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Imperial Storm Troopers Skirmish in Latest IP Battle
fm6 writes "According to guardian.co.uk, George Lucas is suing the designer of the Imperial Stormtrooper armor. Andrew Ainsworth took the original molds he used to make the props for the movies, and has been using them to make outfits that sell for up to £1,800 (US$3,600) apiece. Ainsworth has countersued for a share of the $12 billion that Star Wars merchandise has generated since the first movie."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
He was hired to do a job. He created the items to fit Lucas' vision. It wasn't as if he created them and them sold them to Lucas.
How do you know this? I actually RTFA and while I might have missed it, they seemed pretty light on pertinent details like this. I would imagine that it's quite common for a studio to outright purchase prop designs and rights the same way they do pretty much everything else related to a film. If the guy from Weta who created Andúril started selling exact duplicates of the sword don't you think NewLine would call him up for a chat?
It seems pretty straightforward - if Lucas bought the prop design then this guy is at fault. If Lucas only paid for him to come up with a design then it comes to a question of can the Stormtrooper be trademarked as part of the franchise? How about replica lightsabers?
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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By default independent contractors under English law own their work. Assuming this guy was contracted rather than employed, unless otherwise specified by a contract he owns copyright.
If, as the article says, Lucas bought the helmets by the unit already manufactured that would imply that the guy was an independent contractor. If the guy was an employee he would have been paid at a flat rate and it would have been irrelevant to him home many Lucas then had manufactured. If you buy a dozen prints of an artist's work that doesn't mean you own the original.
So you do work creating IP for people and then refuse to give them the rights to the IP that you create? Let me know how that works out for you.
I think you will find that the majority of companies who get design work done by independent contractors would have watertight agreements transferring all of the relevant intellectual property to them, for obvious reasons, i.e., that people like you can't then attempt to weasel around their rights with dubious contractual terms and thereby hold them hostage.
Honestly, I am generally all in favour of limiting the IP rights of companies, but when you do work for a business creating IP and then try to suggest that it's somehow reasonable and equitable that you retain the rights to all of the "original art work" that goes into it then you are being borderline dishonest. Certainly it's reasonable for you to retain IP you create which is not specific to that job; but it would be entirely unreasonable to refuse to relinquish the rights to the 99% finished "work in progress" version of a website, for instance.
The Windows example is silly, because Windows is not uniquely crafted to each user's requirements (if only), it is a generic piece of IP that is licensed and relicensed.
Read Pynchon.
Unless I did it as part of a "work for hire" agreement. If he (Ainsworth) did the work under such an agreement, then he doesn't own the copyright (or any creation rights) on the armor he originally created for Lucas.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
This isn't the first frivolous lawsuit he's done lately. He tried to sue the pants off of this warehouse company a year ago or so because he kept his storage facility in bad condition and one of his R2D2 props got moldy.
I don't know the details of it, but my grandmother in law works for a sister company of the warehouse that was getting sued. Apparently it was enough that if it hadn't been dismissed, it would've sent them into immediate bankruptcy.
-Vendal Thornheart
You may -think- so. But you're simply wrong.
There is absolutely nothing you can do, or fail to do, to "lose" a copyright.
Trademarks yes, those can be commoditized. But that is completely irrelevant as Lucas does not, infact, have a trademark on the design of the stormtrooper-armour.
Bzzz! Wrongo! Maybe exact replica lightsabers that carry a certain name have to be licensed, but Jeff Parks sells Parks Sabers that are completely non licensed. A lot of his designs look just like the ones from the movies. Lucas tried to sue him before Ep 1 came out and was unsuccessful because he couldn't produce the copyrights.
Everyone here keeps assuming that Hollywood and the Lucas of today is the same as they were back in 1975-76. It was a completely different world back then. Nobody cared about merchandising rights or sequel rights or any of that garbage. That's why Lucas totally owns Star Wars, because Fox didn't give a shit about the rights.
More than likely, since Lucas didn't expect it to take off the way it did, he had a verbal agreement with the guy to make some armor. Lucas probably didn't give a shit at the time since it was only going to be a stand alone space opera. I'm just wondering why Lucas waited so long if this guy has been doing this for a while.
The thing you seem to have missed is that this guy designed the _original_ stormtrooper costumes for the first film.
Yes, it was. Trade mark law in the UK is more than a century old; UK has had a Registered Designs Act since 1949 which moves industrial use of copyrighted work from the life + 50 years (as was) of Copyright to a maximum of 25 years when registered with the UK Patent Office.
I am not a patent or trade mark attorney and this is not legal advice.
IIRC most of the set scenes in the original movie were filmed at Pinewood Studios in the UK. I'm too lazy to check, to be honest.
:)
Oh, hell. *googlegooglegoogle*
I was right.
I honestly don't know enough about it to debate you on the other points you bought up but this one seems questionable. The whole point of an endowment is to finance your activities off the earnings of that money so it's sustainable over the long run. You don't spend the money itself.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The way a foundation works is by donating the the interest, not the principal. Therefore, it makes sense that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will only be donating a small portion of its total assets, since the principal will not be touched.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it