Tag: fair use
(Brain) Dead Intellectual Property Rights
Strong box office. A critical darling. Nominated in 2012 for the Academy Awards for Best Picture; winner of the Best Original Screenplay. By any measure, Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris would be considered a cinematic success.
That is, until the film found itself in the center of some legal sound and fury.
The movie transports its hero, a struggling author played with panache by Owen Wilson, to the artistic mecca that was Paris in the early 20th century.
Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway all have memorable moments in the film. And in one scene, Mr. Wilson’s character says, in true Woody Allen-neurotic style: “The past is not dead! Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party.”
The literati in the audience surely recognized the quote, and laughed. It’s a riff on a line from William. Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun”: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Other people who recognized the quote? Mr. Faulkner’s estate.
Faulkner Literary Rights, LLC (Faulkner LLC) has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal district court against production studio Sony Pictures Classics.
Does the law protect use of quotes only ten words long? Or does it dismiss these types of actions as frivolous and use of such material as protected by fair use? Does it matter that the movie clearly attributes the quote to the original author? Or was it more damaging to have associated Faulkner with the film than not? The media didn’t say. LASIS investigates.
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Tags copyright, fair use, Midnight in Paris, Professor David Johnson, Professor Richard Chused, Requiem for a Nun, Sony, William Faulkner, woody allen |
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Date 11/27/2012 |
Copyright Clash at the Cellular Level
By James Joyce is thought by many to have revolutionized 20th century fiction, so it comes as no surprise that biologist Craig Venter decided to quote the writer when he revolutionized the science world and created the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010.
The synthetic cell was copied from a natural genome, which contains all the hereditary information of an organism, and placed into a host cell. In order to differentiate between the synthetic genomes and the natural genomes, Mr. Venter and his team encoded different ”watermarks” into the new cells, including “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. To the delight of the scientific community the cells came to life, but the Joyce estate was not amused and tried to stop the experiment dead in its tracks.
This kind of “watermarking” is nothing new. In fact, according to The New Yorker, scientists have used quotations from sources ranging from the Bible to famous Disney songs to Virgil with no problems of note. But as Discover Magazine reported, Mr. Venter didn’t get off so easy, and received a cease-and-desist letter from the famously litigious estate of the Irish writer. It appears the estate thinks that Mr. Venter’s use of the passage without seeking permission constitutes copyright infringement. In a statement, Mr. Venter defended quoting the line in the synthetic genome and said that he and his team “thought it fell under fair use.” The article mulls over what a decision in favor of Mr. Joyce’s estate could mean if there were to be a lawsuit but doesn’t discuss the likelihood that the court will decide that way. (more…)
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Tags A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Craig Venter, fair use, James Joyce |
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Date 04/02/2011 |