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Copyright Joy
Oct. 26th, 2006 08:01 pmOn one of the comics weblogs I visit, there was recently a post about a creator who's made some Star Wars T-shirts for sale... and got a cease-and-desist letter from Lucasfilm. (I saw one of those shirts once in a comics store that's close enough to visit; the only problem was that it immediately made me uneasy about all the other less flattering slogans that just might be for sale alongside it.)
Whenever something like this happens, I start worrying about people trying to make Lucasfilm seem like a rich yet uncaring company with an inexhaustible army of lawyer droids... and yet, while I can be cautious of "slippery slope" arguments, in this case I can imagine larger and larger companies turning out products and pocketing every cent they get from them, freeloading off the property. That's not quite all, though. In the ensuing reactions, somebody turned up a page pointing out parallels (some, perhaps, a little stronger than others) between some French-language comics from the 1970s and the Star Wars saga, leaving me with ambiguous thoughts that somebody is trying to argue "two wrongs make a right," which for the moment I can best counter with the equally vague comment "Steal from one person and you're a plagarist, draw from a hundred and you're an artist."
Whenever something like this happens, I start worrying about people trying to make Lucasfilm seem like a rich yet uncaring company with an inexhaustible army of lawyer droids... and yet, while I can be cautious of "slippery slope" arguments, in this case I can imagine larger and larger companies turning out products and pocketing every cent they get from them, freeloading off the property. That's not quite all, though. In the ensuing reactions, somebody turned up a page pointing out parallels (some, perhaps, a little stronger than others) between some French-language comics from the 1970s and the Star Wars saga, leaving me with ambiguous thoughts that somebody is trying to argue "two wrongs make a right," which for the moment I can best counter with the equally vague comment "Steal from one person and you're a plagarist, draw from a hundred and you're an artist."