Sorry - would have posted on the main entry, but am a legal ignorant.
So, I can make now make a storm-trooper costume, but not sell it? Or can I now sell it as well? Does this make it possible for anybody to make Star Wars merchandise? How do filmmakers protect their rights?
Does this affect that restaurant lady who was forced to hold a "Generic Wizard party" after the HP legal department scotched her Harry Potter evening?
Well, you are asking sensible questions, which is more than many law students do!
You can make and indeed sell a Stormtrooper costume. The court has decided that this particular costume, because it was made as a prop with no special artistic element, came under industrial design protection rather than copyright protection. The protection period for designs is much shorter than for copyright, and in the case of items made in 1976 for the original film has long since expired.
What you can't do is sell it into the USA, where the law is different. Indeed, doing so is how Ainsworth got into trouble in the first place.
This will not apply to much Star Wars material. The films are protected as artistic copyright works and so is most of the written or graphical material associated with them. Lucasfilm will own a whole swathe of trade marks, so it would be asking for trouble to sell stuff as 'Star Wars' related (if you look at Ainsworth's web site he is very evasive about naming the film the helmets came from!). And many other props would be so distinctive that I think the product/artwork decision would fall on the side of copyright protection - for instance, I doubt, reading the judgments, if Ainsworth would have won had he been selling Darth Vader's outfit; it is so clearly distinctive.
What this does mean, along with some lesser-known legal cases, is that film and TV makers may find that some prop and costume items get only limited-duration design right protection. For example, I think that the Dalek is well out of protection by now, which may be why the BBC backed off from pursuing the woman who was selling Dalek knitting patterns.
As for the HP dinner party, I wrote about that earlier. I think the best tactic there would have been to say that it was a very small, non-commercial, food-themed Harry Potter convention!
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major_clanger) wrote2009-12-21 11:00 am
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So, at the risk of seeming stupid...
So, I can make now make a storm-trooper costume, but not sell it? Or can I now sell it as well? Does this make it possible for anybody to make Star Wars merchandise? How do filmmakers protect their rights?
Does this affect that restaurant lady who was forced to hold a "Generic Wizard party" after the HP legal department scotched her Harry Potter evening?
Re: So, at the risk of seeming stupid...
You can make and indeed sell a Stormtrooper costume. The court has decided that this particular costume, because it was made as a prop with no special artistic element, came under industrial design protection rather than copyright protection. The protection period for designs is much shorter than for copyright, and in the case of items made in 1976 for the original film has long since expired.
What you can't do is sell it into the USA, where the law is different. Indeed, doing so is how Ainsworth got into trouble in the first place.
This will not apply to much Star Wars material. The films are protected as artistic copyright works and so is most of the written or graphical material associated with them. Lucasfilm will own a whole swathe of trade marks, so it would be asking for trouble to sell stuff as 'Star Wars' related (if you look at Ainsworth's web site he is very evasive about naming the film the helmets came from!). And many other props would be so distinctive that I think the product/artwork decision would fall on the side of copyright protection - for instance, I doubt, reading the judgments, if Ainsworth would have won had he been selling Darth Vader's outfit; it is so clearly distinctive.
What this does mean, along with some lesser-known legal cases, is that film and TV makers may find that some prop and costume items get only limited-duration design right protection. For example, I think that the Dalek is well out of protection by now, which may be why the BBC backed off from pursuing the woman who was selling Dalek knitting patterns.
As for the HP dinner party, I wrote about that earlier. I think the best tactic there would have been to say that it was a very small, non-commercial, food-themed Harry Potter convention!