What might be the ramifications if I were to build an environment in virtual reality, based off a popular Hollywood film, only to showcase what I, or my business, is capable of doing artistically/technically, in order to pitch to marketing firms for legit film properties?
So, for example, imagine if I were to computer model the entire penitentiary from The Shawshank Redemption in a way that you could explore the whole prison, talk to virtual characters, examine tangential interesting content, etc. ONLY as a demonstration to garner business of the like. Such a demo, in and of itself, would never be sold or shown to the general public.
Are there laws protecting such private content from being used in such a way to garner legit business?
IANAL, however I sometimes have to deal with legal issues concerning video game content.
The law prohibits the creation of “derivative works” without the consent of the copyright holder. There are “fair use” exceptions to this rule, but they concern educational, critical or satirical uses of the material, none of which apply to what you’re proposing. The fact that you’re not charging for the demo would carry some weight, but it’s still for “commercial purposes” – to drum up business for your studio. Furthermore, what you’re proposing is pretty substantial. If you were just using still images from a film to demonstrate a Photoshop filter, you’d probably be fine, but you’re talking about recreating settings, scenes, characters and dialog.
Realistically, if you only show the demo to people in private, it’s unlikely that copyright holder will ever find out what you’re doing. However, if they do find out you can expect a cease and desist letter. If it goes to court, there’s a good chance you will lose. I’d never get clearance from PlayStation legal to do something like what you’re proposing.
I’m pretty small-time, but I have some connections where I think I can gain such work, but I’d rather use a well-known property to demonstrate what’s possible for the most impact, and to get as close as possible to what I could do for other properties.
It seemed to me that if I just kept it between myself and the people/firms I’m pitching to, there shouldn’t be much of an issue, but I do realize there might be some legal issue since I’d be using it to garner commercial work, even though the demo itself wouldn’t be used directly for profit. Just to show capabilities.
The alternate is to create a demo that is a fake “film property” and just build my own environment and other content that gets the point across, but it’s just not as fun for either side.
Essentially you would be using the derivative work for marketing, and whether it was one-on-one marketing or purchase of advertising in a major media market wouldn’t affect the legalities.
Also, in the age of the Internet, you have to assume that anything presented even on a one-on-one basis can easily escape into the wild. All it would take would be you emailing a link to the demo and someone thinking it was cool enough to share online, or even someone filming with a cellphone, and suddenly your awesome demo of Shawshank is going viral, and Time Warner is all over you.
Would it make a difference between a real place, that a film just happened to be shot there, like the prison in Shawshank, as opposed to a ‘set’ that he recreates.
Like you re-create Rick’s American Cafe from Casablanca?
With Shawshank, the exterior of the building is right out there on public display. Of course the interior layout in the film and in reality maybe quite different from each other.
Are you going to layout the inside as we saw in the movie? Like here is the roof they had to apply tar. The woodshop, the library, etc etc.
Thanks for the advice all. After presenting your comments to some of my cohorts, we agree that it’s just not worth the effort to derive a copyrighted work for demo purposes. FWIW, we decided to go with a popular and epic setting from the public domain.
Shawshank was only an example to make my case; what I really intended on creating was the USS Discovery and the Pod (inside and out) from 2001: ASO. Ahhh well…