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Warner Bros Is Cracking Down On Harry Potter Festivals (apnews.com)
Warner Bros is cracking down on local Harry Potter fan festivals around the country, saying it's necessary to halt unauthorized commercial activity. From a report: Fans, however, liken the move to Dementors sucking the joy out of homegrown fun, while festival directors say they'll transfigure the events into generic celebrations of magic. "It's almost as if Warner Bros. has been taken over by Voldemort, trying to use dark magic to destroy the light of a little town," said Sarah Jo Tucker, a 21-year-old junior at Chestnut Hill College, which hosts a Quidditch tournament that coincides with the annual suburban Philadelphia festival. Philip Dawson, Chestnut Hill's business district director, said Warner Bros. reached out to his group in May, letting them know new guidelines prohibit festivals' use of any names, places or objects from the series. That ruled out everything from meet-and-greet with Dumbledore and Harry to Defense Against the Dark Arts classes. Related story, from 18 years ago: Harry Potter Sites vs. Warner Brothers.
Turn down free marketing/free publicity for your movies. Also, the books came first -- is the book publisher also harassing festival organizers?
Stop those guys selling unlicensed pot!
Google the term if you don't know what is. All they need to do is both assert normative usage rights and to expressly indicate that they are not endorsed by or affiliated with the owners of the Harry Potter franchise, including but not limited to J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
..not as they do! Right Bethesda?
I remember being a Trekkie in the 80s and how draconian Paramount could be. Even threatening club newsletters, calling them "Fanzines" and accusing them of infringing on their copyrights. Every convention had to be licensed or really, really small with no commercial activity. The wonderful Filk songs on VHS with new music set to cuts of episodes were very creative but on the shit list of some lawyers. The bootleg bloopers were probably going too far... but hey, good times!
Wonder if the Tolkien estate harasses hobbits? GRRM might knight you if you have pizza with him, but I heard HBO has no such sense of humor, so watch out Brotherhood Without Banners!
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I imagine the NAMBLA meetings are lightly attended when there's a Harry Potter festival in town.
Stupid autocorrect.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Dude... GFY with a cactus.
Just boycott any TV show or Movie coming out of WB Studios.
Let them know right at the top what is going on.
Once it hits them in their profits they'll see the folly of their action.
Or you could have a 'Not a Harriet Potter Festival." Lets see them send a cease and desist for that.
Nominative* use.
I'll see myself out.
All they need to do is both assert normative usage rights and to expressly indicate that they are not endorsed by or affiliated with the owners of the Harry Potter franchise, including but not limited to J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers.
Ask the Prelude to Axenar folks how well that “Nomative Use” argument worked for them.
#DeleteChrome
Nominative use might be applied though it's not clear a simple fine print CYA declaration would be sufficient. There are two sides to this and one might hope an agreement could be reached.
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Country Time Lemonade will start cracking down on little kid's lemonade stands,
they need to disguise their product https://i.imgur.com/SauUao8.jp...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I didn't realize we bought Warner brothers.
Hhahahahahaha
Fans, however, liken the move to Dementors sucking the joy out of homegrown fun
Comparing every life thing to some Harry Potter analog is what these fans do. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear as they painfully reveal that they have never read any books outside the Harry Potter series. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until a large media corporation starts bringing down the copyright hammer.
What's the matter if we celebrate this Halloween Festival each year?
Remember, it's not equal to Harry Potter Festival but it seems much.
If your older than 15 and playing Harry Potter you've got serious issues.
You're confusing trademark and copyright. Derivative use isn't a concept that applies to trademarks in the first place. As long as nothing is misrepresented as official or endorsed, there's no trademark relevance. Copyright OTOH is what they're running afoul of.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"It's almost as if Warner Bros. has been taken over by Voldemort, trying to use dark magic to destroy the light of a little town," said Sarah Jo Tucker, a 21-year-old junior at Chestnut Hill College, which hosts a Quidditch tournament that coincides with the annual suburban Philadelphia festival.
