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Free Lightsaber Event Now Battling Lucasfilm's Lawyers (siliconbeat.com)
For eight years the arts collective Newmindspace had been staging free lightsaber battles, and in December they set a world record with 9,951 "combatants" simultaneously participating in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle. But then in January they received a letter from the copyright attorneys for the Star Wars franchise. "We immediately stopped using the words 'lightsaber,' 'Jedi,' 'Sith' and 'The Force,' " the group's co-founder told the technology blog of the San Jose Mercury News, saying they've still been "aggressively pursued" for the last three months. '''In March we received further communication stating 'The Light Battle Tour' and 'light sword' were still too close to their trademarks, and we moved to settle the dispute to avoid legal action." Their new solution involves referring to the weapons as "catblades", and they've re-branded their upcoming series of events (which begins on April 30 in San Jose) as the "Cats in Space Tour".
Otherwise stated, because fuck you that's why.
Imagine if this had stopped 'Star Trek" conventions through the years. Would the franchise be nearly as popular as it was/is?
Here is a clue for the 1% media fucktards and their lawyer army. Something that gets people engaged and excited about your supposed "IP" is free word of mouth advertising. Word of mouth advertising is free, and far more effective than any other kind that you pay dearly for. The trade of is you cannot tightly control the message. Boo hoo.
Silence is a state of mime.
I would have sponsored the event, it's obvious that there is a huge following of fans there.
You are supposed to be creative. Come up with your own stories. Enough with Star Wars.
Instead of reaching out and asking if these people would want to become a sanctioned event, or a simple, could you please work with us to not violate our IP, they chose to instead swing the FUCK YOU hammer.
Lawyers are garbage.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seriously, is that the best name they could come up with it?
I would have went with the "Generic Glowing Space Sword" battle, which gets the point across while giving the middle finger to Disney and their copyrights.
They could have also done a Spaceballs themed Swartz battle, assuming that whoever owns that copyright also isn't an asshole.
So there is this huge event made by geeks that costs them not a dime, advertises their franchise with what is pretty much a public stunt show and they SUE against that?
"But what if they misrepresent it?"
Please! We're talking hardcore geeks here. Anything that could remotely, possibly be consider by someone not-canon would be axed if not nuked with more zeal and closer attention to detail and accuracy than any of the lawyers who have no idea about the franchise itself, only about its IP laws, could or would do. If anything, these things are going to be closer to canon and whatever the "designers" of the franchise create than any amusement park you sell your IP to ever would (because they don't give a fuck about canon as long as it is gimmicky).
So please explain that to me. It makes no sense.
Oh. It's covered by copyright law. Ok, never mind, carry on, that's not supposed to make sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just change the name - Sword Art Online had the "laser sword".
It's as valid as renaming Snarf to Jar-Jar and then making the character horribly annoying.
Ah, so their business strategy for keeping their business is to gain revenue from fans by alienating fans.
This is quite a novel approach to business. Ok then. If they can dictate what English words other people should use, then i will dictate how my money that i created will be used.
I won't buy anything Star Wars ever again, and will only pirate any and all media they get out.
Two for two.
Isn't the definition of suicide attacking your own fan base. So what do we call their fantasy castle now, pedophile planet perhaps?
Has a light sword to guard against reentry into paradise. Seems strange to grant a trademark for that.
I would think trade marking Light sword and Light Blade would be hard, even Light saber is difficult.
It's a light saber, as in, a saber that is physically light. Bam, can't trade mark the word and force english to change to protect your trade mark.
Light battle, plasma sword, sword of light, all things used all over the place. Being so Iconic 'Light Saber' and the fact that they appear as such is probably the only thing they can really strike down.
Even still.
I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.
When Astronomer Carl Sagan objected to Apple using "sagan" as their internal code name for one of their projects, they changed the code name to Butthole Astronmer. Perhaps they should change the name of the catblades to C&D sabers. I wonder if Apple would lend them the name Sosumi.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Prenda Law was shut down in 2013. In that case at least the system works.
They have to protect themselves against trademark dilution, or they could lose the trademark. The more amenable solution would've been to give these guys a license to use those trademarks for their event for a paltry sum like $1. But I guess Disney wants all such events to require you pay the $100+ admission to Disneyland / Disneyworld.
