Category: Copyright

Hari Puttar and the Delhi High Court

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| Copyright

Hari Puttar image, via the BBC site.By way of updating my earlier post Is Harry Potter making a Parody of Copyright Law? the BBC has the following report:

Warner Bros lose Hari Puttar case

A court in the Indian capital Delhi has rejected a lawsuit filed by Hollywood company Warner Bros against the makers of a Bollywood film Hari Puttar. … The court said Warner Bros could have brought the case three years ago and said readers could easily distinguish Hari Puttar from Harry Potter. The court decision means the film can now be released in India. …

“The case has been dismissed. The court said that Warner Bros had known the title of the film since 2005 and had delayed bringing the case to court until the last moment,” lawyer Pratibha Singh was quoted by news agency AFP as saying. …

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Is Harry Potter making a Parody of Copyright Law?

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| Cinema, television and theatre, Copyright, Fair use

Harri Puttar poster, via chakpak website.Disney and the Joyce Estate have competition in the world of ridiculous over-enforcement of copyright. Step forward Harry Potter. There have been many, many legal disputes involving Harry, and his creator, J.K. Rowling. For example, several years ago now, Tim Wu wrote an entertaining piece in Slate called Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright (with added links):

J.K. Rowling and her publisher [Bloomsbury / Scholastic] have launched an aggressive worldwide legal campaign against the unauthorized Potter takeoffs … [they] can use the courts in [TRIPS]/WTO-compliant countries to club her Potter rivals.

Moreover, Warner Bros (the studio behind the Harry Potter movies) takes stern action against cybersquatters on Potter-like domain names (including an infamous example where they threatened 15-year-old Harry Potter fan, Claire Field, with legal action, though they eventually backed down). More recently, the same plaintiffs have sought to prevent the publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon (see its earlier – and continuing – website incarnation here). While we await judgment, you could do worse than check out Neil Gaiman‘s comments on the case.

Now comes news from Legal Eagle on Skeptic Lawyer that Warners are taking on the might of Bollywood, seeking to restrain the distribution of an Indian movie called Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors.…

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Oh, delicious irony: Disney might not own copyright in Mickey Mouse!?

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| Cinema, television and theatre, Copyright

A wonderful video on YouTube seeks to teach the basic principles of copyright law using Disney characters. It’s very entertaining, and the legal analysis is pretty accurate. Perhaps Disney‘s infamously litigious lawyers should have studied it, not for its potential breach of copyright, but for its content, since it seems that Disney might not in fact own some copyrights in their central character, Mickey Mouse.

As Prof David Vaver observed in a fascinating lecture on publishers and copyright (with added links):

Walt Disney may be dead but the corporation he left behind makes no secret of its intention to ensure Mickey’s worldwide legal immortality. To mangle Horace, this is one silly mouse that will produce mountains of law.

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What’s the big deal?

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| Copyright

Photo of Larry Lessig, via his site.Lessig (left) writes:

huge and important news: free licenses upheld

So for non-lawgeeks, this won’t seem important. But trust me, this is huge. … the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. … the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions … on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer …

The decision in Jacobsen v Katzer is excellent news, to be sure; but isn’t it obvious? It may be “huge”, in the sense that this is the first time that a court has actually said this; but this has always seemed obvious to me (which is why I use a Creative Commons licence on this site). What am I missing?…

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Say it ain’t so, Bill; say it ain’t so!

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| Copyright

Image of Shoeless Joe Jackson, via official website. Even if no kid ever actually pleaded with ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson (pictured) (“Say it ain’t so, Joe; say it ain’t so”) to deny his involvement in throwing the 1919 baseball World Series (dramatized in the movie Eight Men Out), it’s still a good line, and entirely apposite to title a post mourning the passing of the best copyright blog on the net.

Last Friday, William Patry announced the demise of his wonderful blog (including – I am sorry to say – the deletion of his hugely informative archives) (see update, below):

End of the blog

I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4 years. I regret closing the blog and I owe readers an explanation. There are two reasons.

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Natural copyright?

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| Copyright

Copyright symbolIn Phonographic Performance Ltd v Cody [1998] 4 IR 504, 511, [1994] 2 ILRM 241, 247 (emphasis added), Keane J held that:

Section 60(4) of the Act of 1963 [ie, the Copyright Act, 1963; see now section 77(4) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000] provides that no right in the nature of copyright “shall subsist otherwise than by virtue of this Act or of some other enactment in that behalf”. The right of the creator of literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work not to have his or her creation stolen or plagiarised is a right of private property within the meaning of Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1 of the Constitution, as is the similar right of a person who has employed his or her technical skills and/or capital in the sound recording of a musical work. As such, they can hardly be abolished in their entirety, although it was doubtless within the competence of the Oireachtas to regulate their exercise in the interests of the common good. In addition and even in the absence of any statutory machinery, it is the duty of the organs of the State, including the Courts, to ensure, as best they may, that these rights are protected from unjust attack, and in the case of injustice done, vindicated.

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Fox might report, but they won’t let us decide

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| advertising, Copyright, Fair use, Media and Communications

Fox News logo, via their site.Over on Lex Ferenda, Daithí has highlighted that, in the US, Fox News has written to US Republican Presidential candidate John McCain asking him to stop using a clip of his own words from a debate in a political advertisement. In fact, not content with taking on one presidential candidate, Daithí points out that they have decided to take on all of them, writing to them all in similar terms.

Fox are playing a dangerous game here (well, dangerous for them, at any rate). There is a very strong argument that First Amendment political speech concerns make this advertisment a non-commercial fair use (don’t just take my word for it; Michael Geist thought so too during a similar Canadian flap last January). And an express Federal Circuit Court holding to that effect would certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons for those broadcasters like Fox who continue to insist on restricting copyright in political debates which they host / broadcast. In fact, Fox seem to be the main holdout against Lessig‘s petition to the US political parties and broadcast networks to license Presidential debates freely after they are initially broadcast – either by putting the debates into the public domain, or by permitting anyone to use or remix the contents of those debates, for any reason whatsoever, so long as there is attribution back to any purported copyright holder.…

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