I didn't think anything could be worse than a Voldemort political metaphor.
I was wrong ...
Good thing Star Wars clamped down on all the fan driven stuff since '77. I mean- look what could've happened to that franchise. The fans could've just *torched* it.
Warner Brother has proven time and again, that they are completely stupid and greedy.
o Let's merge with a DialUp company after the Internet has made them irrelevant.
o Let's close all of the Warner Brothers Stores in the malls because they don't earn a profit. YOU DON"T CARE IF THEY EARN A PROFIT! YOU ARE SELLING YOUR ADVERTISING!!! Mickey Mouse is still popular, but no kid ever heard of Bugs Bunny! Because Disney is still selling Mickey Mouse stuff to new kids, and WB killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
Why should this be any different? Instead of encouraging people to spread the popularity of their stuff, they shut it down, and slowly kill it. Years from now Star Wars will still matter because Disney gets this, and Harry Potter will be forgotten because Warner Brothers will have strangled it to death.
They even tried to extort money from people for singing happy birthday! Their own greed ultimately cost them $14 million dollars... the amount, by the way they thought they could extort from people by claiming to own it in first first place.
The joy of Harry Potter can only be captured by properly licensed products.
Look at this great slot machine that was licensed by the Tolkien estate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC42MXHpJgE
JRR Tolkien would be so proud if he could see his fantasy world encouraging adults and children to try to win big.
That work did not qualify as nomative use for several reasons, not the least of which was the profit that it was going to make if it proceeded as originally planned.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Your original “all they need to do” statement didn’t mention profit potential at all, nor any qualifiers other than a willingness to state “we’re not affiliated with J. K. Rowling and Warner Brothers”.
I would expect many of these festivals could potentially run afoul of “nominative use” in several of the same ways that Axenar did.
#DeleteChrome
Call it something like peaceably assembled fans of X. (embedding constitutional protections into the event name)
True.... nomative use does requre a clear non-commercial intent. But a conference held by fans for fans could definitely qualify as that... depending on how it is conducted.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Really, this is myopic at best.
Jerks
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Can't believe grown adults are playing Harry Potter. Something seriously wrong.
The "meet-and-greet with Dumbledore and Harry" being over the line, I can see.
But "Defense Against the Dark Arts classes"? From what I can see of the series, JK Rollins took some stock characters and had them run around pretending to be witches and warlocks in training. It is not like the characters weren't straight out of folklore. In fact, they were popular in no small part BECAUSE they were familiar. This would seem to indicate that if someone writes a popular book, they get to own our culture.
Hasbro in this sense has done it right. They have (mostly) stayed out of the way of the Transformers fandom and more recently the MLP fandom and, as a reward, have sold more toys than if they hadn't.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
... is not a sport. Just in case Warner Bros can help at all with this travesty. TIA.
While attending Silicon Valley Comic Con 2018 earlier this year, I was at the SpaceCon panel. Bob Wilkins of Creature Freature fame borrowed a Channel 2 cameraman and several episodes of Star Trek to play at SpaceCon, a San Francisco Bay Area science fiction convention that ran through the 1970's. The early convention scene was wild because no one was concern about copyrights. That changed after Star Wars came out and Twentieth Century Fox started shutting down conventions in the early 1980s. Now we have the licensed regime.
This seems like a make-work project for for the spoil-sport jobsworths in the WB legal department. No way WB marketing department would want a crackdown on the HP fanbase.
... lock up those fans in cages. Oh wait....
101 practical advices on how to shit on customer and fan base.
It's funny, how Warner is compared to the "dark forces" like Voldemort and the dementors in Harry Potter.
Obviously marketing is concerned with making money from the content using copyrights, trademarks, licensing and by employing the law to protect their business model, sometimes with heavy handed methods. OTOH the content often idealizes rebellious figures which accept no authority and make up their own rules according to their own morals. This contrast can also be seen in the success of "Pirates" while the movie industry tried to fight "Movie pirates", or in the music industry where songs praising anti corporate and anti capitalistic ideals are in total contradiction to the actions of the RIAA.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
This is not how they do things in Japan, which has a huge culture of light novel -> manga (comic) -> anime (cartoon) -> game apadtations and related economy. Cosplay (costumed display) and fan works (doujin-shi) are tolerated by IP holders, even for sale. In fact Comiket, held twice a year and now around it 90th event, is the largest in the world, visible from space with bare eye and filling the four upside-down pyramids of the Tokyo Big Sight congress centre and the courtyard and all nearby public transport station. Queues wait in lines overnight just to get in.
This season there was an anime series titled Uma Musume - Pretty Derby, meant to promote an upcoming computer game. (Stop reading here to protect your brain cells, since it's idiotic!) Pretty Derby is about well-known japanese race horses re-incarnated as schoolgirls and running in races again. The series became a suprise hit on TV and as you can guess, there are a lot of related fan works on Pixiv, etc. and many of them are NSFW themed or even depict unnatural an illegal acts. This made the yakuza unhappy, since several of the horses depicted are still alive (yakuza owns much of gambling in Japan, incl. horse racing.) Thus, the IP holder game developer studio ASKED the fans of Pretty Derby on Twitter to moderate themselves and create in a way that respects each others sensibilities. If that request won't be met voluntarily by fan community, the studio may decide the mobile game is not getting a release, that's their only remedy.
I can't wait for all the memes.
This is how Frisbee ruined its name by sending lawyers around the country to sue anyone who mentioned they were going to play "Frisbee golf."
The university I was attending was the unfortunate recipient of one of those lawsuits, because "Frisbee Golf" was listed as an available intramural sport. They settled for an undisclosed amount and nobody there has ever purchased an authentic "Frisbee" piece of cheap Chinesium plastic ever since.
1) These people are your base
2) These people may or may not buy "non registered" goods from eachother
3) These people WILL buy your "registered" goods since they are they fanatics
Best case:
No damage
Worse case:
You alienated some of your core fans!
There's always the Twilight series.
Me? I'm waiting for somebody to re-boot the Lost Boys franchise.
Warner Bros only own the MOVIE rights to Harry Potter. J K Rowling owns the rights to the Harry Potter characters.
This time it's LAWYERS!
A Patronus Charm cannot defend against LAWYERS!
This is why copyright is a total failure. Once information is absorbed by a culture it becomes part of that culture. Stories and songs will persist long after corporations wither and die. You can't legislate against people's imaginations, fantasies, or right to assemble. Information is naturally free regardless of what man-made limitations exist.
Legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to what goes in the law.
But they write the laws, vote on the laws, judge the laws, and other wise make huge amount of money off the law.
Not surprising this kind of thing happens.
Copyright law needs to be removed from it's current association with contract law, certainly over the long term. Contract law is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. Something similar needs to be done with trademark law, which should only prevent people from claiming a false association with a project (hence a tool for preventing fraud), not be a cash cow for businesses and lawyers.
Economists estimate over half the income of the US legal profession comes from unethical practice of law associated with rent-seeking behaviour. As a result, the USA has the most unethical legal profession in human history, and in any developed nation.
But you can write your Congress-person to fix this. But wait, most of them are lawyers, they have tons of lawyers working on their staffs, and they take huge campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals.
Well, you can hope instead the judges will crack down on this. But they themselves are lawyers, and they are appointed by the same politicians mentioned previously ...
You can basically select Supreme Court decisions at random and found legal ethics issues in them, which are NOT mentioned by either side ... And, of course, the Court requires you have a lawyer from a list selected by them before you appear before the Court, an interesting way to get censorship ...
There's nothing wrong here, nothing bad to see here. The Emperor's New Clothes are really nice.
Sometimes they have to do stupid ()%$@ to justify their existence.