand it, the "fair use" criteria are not hard and fast. Substantial resources are available on the web for helping to understand this complex issue.
There are four criteria used in judging fair use. Among them, the principal one in controversy here seems to be "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole". The law doesn't say how the court is to address the amount and substantiality, just that it is to pay heed to it. What follows here is my own analysis of these issues.
First, and most obviously, by omitting the soundtrack, they are plainly taking only part of the work. This, it seems to me, is an acknowledgment of their need to not just rely on the power of the original piece in making their new work. (Note: I think there could exist situations where using the whole work might still be necessary to a proper public dialog through parody, but the case is easier to make when some parts have been omitted.)
Personally, I think the case for "fair use" in this case hinges on these issues: Are they using parody as a mere dodge for paying royalties on a movie they would just like to show for free? That is, are they negatively impacting the commercial stake of the movie? And secondarily, are they adding content which legitimately justifies the price they are charging on its own,or are they merely riding on the coat-tails of the movie to make money without adding any legitimate content of their own.
It seems to me very unlikely that a person who had never seen the movie would endure a parody session as a dodge for seeing it. It would be cheaper for them to just rent the DVD. Notwithstanding Lucas' desire that they not charge money, it seems to me that the fact that money is being willingly paid by attendees is a kind of proof that there is legitimate new content here. For far less, people could rent the DVD.
Additionally, and importantly, the work is not likely to appeal to anyone not having seen the movie. The movie would barely be intelligible to them. I'd bet that (to round numbers) everyone attending has seen (and paid for seeing) the movie several times. So I find it hard to imagine Lucas can make a case of losing money on this. If anything, the movie might create a desire on the part of attendees to go back and watch again to check on something, and that might generate new revenue for Lucas. So that seems a win/win, not an injury to Lucas.
Ironically, I further think that if Lucas made the materials routinely available for parody situations at an affordable cost, I might think they had more of a claim. It's the hard-line "you absolutely must not" stand that leads me to believe the courts should defend the individual rights of parody creators. Probably Lucas should just have a "parody-maker's price" for partial viewings,and then they'd have a new revenue source that people could tap into.
Further, if the work were not so ubiquitous as to make it likely that nearly everyone in the audience had paid at least once and probably many times to see the movie in some form already, one might be able to more easily make the claim that this was a dodge of the money-making version. But since the entire point rests upon the recognizability (presumably due to mu
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer