This stunt by Warner Brothers is not the first time that they have tried to keep their legal department busy. Back in 1941 they released the movie Casablanca, a few years later the Marx brothers started to make a film titled A Night in Casablanca. The studio promptly sent a letter threatening legal action if the Marx brothers did not change the name to their film, as it was too similar to their own movie. The Marx brothers replied with an entertaining letter and after more correspondence the case was dropped.
In 2000 JK Rowling signed a contract with Warner Brothers giving them the rights to make all of the Harry Potter movies and rights to create and sell all merchandising. Fairly soon after this happened Warner Brothers started to send threatening letters to people who held domain names on the internet that they claimed infringed on their trademark. These letters stated that the sites had to be handed over to Warner Brothers or legal action would be taken.
Warner Brothers failed to take into account that the fandom might be young, but they were passionate about Harry Potter. A 15 year old from England named Claire Field took the big guns on and won. She took the case to the media and drummed up huge support eventually causing Warner Brothers to back down and she was able to keep her site http://www.harrypotterguide.co.uk paving the way for other proprietors to fight for their rights.
However I think that it is important to point out that Warner Brothers do openly support some websites, namely the biggest within the fandom. http://www.mugglenet.com and http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/
To me this is a real sense of hypocrisy, Warner brothers have learned from what happened in 2000 that they need the fans, because ultimately they just want to make money. By supporting these two websites with exclusive pictures, trailers etc they are able to achieve such things as the biggest mid-week opening ever with Order of the Phoenix. Yet why do they think that they can pull the legal arm of the law down of small sites because it is infringing on their trademark.
1 comment:
sounds like warner brothers value their copyrights highly:P
it is like you said, they would probably not be getting as much response if it had not been for the fans of various concepts, not just harry potter..
i had actually never thought about that they were supporting sites like mugglenet,but it's quite obvious really.
And i guess it is also part of the reason it has grown to get this big.
Copyright is a strange concept really, and you've mentioned some amusing and entertaining example of actions of copyright issues.
looking forward to read more Rachel:D
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