I Have a LawBlog

[major_clanger]

Yes, Legal Clanger now has its own existence as LawClanger. You may find the first substantive post rather familiar-looking!

This is not the end of Legal Clanger posts, but for long articles I will probably put them on LawClanger and post a link here.

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That almost seems to make sense to my very non-legal mind, which probably just means I haven't understood it properly.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Interesting post. I can't help wondering whether some costumes would be considered as a WAC. Servalan's dresses strike me as rather more than props, more the designer dress approach to life.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I was pondering this after writing the post. I suspect there might be a boundary between 'dramatic effect' costumes, such as the Stormtrooper armour, and costumes such as the ones you mention, that might be striking and unusual but which are on the face of it no different from those you might see in a fashion show. How and where that boundary would be drawn is a difficult question! In this case, Mr Justice Mann pointed to aspects of the helmets that marked them out as props, such as the way that what looked at first sight like surface detail had simply been painted on. But I think the wider test for him was whether the costumes were meant to be admired as artistic creations, or to create a dramatic impression. Stormtrooper armour, in his view, definitely fell into the latter category. Servalan's dresses might well be the former.

This also raises interesting issues regarding copyright in, for instance, superhero character designs. It is well-established that if you make a 3D reproduction of a character from 2D artwork, such as a comic strip, then that is an infringement of copyright in the latter (this is the Popeye case from 1941). But what Mann J seems to be saying here is that such outfits, when created as actual TV or film costumes, are unlikely to attract copyright protection. Furthermore, if the first drawings of them are deliberately done as preliminary designs (e.g. concept art for a film) then s.51 applies, and turning them into 3D reproductions is not infringing either.

This seems to lead to an anomalous situation whereby the appearance of a character originally created as artwork in its own right, such as Batman or Superman, would enjoy copyright protection, but one created initially for a movie, such as Darth Vader, would not - even though Batman has been turned into many movies, and Darth Vader has appeared in numerous comics. The moral of this: when planning a film with an original superhero, do a small-press comic featuring him or her first...!