Disney slams cease and decist on Galway students for Sister Act play
Members of the university’s GigSoc were in final rehearsals for a production “loosely adapted” from the Disney film Sister Act, which was to debut at the Black Box Theatre in Galway tomorrow after six months of preparatory work.But yesterday afternoon, in a letter sent via a Dublin-based solicitor, Disney informed the students that the performance would breach its intellectual property rights and threatened legal proceedings if the play went ahead, according to GigSoc.
He said the play had attracted “fantastic support” from students of NUIG and neighbouring colleges, while there had been “record interest” from the general public. “We are dumbfounded by Disney’s stance towards what is a charitable, non-profit-making society, aimed at promoting safety and integration for the student LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community. We were just having fun.”
That’s pathetic. Copyright & IP gone horribly wrong. Disney; quick get into court to lobby for another extension of copyright. Think of the unholy damage this production would have done to the marketing potential for Sister Act. Or what possibly could have been the logic behind it? What can possibly be gained from it? Do they think the publicity gained by this will make more people go rent Sister Act? Is Disney just pure evil?
Can you imagine if a recording of this play leaked onto the internet… Sales of the original Sister Act plunging, Whoopi Goldberg unemployed, Disney unable to make anymore hit Nun related movies… the humanity. Irish Times story. Gig Soc homepage.
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Yay, Lara Croft in Ireland!
Feshti's back and this time he's counting down the top 10 movie opening scenes of all time.
Is American opinion and culture crowding out all others?
Have to disagree here, much though I hate disney. A copyright owner absolutely has the right to say “no, you can’t rip off my work for your fundraiser”. If the NUIG students are so clever, why not write their own play? Answer: they knew they could get better results piggybacking on someone else’s work. (and they’re too lazy/talentless to write one) And the typical “ah sure it’s grand” Irish attitude doesn’t really wash with a behemoth corporation like Disney.
Even setting copyright issues aside, a family company like Disney is not going to want to be linked, even tenuously, with the political issues around the integration of transgendered people.
Comment by slutmonkey57b — February 15, 2007 @ 1:42 pm
I don’t think a company should have the right 16 years after the release of a work to still claim ip rights over it. Copyright is ridiculously over generous, and 16 years after the fact a company should not be able to exercise this amount of control over something that is now part of our culture. I would say that we as a collective now ‘own’ the ideas behind Sister Act, and the remuneration period for Disney should have long since ended.
For example: Copyright on an individual work should last 5 years, should not be implied but have to be formerly applied for, and should only be extensible once for another 5 years after paying a huge fee. (So that works that should go into the public domain quicker because they are not as profitable do, and artists are forced to constantly innovate/be creative - there’s no incentive if after 70 years you can still be making royalties off that little ditty you banged out on your piano when you were 19.)
Comment by danger — February 15, 2007 @ 3:16 pm
I don’t know about that Dave, if I wrote one crappy song that made it to number 1 and that was the extent of my musical career I would be extremely pissed off if I wasn’t receiving royalties for it 70 years down the line. If I write it it’s my work so for every time somebody wanted to use they would have to pay me for it.
Comment by Si — February 15, 2007 @ 4:50 pm
And in fairness if these students at NUIG had any sense surely they would have just changed this play just enough to make sure Disney couldn’t do this, or as said above just write their own play!
Comment by Si — February 15, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
That’s where we differ. Is one good song worth 70 years of royalties … and then more after your death? Why? We’re supposed to be promoting constant creativity, not once offs. You write a nice song, it goes to number 1 and you make a shit load of cash off of it. For five years. If it’s still making enough money to justify it, you can shell out a bit of cash and have it protected for a further five. Then after 10 years, the entire world is free to use your song in a play, in a film, remix it with another song, write a musical based on it whatever.
Creativity is what we’re trying to promote, not greed.
Comment by danger — February 15, 2007 @ 4:59 pm
I see your point but what if you’re not very creative and just happen to write one song that happens to be very catchy, the typical one hit wonder song and no matter what else you write it’s all rubbish compared to that one song you’ve written. Would you not liked to be paid for it?
