Notices from the Universal legal department have popped up for some CafePress Browncoats, and they’re not all cease and desist orders. CP is aware of this and at the moment, searches at CP for “firefly” or “serenity” bring up 0 results. Odds are good that with the recent growth in licensed versy stuff the legal people are cracking down more, possibly at urging from the license holders. Dunno.
But that means it’s time to check again and make sure you’re not using any official logos, character or ship likenesses, reproductions of movie graphics, or other potential copyright infringements. You shouldn’t be anyway, per CafePress’ own rules, but still.
Also not a good time to yell at them. Won’t do any good, and might make things worse. Remember, Universal has every right to protect their intellectual property and they have a duty, as they see it, to protect the interests of companies that have paid hefty fees to make official products.
Although it would be really interesting, just for fun, to tally up how much each of us has worked, hour by hour, year by year, to promote increased awareness and sales of their intellectual property. Maybe submit a bill for PR and marketing services rendered.
Just sayin’.
Edited to add: I’ve trimmed some of my CafePress listings here already. If your site is linked on SerenityStuff and you’d like to lay low for awhile (or disappear completely), please let me know and I’ll pull it.
With any luck, this will get all of the Serenity/Firefly shirt sellers off of cafepress and to better quality printing sites.
Perhaps. Or perhaps there’s gonna be an officially lisenced line of similar FF/S products. Or perhaps Fox are just being the mean buggers there are.
Maybe… or maybe they’ll see all the continuing interest in Firefly and Serenity?
Hopefully that last one, hmm?
Hmmmm – well, there’s good and bad here, that’s for sure. The good is that this means that they fully recognize that Firefly / Serenity isn’t a dead property, and may mean more material down the road. The bad, I suppose, is for those of us doing fan-made work. Still and all, if Universal sees enough value to spend money on lawyers, it points toward a potentially brighter future for the franchise!
Whitefall – I wish it meant that, but it doesn’t unfortunately. Because both 20th Century Fox and Universal Licensing LLC have recently sold licensing of tshirts to 3rd party companies, they have a legal obligation to protect those properties.
Does that licensing of tshirts to 3rd parties include *derivations* from Serenity/Firefly, such as “I (heart) Wash” or “Merry Gorram Christmas”? I would understand (maybe) if it included direct quotes of dialog (rather than images of the cast, graphics or ships). But they can’t possibly say a person can’t use the word “serenity” in general (which is essentially what they’ve now prevented at Cafepress) because plenty of non-Browncoats use that word everyday!! New agers, yoga enthusiasts, Alcoholics Anonymous, etc. They can’t say they’ve copyrighted the Chinese characters for “serenity” can they?
Do they REALIZE what a dedicated fanbase this has, and do they REALLY want to squelch that? That is beyond my comprehension.
There’s all kinds of fan stuff on Cafepress for other shows, so I am NOT buying that they’re just trying to protect the 3rd parties by indiscriminately shutting everything down, or that this is just something corporations do. Where are the companies that license Star Wars?? Star Trek?? Battlestar Gallactica?? Why haven’t THOSE been shut down on Cafepress??
Flame
Have you looked at the officially licensed products being put out?
The ornament is OK and the Titan books are wonderful-fantastic.
But the T-shirts are go-se.
The Serenity shirt is OK but unimaginative.
But the rest of that ilk?
grr arrgh
Boring, badly marketed (Hot Topic says the Blue Sun tee has Japanese lettering) products that are making me glad for every excellent fan-made product I’ve ordered.
I understand the studios’ “legal obligation”, I’m just sick of it.
Normally I support purchasing the products that go with a franchise to show its economic viability. But in this case I feel that the attitude is that they can unload any old garbage on us and we’ll just purchase it.
So, I’m still buying the DVD’s and I have two copies of the Titan books, but the official T-shirt hawkers aren’t getting any more of my hard earned money.
Won’t be long before the Browncoats are an underground movement.
Instead of a growing fan-base looking forward to new adventures and activities, the Browncoats will shrink down to those content to live on former glories of infinitely re-watched episodes and memories of the good ol’ days of wearin’ yer fighting elves T-shirt and pullin’ for the Big Damn Sequel!
Mike
Flame – Universal and Fox jointly own the characters, universe and technically anything in the scripts. Basically, they can fire around legal notices all they want, as nobody here will have the money to fight them. Of course, so far they’ve only gone after things with logos and such.
So, then, is it the decision of Cafepress to just, across the board, stop the search for “serenity” and “firefly”? This also affects any non-Browncoat with a “serenity prayer” or a “firefly fairy” in their shop, and it affects people who aren’t using logos or the likeness of the characters, or extensive amounts of quoted dialog.
Do a search for Battlestar Gallactica and there’s “Frak” all over the place, or “Adama for president” or whatever. I still don’t understand what it is about the Browncoat fandom that seems to be worthy of this sort of squelching.
I just checked Cafe Press at 10:30 am CST on Oct 24. Cafe Press has stripped out “Firefly” and “Serenity” from the data base search terms, but if you enter terms like “Mal” or “Reaver” as a search, the search function will still produce an appropriate list of merchandise. You might want to hurry to buy something, though, before they close down the merchants themselves.
This sort of fei hua got going against Babylon 5 fan made stuff awhile back, and JMS put a stop to it real quick. But when B5 went out of production, the licensing slowly petered out. Now, even though Joss says other, I figure that Fox and Uni have another possible movie up their sleeves and just don’t wanna talk about it yet. I suspect, though, that Hot Topic has the rights sewn up and part of the deal is no one else can sell Firefly stuff. So it’s time to stomp on the little guy.