And at this point, I don't think the franchise cares about any more advertising, free or not. It's pretty much reached the saturation point in mindshare.
..photonic phallus?
Since Lucasfilm/Disney would be better served by not having lawyers running after a good-will event like this, it seems like everyone might be better served if Lucanfilm/Disney would require them to collect a $1 entry fee, all of which is required to go to a charity. Now, no on looks like the bad guy, everyone has fun, and people get some help.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Lucas used to hand out free IP licenses all the time. He let people make amateur films based on Star Wars. You just sent him a letter asking for permission and you usually got it. As long as you aren't making loads of money off of it he didn't care.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
<sarcasm>And enough with books and music and television and movies. Everyone should stay in their basement and never expose themselves to anyone else's creative works, much less celebrate them!</sarcasm>
I think 110010001000's idea is supposed to be that people are supposed to write their own "books and music and television and movies", put them under a license intended for sharing, and celebrate them instead of celebrating proprietary works. It's like e-sports: people take up a proprietary video game as a sport and then act all surprised when the game's publisher wants to tax or even shut down tournaments under its exclusive right to perform the work publicly. This realization about e-sports is why I quit the Tetris fan community in June 2012 after learning of a successful lawsuit by The Tetris Company.
Sharing stories and celebrating them is a fundamental part of human interaction.
Then do so within the boundaries of the law. Instead of misappropriating the industry's productions, make your own with proverbial blackjack and hookers.
Come up with your own stories.
That's easier said than done when the incumbent publishers' lawyers can play the "derivative work" card, claiming that your work is too similar to that of their clients.
You seem to have some drastic misunderstandings of the boundaries of the law. Talking about a copyrighted work or trademarked term is not illegal, despite some companies happily pretending that they think it is in order to file lawsuits that stifle free speech by making it too expensive to defend in court.
Copyright law was never meant to overrule freedom of speech. Copyright law was written into the original constitution and the protections given in the first amendment supercede copyright law. In point of fact, some aspects of copyright law have been ruled as unconstitutional because of this.
So no. Copyright does not prevent us from talking about stories. We can talk with other people about Star Wars and dissect and argue over every tiny detail to our heart's content and Lucasfilm has no legal right to stop that.
At least not yet. Give Disney another 20 years of lobbying and they'll probably get enough laws rewritten to allow them to do it.
Imagine if [copyright and trademark restrictions] had stopped Star Trek conventions through the years.
Star Trek conventions are licensed.
Handling Star Wars analogously would be fine if Lucasfilm had posted an offer of terms under which to host a licensed Star Wars convention. Has it?
In point of fact, some aspects of copyright law have been ruled as unconstitutional because of this
You refer to Golan v. Holder , which was a narrow ruling that the First Amendment defense against copyright term restoration applies only to "reliance parties", who had been using a work prior to the restoration of copyright in the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA). The URAA originally limited the duration for which reliance parties could make grandfathered use of a work whose copyright was restored. The Tenth Circuit in Golan held that this limit changed the contour of copyright in a way that violated the First Amendment, allowing them to continue to use the work for the entirety of the restored copyright term. But it did nothing for the general public apart from reliance parties.
Copyright does not prevent us from talking about stories.
It depends on how much of the story is talked about, and in how much detail. See Warner Bros. v. RDR Books , in which a U.S. district court judge ruled an unauthorized guide to the Harry Potter books to be transformative in to an extent but "not consistently transformative" and therefore infringing. The risk that a particular work may not qualify under the statutory limitations of copyright discourages some people from talking in great detail about others' stories for fear of having to pay statutory damages, attorney's fees, and court costs should he inadvertently step over the invisible line of what is permitted under fair use.
And the exclusive right to prepare derivative works or perform a work publicly certainly prevents us from reenacting said stories. This is where e-sports come into play, as video game publishers assert the exclusive right of public performance against tournament organizers. The same is true of extending said stories, as shown in 3D Realms' successful lawsuit over a third-party level pack for Duke Nukem 3D titled Nuke It ( Micro Star v. FormGen ). A public lightsaber battle might be seen as extending and/or reenacting Star Wars.
Considering that "Jedi" is now the name of a legally recognized religion it will be interesting to see what happens when Disney/Lucasfilm tries to get the followers to stop calling themselves "Jedis". Good thing I stocked up on popcorn :)
...not this one in particular, but I get emails from them on how this stuff works.
