Star Wars is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time, and that success is reflected in Lucasfilm and Disney’s ownership of thousands of associated trademarks, patents, and copyrights. For example, during sensory mark searches last week, I found registered sound marks for Star Wars toys. Check out the trademark status for a light saber toy’s very recognizable buzz. Even “May the Fourth be with you” is trademarked!
But so far most of my posts have looked at patents and trademarks; I thought this would be a good topic for a shallow dive into copyrights and licensing.
Licensing is, like other facets of IP, extremely complex and nuanced. To license any Lucasfilm property, one first needs to contact the appropriate person at Lucasfilm. After that, I imagine negotiations for the proper license and its terms ensues; hiring a lawyer or other legal expert on your behalf may be necessary. There are different licenses for using different types of material, and for how that material is intended to be used. I suggest reading more on that topic on Disney’s licensing page, and on their Terms of Use page.
Disney has a reputation for being extremely strict about using their IP—more so than Lucasfilm before it was purchased. George Lucas and his companies seemed to enjoy allowing people to create more within the Star Wars universe, provided proper permission was sought. Profiting directly off the films without permission was memorably challenged in a few cases, such as selling Storm Trooper helmets and armor created from the original molds. That case eventually played out in the UK’s Supreme Court, and was decided in the artist/creator’s favor.
When looking at cases like the production of a radio drama, one has to wonder if Lucasfilm would have been happy to cooperate with the mold creator. George Lucas famously sold the rights to a National Public Radio station associated with his Alma mater, University of Southern California, for a dollar ($1). That deal included the music and sound effects, just for good measure. And I found the adaptations of Episodes IV and V absolutely fantastic; NPR certainly has fond memories.
In closing, let’s look at copyright searching. I’m not experienced in this area, but the search function seems fairly straightforward and I’m sharing a brief, basic example. I accessed the Public Catalog from Copyright.gov, and searched by title using “Star Wars”. A total of 4,874 returns is not at all surprising.
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| Less specific searches return far more results |
Once reordered by ascending date, I got a good idea of how seriously George Lucas, Twentieth Century Fox, John Williams, and everyone else associated with the franchise took copyrights from the start. Beginning in 1976, just about every aspect was covered.
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| The first Star Wars copyrights |
Unfortunately, the copyright Public Catalog does not include much descriptive material to explain what each copyright is for, unlike the patent or trademark databases. I’m left to imagine (or perhaps search elsewhere to find) what visual material is covered by the first copyright.
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| What visual material? |
May the Fourth be with your proper use of IP!
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