Film Inception: Intellectual Personality And Copyright Law

REIMAGINING CULTURE IN THE ERA OF DIGITAL CREATIVITY AND COPYRIGHT LAW

Prajwal K Aradhya

20141351

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules ”; these were the words of Cobb, the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in the movie Inception. This idea is what is deemed to be a property; an idea so unique and personal, that any person with such an idea is its owner and has certain rights over it. This is what is referred to as Intellectual Property Rights, and the area of law governing it is known as Intellectual Property Law (I.P. Law).

This essay restricts itself to the discourse of Copyright Law field of I.P. Law and the effects

The film portrays an Opera production of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle from the perspective of union stagehands working behind the scenes. As seen in the interwoven shots of foreground and background action, both onstage and off, Else adroitly juxtaposed two sharply contrasting realms, each an integral component of the production: the stylised, fantastical heights of German Romantic opera and the sometimes frenetic, sometimes tedious workaday world of the stagehands. At one point, Else focussed on the stagehands playing checkers in a backstage while the opera was being perform onstage. In the corner of the room was a television set, and when the film was shot, a scene from an episode of The Simpsons happened to be playing. The checkers scenes in the film contained a 4.5 second serendipitous shot of Homer Simpson, out of focus without sound, on the television in the background. After the completion of the film, when Else went around seeking copyright permission, he was asked to pay $10, 000/- fee for the 4.5 second snipped from the producers of Simpsons. The film was a non-commercial documentary film that ran for an hour. Else, kept the checkers scene in the film, but he digitally removed The Simpsons from the television screen and replaced it with an excerpt from another of his films. The audience was thus deprived of a shot that perhaps

To that end, it has contracted and scanned much of the books from several universities and libraries and has been made available on their search engine. Because of copyright, the search project will remain far less than universal, fully accessible and searchable digital library of the world’s printed books. For the books that were published after 1922 and are subject to copyright, users will only be able to see a three-sentence snippet comprising of the search term and the sentence before and after that sentence. Even with those significant constraints for displaying unlicensed post-1922 books, Google’s book search engine is a highly useful research tool .

The first real test of the use of technology and copyright was Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. which initiated a doctrine of ‘substantial noninfringing use’, which favoured the use of technology. This was further used to widen the scope of fair use exception. However was revisited in the MGM studios case , and was revised leading to technology being the loser and the courts imposing liability on an unprecedented scale.