We’re the most vocal and obnoxious fans since the original Trekkers, and that makes us mighty, which no doubt scares the xiong mao niou outta the Fox/Uni suits. Even B5 fans, of which I’m one, aren’t as loud as Browncoats. Kinda makes ya feel proud, don’t it?
They can’t take the sky from us. No reason we can’t do all this underground, through emails and word of mouth. Do it small, a little here and there. We can keep flying that way, stay under the radar. None of us were getting rich off this anyway. It was for our own amusement and out of love for the show. So we keep doing it, sneaky-like. Dong ma?
Miles
Well, if one avoids tags then not EVERYTHING is recognized as being Firefly/Serenity. In my experience Cafepress is more likely to catch something than Fox is, the latter is only aware of it when it is blatantly obvious (using screen caps as online images at the t-shirt store). Personally I don’t think the Fox lawyers know who all the characters are, or recognize all the iconic images, but nevertheless Cafepress is being very careful. At my own shop (where I have original artwork) I found that Mal, Wash, and Zoe were removed right away, but they never noticed River, Kaylee, or Simon. Of course I won’t be advertising my shop in these sensative times, in a few months the lawyers will find something better to do but the fans of Firefly will still be online.
The search term “Browncoat” still works, but needless to say, I am a very nervous browncoat this morning.
Wow…I go off to do homework for a few days and look what I find when I come back…
There was commentary on Whedonverse (which I can’t post on, gorram it!), saying all us fan product vendors should get licensed – YES! Yes, most of us would love to! But, they’re not giving us any opportunity to. They keep giving licenses to the big companies (QMx and Jason Palmer are exceptions) who they’ve done work with in the past and know well. It costs more than just a taxpayer ID and corporate standing to be a licenced vendor…I HAVE those things; it takes a substantial amount of cash upfront for the licensing, IF they even will consider using you.
The problem that generally happens and that makes me so sad about this is that they give rights to those who don’t have a ruttin’ clue about the fandom and could care less.
There’s no heart.
I got a great compliment from another vendor today saying how I really understood the Browncoat aesthetic, and the product just “felt right”. That made me SO happy, because that’s exactly why I do this! I love this ‘Verse as much as you; I understand the heart that drives it, and what kind of things make me happy to see, and I figure it will make other Browncoats happy too.
I miss that care and heart in the commercial products, no matter how happy it makes me that they’re getting made. I’d hate to see all the great fan-made stuff disappear, as it would be just incredibly sad to see our quirky fandom become Fox and ‘Versal’s afterthought when it comes to pumping out something to make a buck or two. We are unique, and cannot be well described. Our merchandise should be the same!
I’m holding my breath. No C&D yet. I’ll do what I can through the end of the year to keep flying, but I’m thoroughly expecting a ‘Versal lawyer to show up at Flanvention and shut us all down. Bets, anyone? 🙂
“I’m thoroughly expecting a ‘Versal lawyer to show up at Flanvention and shut us all down.”
Oh, please don’t say that!
So far it appears that T-shirt vendors are at the most risk right now, and then only if they use recognizable logos or likenesses from the movie. That’s not a legal opinion, however. Tread carefully.
Any of you eBayers out there have any problems?
Blue Sun Shirts has shut down for precisely this reason… Check out the notice at http://www.bluesunshirts.com/…
Sad, I wanted to get another “Fighting Dwarves” shirt.
=(
Hot Topic’s mistaken, I think. The t-shirt shown at
http://search.hottopic.com/clothing/Blue%20Sun
doesn’t have the Japanese kanji for blue (ao), so I assume it’s either Chinese or just plain wrong. The t-shirt in the Cafe Press shop at
http://www.cafepress.com/bluesunstuff2
_do_ have the Japanese kanji.
(The character for “sun” is the same in both Chinese or Japanese…)
Yes Hot Topic IS mistaken. The point isn’t whether the kanji on the shirts is Cantonese or Mandarin or Japanese. The point is these “official” licensees care so little for the ‘verse that they don’t even know that it is a Sino-American Alliance. They all just looked at the sales figures and wanted in on the action. Unkowing and uncaring that all the “action” is being generated by a devote core of fans who love the Firefly/Serenity ‘verse like they live there themselves. If the fan support dries up, everything dries up and blows away. There are NO unthinking masses to drive this franchise without the hardcore fans. Think about Serenity’s $25.4 million dollar box office in terms of Browncoats that saw it multiple times. Browncoats probably generated half of the movie’s total take. Universal was on the right track in having the fans promote the movie. I firmly believe a Big Damn Sequel would have been commercially viable in another 2 to 5 years as the awareness builds momentum. But the tools of generating that awareness are being taken away by copyright lawyers. So the excitement will pass and the movement will stagnate unless someone in marketing wakes up to the reality of whats happening.
I agree with pennausamike’s posts. I mean, if Universal had done a good job of marketing the movie to begin with, I don’t think they’d have the problem they have now. Instead of attacking the people who got the movie made in the first place, why not go through the fan-based designs and buy the “rights” from them? If the CREATOR (our master Joss Whedon) doesn’t have a problem with it, why should the corporations???
Two by two with hands of blue come the corporate lawyers – worse than gorram reavers.
Thank you for those of you with the talent and imagination to think of making these items for the fans in the first place that they have now become so popular that you aren’t allowed to make them anymore …
Universal LLC apparently want $150,000 in damages from 11th hour. Which is just sick.
Lefty, drop me an email. We need to talk.
Miles