Comment by Si — February 16, 2007 @ 10:26 am
See you’re making it personal. If we’re going to do that, I would like a law passed that whenever I do a shit, I get paid €10,000. Now that’s just silly, but somehow, somewhere along the way it’s come to be that it’s not silly that you can create one thing, and get paid and protect it for your entire lifetime, and then once your dead your children can keep it going too? So we have to do what’s good for society, not one individual. In terms of society rewarding and promoting creativity, my proposals above are a good way to do that, whereas current copyright is not.
Of course I would like to be paid for it. But looking at the problem objectively, you can’t argue honestly in favor of copyright as it stands; unless you have a vested interest, like Disney do.
Comment by danger — February 16, 2007 @ 11:08 am
We should just ban everything to do with ‘Sister Act’, especially Whoopi Goldberg.
That way, no-one’s feelings will be hurt.
Comment by Steven Dedalus — February 16, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
Whether you agree with the concept of copyright law as it applies to corporate behemoths, the truth is that copyright law was hard fought for on behalf of a lot of artists down through the years who struggle to make a living and rely on copyright, image rights, repeat fees and the like in order to put bread on the table. wil wheatons’ blog is a good source of first-hand debate on the subject if you’re curious.
A bit like NUIG’s GigSoc society and its need to fund transgendered propoganda - the only difference is that copyright law is there to protect people who have, at some point, created something unique, and GigSoc is looking for the right to rip off people who are creative because they’re too useless to draw a crowd on their own merits.
I’d object to the comments in the original article because the issue is not “is Sister Act a good film”, which is the bias spun on it, it is “does organisation A have the right to rip off organisation B to put money in their own pocket (”good” cause or no).”
As to the correlation between copyright infringement in a paid-entry staged performance and P2P issues, that’s beyond a stretch. P2P piracy exists because of a pretty unique coming together of circumstances, and a lot of the blame for P2P piracy can be put at the feet of the media conglomerates themselves due to decades of illegal price cartels, inflated prices, and artificial market constraints. It is not at all the same as saying “Hey, nice work. I’ll take it, charge these people to see it, and put all the money in my pocket without reimbursing you a dime.”
And finally, you can’t argue that the creator of a work should be prevented from having some control over its use - otherwise where would Sin City have come from? If Frank Miller hadn’t had copyright control over his works, then Sin City and 300 would have come off far the worse than they did.
Comment by slutmonkey57b — February 17, 2007 @ 12:17 am
once upon a time an innocent, gifted girl was in a field painting her favourite tree in the style of disney. she was totally absorbed in the task, loving every moment of it, greatful and loving of her mentor who had provided such a genuine inspiration for her art. she could not be more thankful to his genius, and couldnt wait for him to see and share in the experience. one magical day, putting the finishing strokes to her masterpiece, disney came along, saw the painting, ripped it up and proceeded to smash her face in with a brick. ‘i have too much money, i’m jealous, and i hate people who smile’, said the wonderful, caring disney, who had provided ever so much entertainment to all the lovely children in the lovely world.
if you want to know the truth about disney, its in the book ‘no logo’ by Naomi Klein, which u can borrow from most libraries. there is an index at the back. check it out.
Comment by krynn — February 18, 2007 @ 1:07 pm
Eh. Right. So is this story about Disney smashing someone in the face with a brick in the book is it? Moron. Again, the issue is not about whether disney is a “nice” company or not, it is whether the LGBT soc in Galway has the right to rip off copyrighted works to line their own coffers.
I have “no logo” at home - it’s just as as flawed and logo-obsessed as the corporations it pillories.
Comment by slutmonkey57b — February 19, 2007 @ 12:23 pm
yes, chapter 383: ‘the face smashing incident’. its great. its about the stifling of creativity.
Comment by krynn — February 19, 2007 @ 2:16 pm