{"id":261,"date":"2016-02-03T16:14:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T21:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2016\/02\/03\/how-copyright-law-makes-star-wars-homage-not-theft\/"},"modified":"2016-02-03T16:14:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-03T21:14:00","slug":"how-copyright-law-makes-star-wars-homage-not-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2016\/02\/03\/how-copyright-law-makes-star-wars-homage-not-theft\/","title":{"rendered":"How copyright law makes Star Wars homage, not theft"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"clear: both;text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.recreatecoalition.org\/release-star-wars-force-awakens-teaches-us-copyright-policy-part\/\" style=\"margin-left: 1em;margin-right: 1em\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"152\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-yi2s1lTmmFk\/VrJfCr2L4KI\/AAAAAAAACHk\/E8IZ0KGS30c\/s320\/tatooine.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>The fever over <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens<\/i> has faded now (we haven&#8217;t posted about it in over a month!), but there&#8217;s still plenty to dissect about it. One of the greatest criticisms of the movie was its tendency to retread themes, imagery, and structure from the original film \u2013 ignoring that the first movies explicitly, famously stole from classic action serials and samurai movies.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than turn this into a creativity blame game, the Re:Create Coalition, an intellectual copyright law advocacy group, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.recreatecoalition.org\/release-star-wars-force-awakens-teaches-us-copyright-policy-part\/\">used this as an opportunity<\/a> to explain the limits of copyright and the difference between infringement and expression. For one specific example, author Jonathan Band cites the early Tatooine scenes from <i>A New Hope<\/i> by comparing them to sequences and imagery from John Ford&#8217;s classic Western <i>The Searchers<\/i>. This isn&#8217;t theft since it&#8217;s building on the ideas of an existing work and expressing it in a new way.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a tricky distinction in copyright law for any filmmaker, and <i>Star Wars<\/i> is a great example of how that can be navigated creatively. Band&#8217;s article is mostly a list of examples connecting <i>Star Wars<\/i> to previous films, but they make a strong point: ideas are meant to be adapted, not restricted.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The fever over Star Wars: The Force Awakens has faded now (we haven&#8217;t posted about it in over a month!), but there&#8217;s still plenty to dissect about it. One of the greatest criticisms of the movie was its tendency to retread themes, imagery, and structure from the original film \u2013 ignoring that the first movies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[89,212,329],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-copyright","tag-links-of-interest","tag-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}