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?"

Comments

Not parody

[anotherone]

Parody is alright, but these people are just showing the movie with no sound. That isn't parody, that's Showing The Movie With No Sound.

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:

"In order to protect our copyright, anyone who plans to commercially exhibit our films has to go through the appropriate channels," said Lucasfilm spokeswoman Lynne Hale.

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.

YRO? What's online got to do with this?

[LostCluster]

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.