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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?"
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.
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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Nothing funnier than a room full of geeks dressed as Boba Fett shouting "LOOK SIR, DROIDS!" simultaneously.
If They don't want people making a parody out of thier films, how about a cease and desist letter to a certain George Lucas?
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.
> I clicked the little checkbox that is supposed to prevent me from seeing all this Star Wars trivia. Why am I still seeing these stories?
This is not the trivia you are looking for.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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