I think the remaining seasons of The Muppet Show is because of the music rights also(and some guest stars refusing to release without compensation).
OK, time for Typo’s Stupid Question of the Day!
Let’s say that CBS decides it’s not worth their time to punish the OP.
Does Shatner have any recourse against the OP? Lets say he doesn’t want the movie distributed, for whatever reason. Maybe he feels his performance in that film wasn’t up to the Shatner standard. He signed a deal with CBS, so they could distribute it to their heart’s content and Shatner would have to eat it. But he did not deal with the OP. The OP has made money of Shatner’s likeness. Could Shatner take him to court? (and by that, I mean likely to win in court)
Denny Crane always wins!
Under the Copyright Act of 1976, only the copyright holder has the right to bring a copyright claim.
So the question is whether an actor in an audiovisual work holds any copyright interest in a work.
If you ask a movie studio, they would say no, the sole author of the work is the movie producer. And that is generally how Hollywood has operated.
Also relevant here is the Works Made for Hire Doctrine, under which an employer is deemed the author of any creative work made by an employee in the context of his or her duties.
The wrinkle is that in the U.S. entertainment industry, actors are independent contractors, not employees, so the Work Made for Hire Doctrine does not apply unless there is a contract explicitly assigning authorship rights to the movie producer.
I don’t know enough about employment contracts in the film industry or about the industry’s agreements with the Screen Actors Guild and other labor unions to know whether or how the contracts address this issue.
I would assume Hollywood knows how to do this, but I could be wrong.
Here’s a wrinkle though—Garcia v. Google, 743 F.3d 1258 (9th Cir. 2014), ruled that an actor in a film has an independent copyright interest in her performance.
The film industry declared this ruling insane and the Ninh Circuit is currently reconsidering this decision en banc.
It is thought that Judge Alex Kozinski gave in to his understandable sympathy for the plaintiff, who was tricked into appearing in a small role in an anti-Islam film, “Innocence of Muslims,” and as a result has been subject to death threats.
Suffice to say, there’s a possible wrinkle here.
There’s also physical likeness laws. This a relatively new area of law that hasn’t built up a definitive body of precedents. The basic idea is that some people make a living in part by selling their appearance - actors are an obvious example of this. So they have a legal interest in preventing people from using their physical likeness without compensating them.
So let’s say a paint some portraits of William Shatner and use them to make a calendar which I put up for sale. Shatner would be able to argue that his appearance is his property which has an established value due to the fact that he gets paid to appear in things. So I have to pay him if I’m using his physical likeness to sell a product.
It’s a not a guaranteed win for Shatner. I have rights as well - such as the right to create works of art and to sell them. And I have some rights to use publicly available images (such as William Shatner’s appearance) as inspiration for my art.
The situation in the OP would add a new wrinkle. Could Shatner argue that he consented to his appearance in a movie being sold by CBS but did not consent to it being sold in bootleg editions of the same product? Maybe.
I completely disagree with the idea that this is a proper example. What you’re describing is infringing on your privacy, akin to say, entering your bedroom and taking pictures of you having sex with your spouse.
The kind of works we’re talking about are works that have been publicly released by their author (published, broadcasted, etc…). A better example would be an author who publish something and later on disown his creation (he thinks his youth poetry is crap, he adamanty supported neo-nazism and became a leftist, whatever…).
Such an example, however, doesn’t reflect the most common issue : some corporation/publisher/whatever finds that there are better use for its time and money than releasing again a product that isn’t expected, rightly or wrongly, to make much money. But on the other hand has exactly zero reason or incentive to let it be released by someone else.
As I said, set aside the question of invasion of privacy. That’s a separate issue. A diary is an original an creative work of expression fixed in a tangible medium in which you hold copyright interest. That makes it like a poem you wrote or a short story you wrote that you have chosen not to distribute.
