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

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!)

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.

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"]

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.

Kevin, I'm confused, too. And your reply to Cindy upthread just deepened my confusion. I've reread today's posts here about five times and I'm forced to assume that you think I'm arguing something that I'm not. I don't know what that is, though, so I don't understand what your replies have to do with what I've said, and I certainly don't want to guess. Originally I was comparing the reaction among the two different groups of fans, as an aside, because it occurred to me to do so. That's all. I have no idea why JMS's opinion about selling t-shirts matters.

Nutty- I don't know if there's a litmus test, but the decision in the Twin Peaks case is here. It was infringement largely because 46 of its 128 pages consisted of a blow-by-blow description of what happened in the first 8 episodes. That's where the (at least) 89 lines of quoted dialogue were. That's a substantial amount of material that someone else wrote, and nothing in there qualifies as "transformative." The Serenity-inspired essay collections and so forth are clearly in a different category.

Strega, the reason the t-shirt thing has something to do with it is this;

I remember in the B5 usenet groups, occasionally someone would pop in to tell JMS about some unauthorized merchandise for sale, so he could sic Warner Bros on 'em. See, because they were fans, some of them thought that it was a bad thing to steal from the people who made the thing they liked. We've come so far since then.

Right there, you're (I think) comparing JMS trying to stop unauthorized sale of material with fan responsibility, saying the Serenity fans are irresponsible in that they don't try to make the mother ship profit like B5 fans did. To my knowledge, JMS has never touched t-shirts. So, in the context of this case, I don't think it can be compared.

There is an argument to be made that t-shirts effectively promote free advertising for the company owning a franchise, and that advertising is more valuable than fixed rate licensing. Of course, Universal never went down that route, which I think is a shame. I'm pretty sure it happened with Snakes On A Plane recently -- they allowed printing of shirts etc -- but that was hardly the box office smash either.

I think Strega's point was that, once upon a time, fans were outraged when unauthorized people tried to make a profit off their asses and that it's not so much the case anymore.

Kevin -- I was comparing what some fans did, not what JMS did. That's why I said just that in my previous post.

For the record, in the newsgroup JMS repeatedly mentioned which companies sold licensed T-shirts, and that anyone else was selling pirated merchandise, but again: what he did or didn't do is irrelevant to what I was talking about. And honestly, I think it's beyond pedantic to claim that only examples involving T-shirts have any bearing in this conversation.

There is an argument to be made that t-shirts effectively promote free advertising for the company owning a franchise, and that advertising is more valuable than fixed rate licensing. Of course, Universal never went down that route, which I think is a shame.

Maybe they don't believe that it's more valuable, then. And/or maybe they understand that failing to defend their rights, regardless of whether or not the "free advertising" is worth something, makes it easy for any other unlicensed vender to claim that the subject matter is public domain.

Licensed Serenity shirts: [link] [link]

11thHour's "original art" shirts (still for sale): [link] and starting to understand the demand more and more.

Google cache of stuff that's now removed: [link] [link] [link]

Google cache of 11thHour advertising her stuff to FF/Serenity fans: [link]