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Your humble opinion would be wrong. This is pretty clearly a "derivative work", which requires permission from the rightsholder. For example, I could totally w
by rosser 12y ago
Your humble opinion would be wrong. This is pretty clearly a "derivative work", which requires permission from the rightsholder.
For example, I could totally write a story that had characters named Gandalf and Frodo. But if my Gandalf happened to be a grey-wearing wizard, who walked around saying things like, "A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to," and my Frodo a hairy-footed fellow of diminutive stature with an extra-special ring, I'd better have had permission from the Tolkien estate, or a lot of money to burn on lawyers and fines.
EDIT: Pre-emptively, yeah yeah yeah, parody. Bringing that up in this context is probably diversionary pedantry at best, however.
- ForHackernews 12y agoThat's not how fair use works. The only way to determine whether something qualifies as "fair use" is to take the case to court and have a court rule on it.
- nraynaud 12y agoI'm pretty sure that the documentary aspect of the movie makes the thing fair use.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago"documentary"? The Fifth Estate is not a documentary.
- notahacker 12y agoThe other factor is that they're background slides. The Tolkien Trust would be very interested in stopping you from selling a derivative version of Christopher Tolkien's maps but rather less interested if derivative version of Tolkien's maps appear as props in a movie scene involving a convention for fantasy enthusiasts in a movie whose theme and plotline is not even remotely related to the subject of hobbits or Middle Earth.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- biot 12y agoBad example. The items in the movie are mostly paraphrases or summaries of the original. This would be more like releasing a movie where in one of the scenes a wall in the background contained a slide that said: WIZARDS - NEVER LATE OR EARLY - PRECISELY ON TIME Does that require the Tolkien estate to grant permission?