Well, of course fewer people would have bought it. I don't think -- just my opinion -- she would contest that the designs were aimed at Firefly/Serenity fans. However, people on this very website wrote in a book called "Finding Serenity". Should Universal retroactively invoice those folk?

I think the book is a well established Fair Use. It's legal to refer to and/or use portions of copyrighted materials for criticism and commentary. Besides, nobody is going to confuse a book about themes in Firefly with the product the studio was selling. Whereas consumers might well confuse fan made for-fan-profit T-shirts "inspired" by a film, with any T-shirts Universal (et al) might choose to license.

Here's some summarized information on fair use/not fair use as pertains to visual arts: [link] See the "Not a fair use" paragraph on the church quilt poster.

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Yes, but Universal and FOX have sold licenses to Titan -- exclusive ones -- for delivering works pertaining to the development of the show and movie.

ETA - this post was written earlier..

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I've profited off the sale of Save Firefly as part of a collection of my work. Fair use, falls under commentary.

There's no yes but about it.

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Yes, but..

There are some examples of unfair use of unauthorised books about TV shows. The publishers of a Twin Peaks guide were sued, for example.

You could argue that "Finding Serenity" makes substanial references to characters and moments in Firefly, which would effect sales of an official reference book (which now exists). That was the argument used with the Twin Peaks book. Successfully. This argument has also been used on other TV projects, successfully.

The equivalent Universal or FOX situation in this case would be to send the publishers a letter demanding licensing payment, since Titan holds those rights . It would be based on very questionable legal grounds, though. Although it wouldn't be the first time that kind of thing has happened.

When "Finding Serenity" was published, they didn't put 'Unauthorised' on it.

Old Finding Serenity cover: [link]

As of very recently, they put a new cover on it: [link]

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Okay, so what difference does it make, legally, that the work now states that it is unauthorized? 11th Hour wouldn't be in any less trouble if she had added "unauthorized" to her designs. (I presume.)

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It's commonly done on books, especially in the titles nowadays, to try to avoid the licensed work issue. [link]

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You could argue that "Finding Serenity" makes substanial references to characters and moments in Firefly, which would effect sales of an official reference book (which now exists). That was the argument used with the Twin Peaks book. Successfully. This argument has also been used on other TV projects, successfully.

Never having heard of the Twin Peaks case you're referencing, I can say with some certainty that describing a copyrighted audio-visual work, even in some detail, is not automatically grounds for a lawsuit, or else the Time Out film guide would have gone out of business long ago. I suspect there is a litmus test of how much detail the material goes into, and how much value is added by the authors above and beyond the raw descriptions, that prescribes which books constitute fair use and which infringement.

(Personally, I am a great fan of bitchy, opinionated dictionaries/guides, as with the new Biographical Dictionary of Film, by Thompson, which is fantastically bitchy. He hated 2001: A Space Odyssey! I'm not the only one!)

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Ah, but maybe bitchy things can come under parody :o)

The Twin Peaks thing had 89 lines of dialog in total. That ruling was used a few years ago to help fine the publishers of a book about Seinfeld $400,000.

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89 lines of dialog in total.

There's your problem. Dialogue quoted verbatim falls under copyright if it's more than a small amount even if it is surrounded by value-added material. The rule of thumb in my neck of the woods is 300 words from a published book -- that means 300 words total, including "a" and "the" from the whole of War and Peace.

89 lines of dialogue, from something as short as a teleplay, would be very likely to exceed the fair use amount, and thus become a matter worth pursung for the money. If the authors of that book had paraphrased the dialogue in question, it would have been less of a problem.

[edited to remove an errant "not"]

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Yeah. There's a few others, too. The final fair use test is 'does it effect the owners market', which is what nailed the Seinfeld book. The studio argued if they wanted to bring out an official book, it would be effected sales wise.

Copyright law is an odd beast. For the vast majority of it, I support it. However, there's been so much interpretation (and frankly, badgering by corporations) over the years of it that it's difficult to know where things stand.

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