Holiday Special Post! Magnetic Tape and IP Are Disappointing Star Wars Fans

Let's talk about copyright, and in particular, Star Wars.

For those who may not know, Star Wars is among the most valuable franchises, and has more IP than I'd care to try to list. And while the franchise spans games, toys, books, TV shows, clothing, amusement parks, and probably food items, it all stemmed from a project in the 1970s that came with no small amount of scorn and doubt. 

Today, we all know and love the original Star Wars movie (later A New Hope), copyright 1977. However, many have only seen specific edited versions, or "special editions", that came later. In fact, there aren't a lot of viewable copies of a widescreen (normal. Today that's just normal.) original version. That is something of a collector's item--and not just according to the label.

Yes, dear readers, I have a copy of the original trilogy on VHS in widescreen. 

Widescreen was once an optional format

And, like many people, I would like to own that version on a slightly more contemporary media format. Why I can't purchase it on DVD or stream it is another story. Briefly, after editing his films Lucas didn't want the older version distributed, meaning that I might be able to find a bootlegged version or a non-professionally edited copy, but not the true originals. 

So, with help from the staff in the Digital Media Commons (shout out to Ian), I decided that this slow time of year was perfect to transfer it to DVD. [Look, I know that it's copyrighted material and I am pretty familiar with the basics of copyright; but I didn't intend sell, distribute, show in public, etc. the DVD. I just wanted to be able to watch my movies at home.]

Bad news, fans

As it turns out, someone foresaw this type of activity, and there's a built-in mechanism that prevented me from making a DVD copy. Apparently, a part of the magnetic tape has been encoded. This is distressing because VHS has a fairly short shelf-life, and there aren't many players left that don't destroy or damage a tape due to age. Furthermore, finding a VHS player that is compatible with modern TVs or screens is challenging, and becoming impossible. Even the converters are harder to find, and tend to be more unreliable.

A boxed set of sci-fi, space drama joy, a Collector's Edition!

What is most frustrating about this, in my opinion, is how many times people likely recorded the movies from onto VHS, or Tivos, or whatever, back in the day. This fairly common practice clearly never affected the value of the original property. I mean, it's worth billions! People attempting to make a copy of this specific VHS could not have been widespread enough to affect the overall value of the Star Wars franchise, either. 

Here's some potential evidence for my reasoning that people who recorded Star Wars material haven't destroyed the value of the original.

In 1978, there was a televised event, the Star Wars Holiday Special. It was made to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, and also the holiday season. It was aired a single time, because it was simply just so awful. In fact, the people behind it did their best to try to forget it ever happened and hope that the rest of the world would, too.

Well, people don't always forget things, and fortuitously (?), some viewer decided to record the Holiday Special. As one might expect, the advent of the internet and the web led to it turning up online, and the Holiday Special had quite the renaissance decades later. It feels like only one copy of it was ever retained, because most of us have seen an ad for a local news report after the special. Who knows, maybe someone has the original shots and tapes somewhere. But given Lucas' opinion and attitude towards the Holiday Special (which is allegedly that he was mostly uninvolved and wasn't it awful what those TV people did?), it is no surprise that he didn't have his company distribute copies.

Despite the train wreck that is the Holiday Special and its refusal to die, Star Wars didn't lose any of its value. Not even immediately following the international airing of it, and almost universal bad reviews. The later bootleg versions that so many of us fans have seen haven't tarnished the value, either. 

So why stymie fans like myself, who just want a semi-modern copy of movies they love? We aren't a large enough force to impact the value of Star Wars, and never have been. By the time this collectors' edition was released, all three films had been out for years, and available on multiple media formats.

A VHS I failed to copy today

I'm going to assume that perhaps most commercially made VHS of a similar quality has these built-in safeguards, and that it isn't just Lucasfilm or 20th Century Fox being particularly cruel about their IP. Perhaps it was standard manufacturing process to include.

I'm still mad, though. I was planning on watching the movies during the break.

May the Fourth be with Proper Use of Intellectual Property

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.

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.

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.

What visual material?

May the Fourth be with your proper use of IP!