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The Real Monsters Behind Godzilla
eldavojohn writes "A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued: 'He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow, he's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle.' Read on to find out why they targeted the site davezilla.com but not mozilla.org. Another abuse of the American trademark & copyright system? You decide — just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."
Helpless people on subway trains
Scream to God, as he puts liens on their assets to cover the cost of legal proceedings!
GODZILLA!
1. godzilla is decades old. ip law should time out after a decade, at worst
2. this is corporate takeover of our culture. its our culture. not their ip. we need to hammer this point home
3. ip law exists to serve us. but it has been pervered to extort money for decades, even way after the artist is long gone. ip law doesn't even serve the artist, it serves the distributor
the story of the 21st century will be the story of the death of ip law. it is simply morally unsound
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There goes Tokyo!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
We have ethical machines to deal with lawyers like these.
Doesn't the headline imply that there were ficticious monsters behind Godzilla?
He looks more like an allosaurus or perhaps a Dryptosaurus
He's got an S, a more different S, consummate Vs, spinities, wings, a beefy arm for good measure, angry eyebrows floating above his head and he comes IN THE NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The lawyers have failed to stop Godzirra!! Run! Run for your lives!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Note that the article implies that they have not just copyrights but trademarks. Trademarks do not have any maximal duration as long as one can defend them. So there's nothing here that is an argument for limited copyrights.
They don't sue rent-a-zilla.com ?
How would slashdotters feel if somebody started selling a Linux branded cabernet with a picture of Tux on it without permission?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...Asshole
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
and god help you if you pronounce the name wrong....it's GOJIRA you moron!!
This guys' site is crap.
I hope Godzilla eats him alive.
Mod Parent +1 Right The court rules in favor of Allosaurus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Allosaurus_in_Baltow_20060916_1500.jpg
Just because it's foreign (and maybe a little silly) doesn't mean it's not a high-powered brand. Middle-class American white folks might not realize it, but Ultraman is the third most merchandised character in the world, right after Mickey Mouse and Charlie Brown (and before Superman). And the people who command that kind of market share have lawyers? Color me shocked.
Breakfast served all day!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
godzilla is decades old. ip law should time out after a decade, at worst
"Godzilla" is a trademark, and exclusive rights in trademarks are perpetual by design. Should Coca-Cola be allowed to pass its own products off as Pepsi, just because Pepsi has been around since 1903?
Perhaps he's just off his meds.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
ip law between corporate entities is still sound, and always will be sound
ip law as applied to civilians, civic organizations, parody, hobbyist websites, etc.: dead
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The weird thing is some of the Godzilla movies have entered the public domain. We used a piece in a TV commercial (years and years ago - think Morris worm) and Toho showed up and said no (or face the wrath of our suitcase baring legions). So we took the actual image of Godzilla out but still used the rays destroying tanks, people running, smoldering buildings and there was no problem. Used it again on MTV a couple of times.
Someone should do a bootleg Kiss Vs Godzilla for the asshole IP Olympics.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
from the article it seems that popular culture has made godzilla widespread, so people actually believe it's public domain.
all of the cases listed on the article had either the name godzilla or the picture of godzilla except davezilla and subway
the guy with the blog prob didn't want to take it to court because he doesn't want to battle it out, all thought I think he would have won, from the looks of the logo, which were a) a shadow of a monster in a similar fashion to dinosaurs and b) the name 'davezilla' and subway was bad too... ok so now, they are just a)paranoid, b)greedy, c)both
what do ppl think when they hear zilla? and who created the 'zilla'? toho...
from wikipedia
Popular Culture
* The suffix "-zilla", now appended to many words. The enduring popularity of the Godzilla creature has led to "-zilla"'s contemporary usage in neologisms that describe something which is considered to be monstrous, extreme, or out of control, as in: "bridezilla" (for misbehaving brides) or "browzilla" (for large, overgrown eyebrows).
float f = (float) godzilla;
Am I safe now?
"A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued:
You decide -- just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."
At least they aren't defending the trademark with curtain fire.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Since coke has been marketed so extensively that it's become a household name for cola, coke's trademark use should be revoked (by the society that granted it to them) now, when society needs to use the mark more widely. Especially since, in this case, there's a very similar (and arguably better) product struggling against a larger monopoly, because of that issue.
