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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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Maybe because it's a parody? I've not watched this movie and don't intent to, but a parody is allowed to use however much of the original work it wants to.
Is it fair use? Certainly not, but Saban eventually reversed course and gave permission for the thing to exist. So now it's back up.
Power Rangers has always been a live action TV show.
The original Power Rangers is campy and laughable. Showing gritty topics in a saccharine sweet, good guys always triumphant without any real struggle or doubt way that the children's shows often do is worth satirizing.
From Webster:
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What is Parody if not to amuse? And what is amusement but entertainment? To say the only form of parody is the sort we see on Saturday Night Live would be utterly limiting and disingenuous at best. This is clearly a piece of "Fan Fiction" and should by all intents and purposes be covered by fair use since it is not a commercial work, and was created to amuse fellow fans of the Power Rangers. Perhaps instead of calling their lawyers, the copyright holders should have called the creator of this piece to see about putting together a deal to bring this to SyFy as a Galactica style reboot. But hey -- they're assholes in suits and more about "protecting" the rights they've secure from others than "creating" anything new with those rights.
Parody of Power Rangers. No one is mistaking this for an actual official Power Rangers movie. (Compare with Hustler v. Falwell.) The difference in fan fiction is that when looking at an excerpt of text, there is the potential that a reader might mistake a piece with officially sanctioned/published material. Non-commercial work faces a lower bar for being judged as fair use. (Thus firms are more likely to obtain permission/licensing when making a product or film.)
Satire of grimdark and remakes/reboots. "In the grim future of Hello Kitty, there is only war". http://onastick.net/sitz/image...
The video was interesting in spots; this article wasn't.
Haim Saban's "creation" consists of dubbed versions of the characters from Super Sentai, which you can see on the Wiki page for one installment, Kagaku Sentai Dynaman - scroll down.
As a derivative work, Saban doesn't own squat, and ownership, if there is any, probably belongs to Toei Company. However, as the same characters have appeared in many works *as different characters*, the argument might also be made that they are generic.
So this is basically yet another example of someone claiming ownership of something they never owned, which is precisely why copyright is such a farce in general.
The poster has no clue about how fair use works. There are four factors that get considered in deciding whether something is fair use:
1. Is it noncommercial? Yes it is.
2. Is it transformative? That is, does it use the original work as raw material to create something new, rather than just copying it for the sake of copying it? Yes it is.
3. Does it compete with the original work in the marketplace? It would be pretty hard to claim that.
4. How much of the original work does it copy? In this case, very little. Just the appearance of the characters. All the footage is original.
So it scores highly on all four criteria. This is absolutely fair use.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."