Remover even though it is an invasion of privacy, another person still might conceivably hold fair use rights to copy and broadcast part of it, just like any other creative work. So the privacy issue is a different question.
Why you have chosen not to distribute is nobody’s business. It’s your work. It’s your right to withhold it from the public.
These are called “personality rights” or in U.S. state laws “right of publicity.” Depending on the state they can apply to a person’s name, identity, likeness, appearance, image, voice, and other things.
In agreeing to appear in a film, however, Shatner has no misappropriation claim with respect to copying and distribution of that film. Any conceivable personality right there is pre-empted as being duplicative of a copyright claim.
Go Set a Watchman
Real world example that happened to me first hand…and before I start please don’t tell me how stupid this was…I know how stupid it was already.
Couple years ago I was working in television and my production company was booming. We got thrown a television series that was established but seriously needed to be revamped.
In our haste we threw a filler song into the theme to get things edited, and we mailed the record company for rights to use it. Two weeks later, no response, I knew they would let us use it so I gave the go ahead to put it on the air.
A year later the recor company found our request hiding in their paperwork, an discovered we had used their song 54 times without permission.
They had us by the balls but gave us the option of paying $100 per week back to the original air date and forced us to sign a contract to use the song for another year.
They went easy on us, they could of taken me for all I was worth…don’t mess around with this stuff!
And also in Japan, the country’s biggest rental video/audio/comic store, TSUTAYA, has a copy machine in many stores and blank DVDs & CDs for sale right near the counter. I wonder what those could be for? Hmmm. :dubious:
The threat of Shatner [Audio NSFW]crooning[/Audio NSFW] outside his window should be enough.
That’s what makes me find it similar to an invasion of privacy. Not because the plumber entered your house, but because he decided to make public what you wanted to keep private.
But what we are talking about are works that the author decided to make public (and would like later to make dissapear from public view). For me, it makes a huge difference. Rather than a private diary, the equivalent would be the editorial piece you were writing daily in some local newspaper and now are ashamed of.
That’s where we probably disagree strongly. You (probably) are of the opinion that you have a moral right over what you wrote, that should naturally enable you to prevent its distribution at any moment for any reason.
I think that there isn’t any such moral or natural right. That whatever you create and then make public naturally escapes your control and is up to the taking for anybody. And that copyright is a completely artificial concept whose sole reason to exist is to encourage further creation by rewarding creative people. And as such, that your right to prevent a new edition of whatever work you published in the past is only an unavoidable but unfortunate consequence of copyright laws, and runs contrary to the very reason why they exist (making works unavailable instead of making more works available).
(this doesn’t apply to the plumber publishing your diary because you never decided to make it public anymore than your hot sex pictures).
I disagree. I believe that I have the right to create and distribute on my terms. If I originally mixed my music in mono, I should have the right to demand that some recording engineer not re-mix it “electronically to simulate stereo” (this is actually a controversy with old music being re-released.) If I shot my cinema masterpiece in black and white, I should have the right to not have Ted Turner colorize it. And if (God forbid!) I believe my cinematic masterpiece would be improved with state of the art CGI and having Greedo shoot first, even that is for me and only me to answer for on Judgement Day.
And to me there are two issues. My privacy rights and my right to decide whether to distribute my creation.
If I am a person whose opinions are of public interest then you have fair use rights to make my past opinions known. That’s already taken care of.
Yes, I believe I have a moral right to halt the producing of any more copies of my creation at any time for any reason (absent fair use).
All human “concepts” in the form of legal rights or a legal regime are artificial. We make the rules of our society.
And I think that it’s not the sole reason I have rights. I also think I have a right to control what I created.
The reason—not the only one in my view—is not to make any specific work or every conceivable work available to the public, but to generally encourage the production of works that are then made available to the public.
In fact, I think I should have the right never to sell any of my works but make them available only subject to licenses. I should be able to license copies of my book and prevent further distribution, just like I can license software and prevent further distribution.