All I can say is: whoop-dee-shit, Disney. Someone calls a cardboard tube* a lightsaber, and you're getting pissy? Why? Who's making such a great profit off of these very, very flimsy things that anyone anywhere EVER would mistake them for the genuine article, and therefore a substitute to a licensed product that you might sell? Believe me, you are losing virtually NO profit from anyone in any event like this using something that they call a "lightsaber".
*They'd have to be cardboard tubes. Newmindspace is notorious for arranging pillow fights and bubble battles, and have been largely successful at it. The key is that any kind of event where large numbers of people are aiming and hitting other people with things, there had better be a lot of "give", or else these events would have been stopped a long time ago.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Where are all these Internet billionaires when you need them? Just have on organize one of these things and have Disney take them to court (no settlements). Would you like the light sabre or the heavy sabre? I mean, if we can finally got Happy Birthday To You out of greedy corporate hands, maybe Disney can get a little Force push as well.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Let's boycott disney?
If people want to reenact a story, and Disney is unwilling to offer reasonable terms to license its stories for reenactment, a boycott is the legally and morally correct answer. But if the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 wasn't enough to inspire a boycott that gains enough momentum to have a noticeable effect on Disney's policies, I can't imagine what is.
"Scientology" is also both an established religion and a closely guarded trademark-copyright complex.
Dear Lucasfilm Lawyers:
We have stopped using your trademarked terms Jedi and Sith, your laughably descriptive term "lightsaber" and even the obviously generic "Force". However, we are drawing the line at dropping the word "light", even when in combination with "battle" or "sword". Your resemblance to the Prince of Darkness does not give you a monopoly over light. Please fuck off now.
And the mouse they rode in on.
The last Star Wars was crap anyway, and not worth the measly $2.00 I paid RedBox to see it.
#freemickey
--- Keep the choice with the user..
"We immediately stopped using the words 'lightsaber,' 'Jedi,' 'Sith' and 'The Force,' " the group's co-founder told the technology blog of the San Jose Mercury News, saying they've still been "aggressively pursued" for the last three months.
Episode 1: story opens with a trade dispute
Episode 8: story:
Eh, I'll still go.
"defending your brand" does not typically mean preventing any of your copyrighted words and names from being uttered in public.
Wrong. And betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of IP.
It's not about copyright. It's about trademarks.
Defending your trademarks certainly does mean limiting their use in public. If you don't, your billion-dollar brand can turn into a word that takes on a generic meaning, like band-aid or xerox. Google runs this risk, for example.
If Lucasfilm wants to maintain a trademark in the Light Saber, for example, a trademark they sell many millions of dollars of toys based on, then they need to be sending out these cease-and-desist letters. They're not saying the people can't have their festival--they just can't use the term light saber in their official communications.
... disney is becoming scientology in their ways of pursuing 'trademark' infringement.
What can we the people do to re-obtain the rights to do fan art, fan meetings and fan based activities in general?
Bach says it all.
I guess nobody has claimed cats in space yet. But if they had switched to pigs, Disney would still be after them for infringement on The Muppets.
E.E. "Doc" Smith; the light sword in the Lensman series (1948-1954)
Edmond Hamilton; Kaldar, Planet of Antares (1933)
Various other energy-based swords and knives throughout pre-SW SF/F.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
They should switch to foam-tipped arrows instead of lightsabres.
Lucas has attributed the origins of "The Force" to a 1963 abstract film by Arthur Lipsett, which sampled from many sources. One of the audio sources Lipsett sampled for 21-87 was a conversation between artificial intelligence pioneer Warren S. McCulloch and Roman Kroitor, a cinematographer who went on to develop IMAX. In the face of McCulloch's arguments that living beings are nothing but highly complex machines, Kroitor insists that there is something more: "Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God."
When asked if this was the source of "the Force," Lucas confirms that his use of the term in Star Wars was "an echo of that phrase in 21-87." The idea behind it, however, was universal: "Similar phrases have been used extensively by many different people for the last 13,000 years to describe the 'life force,'" he says.
I've got one of these, and it's very officially a light sabre, named so in 1796. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I can't see how anyone could trademark that..
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse