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LucasFilm Rescues Darth Vader Fan Film From YouTube Copyright Fight (newsweek.com)
A Star Wars fan named "Toos" told Newsweek he'd spent $150,000 of his own money on a fan film about Darth Vader -- and what happened next:
Before the camera started rolling Toos said he contacted an employee at Lucasfilm [and] claims Lucasfilm gave him permission on two conditions: he couldn't crowdfund and he couldn't monetize the fan film on YouTube. Toos agreed to those conditions and shot for three full days in September. They ran post-production up until the release of "Vader Episode 1: Shards of the Past" on December 20. Star Wars fans, a notoriously tough group to please, had overwhelming praise for the video, which gathered more than six million views in one month and 40,000 likes.
On January 14, music group and corporate collective Warner/Chappell filed a copyright claim against the video. After filing the claim, the company (publisher for the Walt Disney Music Company) began to collect ad revenue for Toos' video by claiming that one of the songs used a rendition of "The Imperial March"... If Toos attempts to appeal and Warner/Chappell refutes his claim, he could get a copyright strike on his channel and lose complete ownership of the video...
Fan response on Reddit has been massive, with the post about Star Wars Theory and the strike reaching over 90,000 upvotes... In a new video on the StarWarsTheory channel, Toos told his fans that the claim on his video had been lifted due in part to the intervention of LucasFilm."They stepped up and told Disney or the other company that this wasn't okay, that this wasn't going to stand."
Newsweek points out that Disney doesn't own Warner/Chappell. "The music group merely licenses their music" -- and has been accused of making erroneous claims before.
They're the same group that claimed they owned the music rights on a YouTube clip from Star Wars with all the original music removed.
On January 14, music group and corporate collective Warner/Chappell filed a copyright claim against the video. After filing the claim, the company (publisher for the Walt Disney Music Company) began to collect ad revenue for Toos' video by claiming that one of the songs used a rendition of "The Imperial March"... If Toos attempts to appeal and Warner/Chappell refutes his claim, he could get a copyright strike on his channel and lose complete ownership of the video...
Fan response on Reddit has been massive, with the post about Star Wars Theory and the strike reaching over 90,000 upvotes... In a new video on the StarWarsTheory channel, Toos told his fans that the claim on his video had been lifted due in part to the intervention of LucasFilm."They stepped up and told Disney or the other company that this wasn't okay, that this wasn't going to stand."
Newsweek points out that Disney doesn't own Warner/Chappell. "The music group merely licenses their music" -- and has been accused of making erroneous claims before.
They're the same group that claimed they owned the music rights on a YouTube clip from Star Wars with all the original music removed.
or it fails. Free them to worship, with all visual and audible alacrity, Most High!
To the Moon!
so less than 1% liked it?
Mine! Mine! MINE! Wait, what is it again? Oh well, doesn't matter ---- MINE! MIIIIINEEEEE!
After all, I'm paid to protect property rights and collect fees. So if you use notes in a song, MINE. If you DON'T use notes in a song, that's MIIIIIN... wait, that's J Cage. But it SHOULD be mine though, I'm working on that.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
The problem for the studio was that it was too good. They were getting upstaged. Fire the studio execs and let good directors do their work.
We need a Creative Commons sci/fi universe that people can create from instead of using some copyrighted story. We need a pallet to paint from.
That Vader film certainly has a few bars of what sounds very much like the Imperial March.
The video with "all the music removed" certainly has what one might consider "music" at the start.
I mean, sure there's a serious issue with the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and youTube's policy here is awful, but the criticisms seem a little disingenuous.
I made a rather long YouTube video (over an hour in length) that racked up nearly a million views. 100% of the content in it is either my own original work or from the public domain. Despite that, there are over 20 different copyright claims on the video that I cannot get removed, despite trying. I disputed them with google, and lost all those disputes. It was going to take way more time than it was worth to prepare all the "evidence" that the video was not using the works that the claimers were "citing". In most cases, I couldn't even tell what the hell "copyrighted work" they were referring to that they supposedly owned the rights to. The names of "their works" were so vague and Googling didn't turn anything up. I lost all those disputes... However I don't think I was ever given a Strike.
This is a huge problem on YouTube, and has turned me away from even trying to make it a platform to publish content with any aspirations of earning ad-revenue.
I'm impressed.
This is why any discerning Youtube video poster uses only Tibetan throat songs performed by themselves as background music. The music of Hildegard of Bingen is also suitable while performing unspeakable acts for the camera. Even more so afterwards.
Wow, this was great. The tension in the story had me hooked. Vader is torn between doing what's right, and his loyalty to Palapatine. This is the kind of internal struggle we saw in the first 3 Star Wars films that made them a compelling story, but now it's from the other side of the conflict. FX were good considering the budget. One small change I would have done, when Vader is looking down at that hole to the catacombs with light flashes coming out of it, I would have used purple colored flashes of light instead of white, just to add a little more foreshadowing to Palapatines, "Amethyst saber wielding Jedi"
Beyond the story and FX, I loved the costumes too. The storm trooper talking to Vader at Naboo, he looked almost like a 50's hot rod to me. His mask had dual K&N looking air intakes on it. In the original Star wars, much of what Lucas had to work with was based on a limited budget, and things familiar to him. Considering Lucas directed "American Graffiti" it was almost like a nod to where the original Star Wars got so much of its design from. It was a combination of 40's and 50's era technology shoe horned into a futuristing setting (The Millineum Falcon's cockpit for instance was designed to look like a B52's, much of the space dogfighting was modeled after WWI Biplane dogfights)
Disney should hire you guys to flesh out and direct any new star wars films. Given your limited resources (Which might have contributed to why this is so good) it's perfect. There is a love for the universe in every detail of this, and I look forward to the next episode.
I've heard so many stories similar to your that at this point there's no way I would put original content on YouTube.
Have you thought about putting the same content on Vimeo? I know it's not as popular but the way people are being screwed over at YouTube, eventually there's going to be a shift somewhere and that seems the next most likely platform people would go to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In a phrase- fan investment. SF/fantasy IPs are launced all the time. 99% bomb, and bomb massively. When Star Wars was released back in 1977, the industry understood that SF was one genre that never made real money in the cinema- and all the attempts to emulate the success of Star Wars in the decade that followed showed that Star Wars was the 'exception that proves (tests) the rule. Of course today, we know otherwise.
What Lucas had achieved (entirely by accident- everything in the Star Wars movie was his 10th arbitary refinement) was to get a fanbase to rally behind his cinema world just as a similar fanbase had rallied behind the TV world of Star Trek. And just as fans had kept alive Star Trek with various fan works since that show was cancelled in the late 60s, fans would start to support and make various fanworks around the Star Wars universe.
Eventually, Lucas formalised the rules that allowed fans to make FREE use of his IP, so long as their efforts were not monetised. This GREW interest in the IP after Lucas became too incompetent to make more movies after 'return of the Jedi' - tho the downside of the fan base was extreme criticism of all official Star Wars products - including the new films when Lucas eventually started making them again (the 'prequels'). But perversely fan 'hatred' was actually a positive for support of the IP- even tho it forced Lucas to give up on the IP is despair and sell it to Disney.
Lucasfilm understands the unique value of fan-service to its IP. Corporate Disney, on the other hand, does not. Corporate Disney is responsible 100% for the horror SJW scripting of the recent Disney Star Wars movies that have burnt off a LOT of fan support for the IP. But Lucasfilm is convinced the brand can survive a number of truly rotten movies made in the zeitgeist of our 'age' IF fandom is allowed to continue to freely use their own money to make Star Wars stuff they feel better captures the spirit of Star Wars.
At the moment the CANCER of SF on American TV/Cinema is JJ "one shot, two kills" Abrams. He and his stable of 'tribe' writers not only have zero talent, but have ruined an unbelievable amount of genre works. His team works by vaguely remembering themes from their dad's VHS tapes, and low IQ repeating these themes in their screenplays. The 'quality' of 'one shot. two kills' Abrams work on the first Disney Star Wars movie destroyed that film and the ones that followed. Likewise, Mr 'one shot., two kills' destroyed the new Star Trek movies. Tribe writers from his stable are actually worse. And some of them are now allowed by fellow tribe producers in Hollywood to direct- and their efforts in this direction have to be seen to be believed.
When big budget IP output is as demonically awful as current Star Wars and Star Trek output currently is, fans will hunker down and imagine their own stories and character expressions. Wait for a time when JJ 'one shot, two kills' Abrams is no long a force in the industry. Sane owners of IPs will not hate their fans for doing this, or punish them for not supporting the current orthodoxy. Sane owners- even if they do not understand why fans are hating on their current efforts, will leave the fans alone.
PS Lucasfilm threw the fans a bone with the tone deaf, godawful 'Solo' movie. With this film, the fans understood that currently Disney cannot make a good Star Wars movie to save their lives. So fans want to use their OWN imagination. In doing so, the fans want to work FOR FREE. Lucasfilm has the good sense to understand 'free' is good.
...Star wars from Disney and themselves.
A recording that you commissioned by contacting someone on, say, the FamiTracker Discord server is copyrighted but licensed to you under favorable terms.
See the story about Jennifer Nelson's lawsuit against Warner/Chappell for many years of fraudulently charging for use of the Happy Birthday song by claiming a copyright they did not hold (an estimated $2M/year source of fraudulent income). She also made a documentary about her research and suit which is well worth watching.
Nelson's lawsuit is very informative for many reasons, one of which is it speaks loudly about why we should not trust Warner/Chappell's claims about their copyright assertions. We also have good reason not to trust any system or policy that encourages quickly shutting down service at the behest of a copyright claim. Copyright fraud is very real and there seems to be little incentive for claimants to fear making erroneous, exaggerated, or outright lying claims which continue decades of fraud as Warner/Chappell apparently did. As Nelson said in an interview with Al Jazeera, "A lot of people were duped into thinking that they had to pay for the song when in fact they didn't."
Digital Citizen
While difficult I'd ask any readers to try to avoid taking a partisan overreaction to what I'm going to say or even assuming which side you think I fall on.
But I sincerely believe that a lot of the hotbutton topics in politics in the USA right now are deliberately inflamed by the power elite on both sides in order to obscure the real problems with America today.
Abortion rights, gun rights, illegal immigrants, the war on drugs are just the most obvious ones. These were topics that up until some up and coming politician decided to make them a partisan issue, they weren't. There were people in both parties that had all kinds of opinions, pro/con/meh/whatever, on the topics.
But now politicians on either side staked a position for the party and present their side as the only moral on and the other side as irredeemably evil. This is because they wanted to create a political world where people won't even dream of crossing party lines.
This all hides the real problem from the attention of voters which gets us to things like copyright law, because it is part and parcel with corruption in politics and the control that corporate America has over our government.
Is their a reason he did not attempt to get permission from the actual owners of the rights?
Lucas Arts Should be careful, I imagine any court is unlikely to take pretending to have intellectual property you don't have is many different kinds of illegal.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
for years.
We need to get a coalition of creatives together to set down ground rules for canon inclusion, a proofreading/canon staff for reading prerelease drafts of fiction so that authors remain both canon and consistent and rules for both clear character ownership and fair use (ideally allowing cross-author cameos with implicit character licensing, and only requiring licensing/royalties for writing a short story or novel based on someone else's creation.) An even more important detail would be in deciding how and when a person's original work becomes part of the community it helped foster, so their contributions can either be allowed to take on a life beyond their own, or have a clear resolution ending their participation in the universe while still allowing reference to their characters to exist.
If we did all of the above would could finally give up selling a part of ourselves to commercial entities where only stockholm syndrome can keep us supporting our childhood favorite franchises, which had been perverted beyond all measure through multiple corporate takeovers, transfers, and creative leadership changes.
Also RIP LucasGames and the creative media licensing division. Those were the canon I prefered over the later Film franchise. West End Games and the authors of the 70s to 1990s did more for Star Wars than anyone other than perhaps Ralph McQuarrie did. And Lucas did far less to bring it all to life than all the unsung heroes behind the camera, writing, props, and man (just look at his ex-wife and her early participation.)
If anyone becomes serious at taking this concept further, consider using a libre site for discussion, instead of discord, reddit, etc. It's silly to take a stand on one facet of the creatives problem while helping support a different part of it.
No one searches Vimeo for anything.
I would agree that pretty much no-one is going to go to Vimeo and search for content.
However what I have seen personally is that Google or Bing searches will find video content on Vimeo, that is what I meant. In terms of search rank Vimeo is going to be a lot higher up there in terms of trust and search placement than video hosted on some random blog with four readers with zero external links.
The benefit is most people don't know how to host anything,
That is true, but like I said even if you know how to host video Vimeo is still solving a lot of issues for you you may not want to take the time to address.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most Creative Commons licenses mean that licensors retain their copyright on the work. The issue isn't whether the work is copyrighted, the issue is in what rights licensees get. But there are more works being elevated to the public domain[1], so one is free to draw on those if one desires an already-written story.
[1] I say "elevated to" rather than "falling into" because I don't think of the public domain as being of lower value to the public. I see "falling into the public domain" as propagandistic and I think it's worthwhile to get people to reconsider that oft-repeated language.
Digital Citizen
So, I make a synchronized light+music show on our themed christmas tree each year. And of course film the result and upload to YouTube for future bragging rights. A few years ago, the theme was space, and I did a few different songs. The only time I've ever gotten a copyright violation claim was that year with a Star Wars medley. I arranged the music myself based on the force theme and the imperial march, but it was original (and performed by my synthesizer) - take down notice within hours of upload. Lost on appeal.
My video was of my own christmas tree, with a bunch of planets and stars as ornaments, lighting up red/blue/yellow and generally telling a story of new hope, the empire striking back, and the return of the jedi ;) The light string might have resembled lightsabers, and might have actually included some scenes, rendered 1D style on the continuous light string, but saying that bears similarity to a copyright image would be going a bit far.