Results tagged “licensing” from Uncivil Society

Another charity-studded week for comics, which, like fashion, has become a significant presence in do-gooder fundraising. Via the Beat, news of two worlds colliding in last night's superhero fashion event at this year's Chocolate Show.

Trade shows fascinate me, because in the nonprofit & tax-exempt world they illustrate how identity design can lead us to see business as something distinct from business. The effect becomes even more interesting when you compare nonprofit trade shows to their for-profit counterparts. The Chocolate Show is run by a for-profit PR firm, but are the exhibitors there any more businesslike than drug vendors at an AMA convention, the publishers & resellers at the San Diego Comic Con or the industry promotion at the Oscars?

And then there's my favorite tax-exempt activity--the freak shows, rigged games and rides at agricultural fairs. You may think they're an ordinary profit-making enterprise, but as we tax-savvy do-gooders know, they're one of us!

Above: a poster for the Vendy Awards, a project of the Urban Justice Center designed to promote its Street Vendor Project:

[I]n recent years, vendors have been victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life” crackdown. They have been denied access to vending licenses. Many streets have been closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups. They receive $1,000 tickets for minor violations like vending too close to a crosswalk -- more than any big businesses are required to pay for similar violations.

The Street Vendor Project is a membership-based project with more than 750 active vendor members who are working together to create a vendors' movement for permanent change. We reach out to vendors in the streets and storage garages and teach them about their legal rights and responsibilities. We hold meetings where we plan collective actions for getting our voices heard. We publish reports and file lawsuits to raise public awareness about vendors and the enormous contribution they make to our city. Finally, we help vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans.

In recent years, the social enterprise movement has more-or-less succeeded in associating "local" with "virtuous" in relation to commercial business. The Street Cart Project reflects similar semantic play, contrasting the mobile cart to a fixed structure.

Once again, design plays a role in our ethical perception. Separate carts distract from the issue of common corporate ownership, as do compelling stories of plucky individuals making a living on the streets. Moreover, note the winner of the People's Choice Vendy, the Dessert Truck--while a crowd favorite among professionals and the upwardly mobile, it's also part of a broader trend of gentrification within the street vendor industry. Replace a old diner with a gourmet dessert shop and New York is dying; flood the streets with Food Network friendly carts and you're a champion of the dispossessed.

If you're wondering how the due diligence for the Watchmen movie could have missed the rights problem now in court, this article has useful background info on the process--in short, the key 1994 document was not included in the document reviews for subsequent stages.

The article also offers a producer's insight into how movies get made, and his point is relevant to lots of other areas of life as well:

Mr. Gordon, meanwhile, appears to have made good on a philosophy he described almost 30 years ago.

“Most pictures are made because somebody else wants to make them,” he was quoted as saying in a 1979 issue of Screen International.

“As a producer, the only club you have is to have something that somebody else wants.”

I tried to post this as a comment on the relevant Blog@ thread, but alas, it was rejected as spam--understandable, given the digi-tons of linked junk that shows up in my own filters. Anyway, since I pulled this all together, here it is. No substantive comment for now; I'm working on some thought-intensive projects that are going to keep my blog posts for the next week or so confined to shiny things I run across in the course of my work. However, I will note that cases like this illustrate why I emphasize the value of savvy due diligence and explore worst-case scenarios.

For those who want to check out the original source material, here are the the Fox complaint, Warner Brothers' response, the disputed legal documents and the judge's order.

Arguably the most explosive sentence in the order: "It is particularly noteworthy that nothing on the face of the complaint or the documents supplied to the Court establishes that Gordon, the claimed source of Warner Brothers' interest in 'Watchmen,' ever acquired any rights in 'Watchmen.'"

As several reports state, Warner Brothers faced a similar situation before, when, in 2005, the same judge granted a preliminary injunction that would have kept The Dukes of Hazzard movie from being released, prompting the studio to agree to a multimillion dollar settlement. The plaintiff's lawyer in the Hazzard case: Marc Toberoff, who is now representing the Siegel heirs.

FOR THE RECORD UPDATE: Since a number of people are interested in the documents in this case, for the sake of completeness here are the studios' responses regarding the motion to dismiss and, for real inside baseball, the motions and order regarding whether the court has jurisdiction to hear the case. If you don't want to wade through all the legal arguments, a couple of the documents stand out: Fox's chart of alleged misstatements by Warner Brothers and the original 1990 purchase agreement between DC Comics and Fox.

Earlier this week we saw an online controversy sparked by Warner Brothers' enforcement of its intellectual property rights in material being sold in an auction to benefit charity. The criticism of the Warner action was quite familiar to anyone who has been in my gig for awhile--whatever its legal rights, the reasoning goes, no company should be so heartless as to keep money from going to a good cause.

But when companies are making decisions on IP enforcement, they're not just looking at the occasional impromptu online benefit. They see dozens (if not more) of charitable fundraising efforts using their material each year, and some of them can be quite widespread.

Here's an example: the new "Be the Hero" campaign from the World Wildlife Fund. Among wrestling fans, the WWF is perhaps best known for its draconian enforcement of its own trademark in the notorious lawsuit that forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to the WWE. However, in its own marketing the WWF appropriates the uniforms of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to depict ordinary people as eco-heroes for turning off the lights and watering after 6 p.m.

The merits of the campaign aside--for me the word "hero" loses any distinct meaning if you become one by turning off your TV--these WWF ads illustrate what has many rights owners concerned: the establishment of charity as a law-free zone.

YOUR LYON EYES EXTRA:

A commenter notes a similar eco-campaign in France that produced an unauthorized DC-Marvel crossover:

Funny we had the same idea here but adapted to a campaign whose goal was to tell people to be "cleaner" citizen in the streets of our city (Lyon, France). We actually also used Superman too but my favorite one was a visual with the picture of hand wide open with the title "The Fantastic Five". The Fantastic Five were actually the five fingers every super citizen has and can use to throw their waste in the trash and not to leave them on the streets...

While this comment is funny 'cuz it's true:

At last, a social and environmental campaign that does not include:

1. Malformed, burned, skeleton children
2. Images which, seen from a distance, remind you of something else
3. Bush

43(B)log points to a useful article on museum image rights & licensing.