Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Lucas Films is overly obsessive over the conditions in the theaters in which Star Wars movies played... they spun of THX as a certification body to make sure visual and sound equipment is upto code for everything from theaters to the recording studio used for a video game.
It shouldn't be surprising that a group like this is going to get legal nastygrams for what they're trying to do here when you put that in context. Lucas Films isn't going to release any part of their movie to people who want to do parodies, if they want to do a real parody the right way they'd have to use their own video content. These people got used to using the real movie's video when they were only doing public domain movies, but they fail to understand that anything that came out after the introduction of Mickey Mouse won't be public domain until at least the 2010s, assuming the law isn't revised agian. Until that happens, copyright holders will have the power to shut down this type of "parody" as being not far enough removed from the original work to count.
Remember the company who sued the JibJab over the THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND use the political satire:
/ 14 16257
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/25
I realize there's a legal difference between parody and satire and that this case was over a lapsed copyrighted work.
This still sounds like a great opportunity for litegation against LucasFilms over fair use.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just like Paramount shut down Star Drek , an unbelievably funny musical parody of Star Trek by David Rodwin. It ran for a year and a half in Seattle. No matter how funny, no matter how popular, no matter anything, it's all about money. Unfortunately, pieces of entertainment are no longer artistic works that become part of our culture. They are only "properties." We are allowed to "consume" them for as long as they're profitable, and that's all. Then they get locked away and carefully guarded in case they might someday be profitable again.
The Sunday Morning Fog is still hovering over my brain, but I seem to recall that the law makes a distinction between Parody and Satire.
Parody (in which an artist is commenting on the work itself ) is protected as Fair Use, while Satire ( where an artist is merely using the work as a tool to comment on something else entirely) is not.
So, as always, the devil is in the details. And whether this Mashup is considered Parody or Satire would depend entirely on the content of the derived work.
-Sean
A parody doesn't allow for unlicensed playback of copyrighted works. LucasArts are perfectly within their rights to request this!
Considering that Slashdot runs copyright stories multiple times a week, why does the submitter even question if parodies are fair use.
Among the very few things that are explictly proctected under fair use is parodies.
I know that there's a lot of RTFA going around, but how can people with exposure to the issues multiple times a week even ask such a question, unless:
1. It's obvious flamebait.
2. Nobody RTFAs or even bothers to understand the laws they are talking about.
Not that copyright law is great, but really, why question if it protects parody when the law explicitly states that copyright does not prevent reuse of the material in the case of parodies.
Actually, the supreme court decided a few years ago that the copyrigt holders indeed do not have the right to do this.
I believe it was over a weird-al song -- Amish Paradise if I recall correctly. If it goes to the courts, it should be a pretty straightfoward case.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Do they have a law about how softly you can play the audio track? Do they have a law about talking in a movie theater? Fuck Lucas. Turn the volume knob down to "1", crank up the audio on the live actors, and talk right over the real audio track.
Imagine that someone took the source code to the Linux kernel, modified it heavily, gave every command a fake Finnish sound to it, and released it for $50 a pop as "Finux" WITHOUT releasing the source or doing anything else to satisfy the GPL provisions. If you think what this theater troup is doing is fair use parody, "Finux" would be legal. If you think the GPL would prevent someone from releasing Finux without following the provisions of the GPL, then what this theater group is doing is not fair use parody.
while parody is protected free speech and can't be shut down by copyright owners, the court has to determine whether the use of the copyrighted material is actually a parody or not.
one of the factors in that decision is "amount of use."
you have the right to use enough of the copyrighted work as is necessary to ensure that people recognize what you are parodying. you DO NOT have the right to use the entire thing.
there is no way that you can get away with turning down the volume on a movie, claiming that you are parodying it, and then make money during a public performance. (the first factor used is whether the use is for profit or not.)
lucas is totally within his rights here, and he's not being a jerk either.
Actually, the film is no longer 30 years old. In the 1997 re-release, it's been modified and cleaned-up enough so that copyrights are in full effect.
You wont be able to find a 30 yeard-old print now. Impossible. And you can bet in 25 years, there will have been a few "improved" re-releases to further milk^H^H^H^H protect the SW franchises.
