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Gritty 'Power Rangers' Short Is Not Fair Use
"Power/Rangers", the 11-minute short directed by music video veteran Joseph Kahn, is still available on Youtube, where it was posted by the film's producer, Adi Shankar. Rival video site Vimeo removed the short film after receiving a copyright complaint from Haim Saban, the creator of the U.S. series, for using the characters without his permission.
The movie is OK. I think the people gushing about how amazing it is are mentally comparing it to the awful 1995 "Power Rangers" movie or the bland cartoon. But how are the director and his defenders arguing that the movie isn't a copyright violation?
The director said in one of a series of tweets: "Every image in POWER/RANGERS is original footage. Nothing was pre-existing. There is no copyrighted footage in the short." True, but this ignores the fact that characters themselves can be protected by copyright. Fan fiction sites can exist legally only to the extent that the character copyright owner grants permission (J.K. Rowling has explicitly given permission for the Harry Potter characters to be used in fan fiction; Anne Rice specifically prohibits fan fiction featuring her characters). Most obviously, when a studio like Warner Brothers produces their own gritty reboot of a character, they have to pay fees to the owner of that character, even if every frame of their movie is entirely the studio's own work. Why on Earth would the studio pay those fees, if they didn't have to?
The director also tweeted, "I am not making any money on it and I refuse to accept any from anyone." Well, everyone ought to know by now that that argument isn't going to fly if you put a copy of The Avengers on your personal home page. It's not obvious why that defense should work any better if you've violated someone's copyright by using their characters without permission, instead of just copying their movie.
Kahn also tweeted that the short film was not a copyright violation because it was "satire," and his supporters agreed, calling the film a "parody." (Copyright law holds that you can satirize or parody someone else's work without their permission; thus Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do not have to pay licensing fees for the movies that they rip off in their awful "parodies.") But no English speaker would use the word "satire" or "parody" to describe Kahn's movie, precisely because of the qualities that people loved about it (dark, violent, almost completely humorless). Most tellingly, as far as I can tell nobody did call it a satire or parody until that started being raised as a defense against copyright claims -- they called it a dark, gritty remake or re-imagining, because that's what it was, and calling it a "satire" sounds jarringly wrong unless you're in on the wink-wink pseudo-legal strategy.
Kahn also invoked "fair use" multiple times, but that's just begging the question: since "fair use" is a catch-all for several scenarios in which you can legally use copyrighted content without the owner's permission (parody/satire, brief excerpt for the purpose of commentary/criticism, etc.), which defense applies here? One of the criteria for "fair use" is how much of the original work you re-used -- if your online review of The Dark Knight links to a 10-second clip that you posted to show that the fight scenes are kick-ass, that might be OK, but a 30-minute excerpt would not be. But if we apply that logic to the use of a copyrighted character, in a story you're either using someone else's copyrighted character, or you're not. Given that characters are protected by copyright at all, it doesn't make much sense to talk about "using 0.5% of a character", the way that a 30-second clip would constitute only 0.5% of a 100-minute movie. It certainly wouldn't make sense in the case of Kahn's remake, where the copyrighted Power Rangers characters are onscreen in every single scene.
The director's defenders rightly pointed out the absurdity of Vimeo removing the short film just hours after giving it a "Staff Pick" award, but the real absurdity runs in the opposite direction -- how did Vimeo's staff give an award to the film that they should have known was a knockoff? Presumably they had heard of the Power Rangers and knew that the movie was using the characters without permission.
Moreover, there's not just a legal argument against an unauthorized "gritty reboot" of the Power Rangers, there's a moral one as well. The short film shows that Joseph Kahn is a technically competent director -- but there are many, many competent directors out there, making gritty sci-fi films of short and feature length, all competing for people's attention. By using the "Power Rangers" name for his piece, Kahn got way more views than he would have gotten if he had released it as "just another dark sci-fi short film." And despite his protestations that he's not making money from the film, it's bringing him exposure and connections which are almost certainly monetizable somewhere down the road, opportunities which come at the expense of other similarly talented directors. Does that seem fair?
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