First you brought out tags which don't want to work properly on my work system (ie 6 forever, I'm afraid). Then you brought out that idle garbage. I even would view it from time to time when I was feeling brave enough to venture into that coding travesty. But now you have decided to change my personal info page into a similar css nightmare of green and green! WTF!?! Have you grown tired of pleasing your users? Are you hoping less people will look at someones journal? This is the lamest thing I have seen in a long time...
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
I can't believe people spend their lives doing this stuff, i.e. searching and fighting "abuse of character".
It is sad, get a life people. Do something productive.
...Dexter got hauled off by Major Glory to see his lawyers for IP infringement.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Simple, just change your monster to a T-Rex that fits a textbook on dinos. (However, you may get sued by Spielberg instead :-P
Table-ized A.I.
From TFA:
Warner Bros., for example, didn't know it needed Toho's permission to use Godzilla in a 1985 chase scene in Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The Hollywood studio paid an undisclosed amount to Toho after it was sued.
They may have been able to convince a judge of this and so been able to merely pay out some cash and still release the film, but I don't believe it for a second. No MPAA member, particularly not one that owns the rights to Bugs Bunny, can be ignorant of IP rights associated with a fictional character. Lying sacks of shit.
And the brethren went away edified.
"And the court set aside Morrow's assertions that the name Godzilla, which is a combination of two Japanese words for gorilla and whale, didn't deserve protection because it did not have any real meaning."
No. No it is not. The Japanese cannot even pronounce l, more or less use it in a word. I'm surprised no one has called BS on this.
I love this scene from the movie Goldmember. Complete parody of the topic of this thread. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEJm0uIVwUc
Funny they don't mention the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity#Scenarios
factor 966971: 966971
This is kinda funny, because Godzilla was at first a warning against big ole' American things like nukes. So now we need a monster movie warning against big ole' American things like oppressive IP law.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Equally stupid is the following "argument":
If you want to get a rise out of the soft-spoken Moss, ask him something like, "Isn't Godzilla just an overgrown Tyrannosaurus rex?"
"He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow," Moss says, repeating arguments Toho often makes in its lawsuits. "He's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle."
Actually, at the time he was conceived, about every image on the planet including a T-Rex showed it:
- Standing erect (they had to break the tailbone structure to do this, but they were convinced they were right because "it's a lizard, it has to drag its tail."
- With significantly larger arms (though not quite as big as Gojira's).
Take a look and compare Gojira to the T-Rex from the 1933 version of King Kong , or to any other movie featuring dinosaurs up until the late '80s. What do you get? You get a "Rex" standing upright on its hind legs, walking forward, dragging its tail.
The only reason Gojira has human-ish arms is that they were putting a rubber suit on a fucking human to get the effects.
This is a joke. Gojira is, in fact, just a mutated oversized Rex. They gave him fire breath because the Japanese, like most Asian cultures, have a dragon obsession and fire breath is cool.
This makes the it looks just like godzilla (but it's not) bit in Austin Powers way more funny. Anybody know if they had to get a license on the image to do that?
>'The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle.'
>45-degree angle
Someone has been reading really old paleontology material, or has been reading really bad children's books. Also, they apparently never saw Jurassic Park.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I mean its not like wine goes bad fast or anything....couldn't he have simply just relabeled the bottles without a picture of godzilla and gee, give %5 of the take to ip holders? Maybe he should have sent a couple of bottles to japan.
zosxavius photography
prior art:
thousands of years of asian fire breathing dragon myth
trademark nullified
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did these guys send a cease and desist to Subway? They replaced giant monster lizard in there five dollar footlong commercials quite suddenly with a really dorky robot.
What the hell is a 'right to royalties in perpetuity'?
Am I reading the Wiki right? What idiot thought setting a precedent where someone can receive royalties after the copyright expired was a good idea?
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Weird - Wiki link was just culled;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Wendy#Copyright_status
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
patents and copyrights both lasted 17 years. I think that is plenty. (The number was a compromise between 15 and 20 years.)
Just for reference, the name "Gojira" (the actual Japanese name for Godzilla) was derived from combining the Japanese words for Gorilla (gorira) and Whale (kujira). It would have been hilarious if Godzilla's inventor had envisioned the actual beast to be a mix of the two creatures.
Should Coca-Cola be allowed to pass its own products off as Pepsi, just because Pepsi has been around since 1903?
Should Pepsi be allowed to call its product Pepsi-Cola? That's the relevant argument. Err, I mean PepsiZilla.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1. godzilla is decades old. ip law should time out after a decade, at worst
How about we just reset to 14 years as it was originally? That seems like a reasonable compromise and has sound legal precedent.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A loophole to get around Toho's lawsuits and profit: Insist that it's Reptar.
for those interested. The Godzilla statue is located in Hibiya, Tokyo. Directly infront of the original Toho theater. Now known as the Toho Hibiya Building. (the orange building under the cross. The indicator is the location of the statue)
http://map.yahoo.co.jp/pl?type=scroll&lat=35.67029086&lon=139.76332388&sc=2&mode=map&pointer=on
No, seriously, ask a glass of water
I can dismember their claims in one fell swoop: the reason Godzilla looks that way and not exactly like a T. rex or cousin is simply because it was a T. Rex costume adapted for a man to wear in front of the cameras.
This is demonstrative why decent folks hate both lawyers and so-called intellectual property.
History shows again and again how lawyers point out the folly of men....
Godzilla!
Defending this trademark is important. Without profit, the incentive for companies to develop new giant fire-breathing dinosaurs would diminish and society would fall apart.
So, you can tell something isn't Gozilla if it stands at a 45-degree stance, instead of upright?
Is this a lawsuit, or a belated excuse to have another whine about how unfaithful Emmerich and Devlin's version was?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
if godzilla is copyrighted, derivatives are protected, but if godzilla is a trademark fuckzilla is not covered: trademark are EXTREMELY precise in their definition.
As I understand it, a trademark on "FOR DUMMIES" for books would cover "Evil Geniuses for Dummies", making O'Reilly use "in a Nutshell" instead for its User Friendly book. McDonald's trademark on "MC" for food would cover "McTurkey" or "McFDA" or whatever. If Toho owns "ZILLA" for filmed entertainment and/or other media, it might cover fuckzilla.
I guess that means someone, somewhere is going to try to sue this guy.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0197521/
(alias: Raymond Burr)
Isn't davezilla's site an example of parody? Also, IANAL, but isn't it legal to infringe on a copyright or a trademark for parody reasons?
For that matter, most advertisements that use Godzilla do so ironically. None of them are saying "eat at subway, we're cool like godzilla" or "shop at crazy larry's. We're Godzilla endorsed!". So, couldn't most of them be considered parody?
I've recently received my own cease and desist from the lizard's lawyers for my very low traffic blog on (codezilla) which used to have as its logo some Godzilla fan art. Not interested in fighting "the Man" (even if he is wearing a rubber monster suit) I replaced it with a Mr-Rogers-as-T-Rex image I got from Creative Commons.
When the community-supplied content overwhelms all the protected stuff I think our current trademark problems will become moot.
They blur out genitals.
For example, suppose that the movie Godzilla is in the public domain. That means you can make derivative works, including, say, an action figure of the star. What would you call that toy? Clearly, it's a Godzilla doll. It's not a "Godzilla brand doll". If the copyright holders were to do the same, they could use "Godzilla" both ways: to identify the thing represented (the character Godzilla) and as a brand (asserting that this product is authentic, that is to say authorized by the creators).
This line of reasoning might fly in the United States ( Dastar v. Fox ) but not in Canada. "ANNE OF GREEN GABLES" is a trademark jointly owned by a Canadian province and the author's estate.
Crow: did you know Gamera is friend to children?
Tom:Ah ha! Yes, he is really neat, he is made of turtle meat.
Good by karma
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Vatican sues Toho for blasphemy
Sigh... if you're going to quote Douglas Adams, at least quote him correctly:
Arthur: "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
--Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 6
Maybe I'm a little thick-headed, but I'm pretty sure I got it right. I wrote:
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
You wrote:
Arthur: "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
Looks like an exact match to me...
Bow-ties are cool.
That was pretty good. (Reply to low-scored poster.)
OP: "The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms..." Birds don't have arms, bro.
Didn't Urtraman's use of simirar monsters dilute the iterrectuar capitar to the point where it is no ronger inforceabre?
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
"A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued:
You decide -- just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."
At least they aren't defending the trademark with curtain fire.
This is not overrated.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.