Strange that Lucasfilms won't let this theatre company perform. Charles Ross does a One Man Star Wars live theatre peformance where he takes the classic first 3 films and does all the main scenes. He condenses the 3 films down to 1 hour. Amazing to watch and incredibly funny as well. More info can be found at http://www.onemanstarwars.com/one_man_star_wars1.h tml.
Or to just see a video clip is here: http://www.onemanstarwars.com/OMSWDemo.WMV
Lucasfilms most definately knows about him as he was flown down as their guest for one of the recent conventions. He will also be performing at the big Celebration III for the new movie.
The same guy also does the One Man Lord of The Rings which is also incredible.
Can someone explain, or point me to a site that explains, how something can be in the public domain if it was made after the mid-1920s and wasn't explicitly allowed to enter the public domain? Right now, copyright lasts for life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years if the copyright is owned by a business.
One thing that puzzled me was the ruling that the JibJab "This Land" animation was safe because "This Land is Your Land" was in the public domain. It was apparently first published in a songbook in 1945, and at that point, you needed to renew the copyright before the 28 year term expired, which wasn't in 1973.
Wasn't the crux of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case the fact that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act put things back under copyright that had fallen into the public domain? Was there a time limit in the Bono act that prevented older works that had been in the public domain for a while, like "This Land" or older movies, from falling back under copyright?
Copyright holders look the other way unless money is being exchanged
This is so not true.
Anyone sharing music who has been sued by the RIAA can attest to that. Or how about that guy who ripped "the incredible hulk" and put it online? He got sued without having sold anything.
If I'm not mistaken, back in the 1980s, warez trading was not a crime unless it involved some amount of profit on behalf of the copyright infringer. But today, it doesn't matter. And many if not most copyright owners will go after you whether you're making money or not.
If you really think copyright holders don't care, try starting a "not for profit" warez group and see how long it takes for the BSA to raid your house.
Don't get me wrong with this, I like the Star Wars movies, but this is ridiculous, how much money do they want to make off this movie?? I read last week somewhere that DVD release was pushed forward because of piracy fears, I almost chocked, do that not realize that this movie has been out for more that 20 years... it has been on free to air TV many times, the only people who are going to buy this trilogy set are die hard fans of the movie, whom I would guess have also purchased a lot of other star wars merchandise, so my suggestion to Lucas Films is get over it... you made a good film, people loved it, money was made, people careers were helped, and maybe it's time to acknowledge the fans whom with out this would just be another old movie.
The movies or the book?
The book has been around for 40 years, and the author has been dead for 30. A fair case could be made that the purpose of copyright, to give authors a financial incentive to produce new works, is not being fulfilled by keeping it under copyright. Quite a similar story for Happy Birthday.
LoTR, the movies, on the other hand, are only three years old at the most and would still be under even the extremely short (by today's standards) terms of 14 years originally set down in the 1700s.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Ah, well, I'm just working with the limited info from the article.
I do agree that there is a fine but important line between "parody" and "fan fiction".
"Parody" is commentary on a particular story, and the latter is merely taking the stage of a particular item as a jump-off. "Fan fiction", by contrast,I would imagine the fair use restrictions are stronger.
The point of parody is to make humor and sometimes a political message as well. Certainly my parody tends to have its basis in parody, and (in part out of parody and in part out of paranoia) I've gone to trouble to meticulously document on a per-episode basis the nature of the political commentary in plain text, for those who are comedically challenged and might otherwise overlook it. (e.g., consider Episode 47 as an example) was accompanied by a corresponding "moral of the story" page (e.g., Moral 47). In fact, some of my readers tell me they have preferred to just read the morals directly, either in addition or instead, so I know the commentary itself had value in and of itself.
I have heard that others who have "fan fiction" sites have been contacted by studios asking them to cease and desist. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but I have never been contacted by Sony or CBS suggesting that I am outside my bounds in the site I've done. I like to think that this is because I've stayed to the correct side of the parody/fan-fiction line.
The strange thing is that if this group is as good at improv as it is, it seems like the backdrop would be more distraction than help... Fan fiction, by its nature, usually just starts with an existing something as a jump-off and then goes a separate way. Improv as well.
I don't agree with this as either an isolated statement or a summary of our (or, at least, my) analysis. The copyright law makes no such clear statement, and I think for good reason. I can imagine situations where you'd need this right of "fair use" even when showing the whole of someone's movie.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer