The Real Monsters Behind Godzilla 243
eldavojohn writes "A Wired blog looks at the real monsters behind Godzilla: his lawyers. Do you think Godzilla is basically a glorified T. Rex? Guess again, as his lawyers have tirelessly argued: 'He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow, he's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle.' Read on to find out why they targeted the site davezilla.com but not mozilla.org. Another abuse of the American trademark & copyright system? You decide — just don't make a float of him or you'll find yourself paying an undisclosed sum to Toho Co. Ltd."
ip law is so bankrupt (Score:5, Insightful)
1. godzilla is decades old. ip law should time out after a decade, at worst
2. this is corporate takeover of our culture. its our culture. not their ip. we need to hammer this point home
3. ip law exists to serve us. but it has been pervered to extort money for decades, even way after the artist is long gone. ip law doesn't even serve the artist, it serves the distributor
the story of the 21st century will be the story of the death of ip law. it is simply morally unsound
Re:You know they are right... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tempest in a teapot (Score:3, Insightful)
If you use a picture of Godzilla on your product "Cabzilla", then you most definitely are attempting to use the well-known trademark of Godzilla in your marketing. A specific work is copyright... the character is trademark. It actually works out quite well, because it allows you to make future works that are definitely yours without confusion in the market.
Equally stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Equally stupid is the following "argument":
If you want to get a rise out of the soft-spoken Moss, ask him something like, "Isn't Godzilla just an overgrown Tyrannosaurus rex?"
"He's erect-standing. He's got muscular arms, scaly skin and spines on back and tail and he breathes fire and has a furrowed brow," Moss says, repeating arguments Toho often makes in its lawsuits. "He's got an anthropomorphic torso. The T. rex has emaciated bird-like arms and stands at a 45-degree angle."
Actually, at the time he was conceived, about every image on the planet including a T-Rex showed it:
- Standing erect (they had to break the tailbone structure to do this, but they were convinced they were right because "it's a lizard, it has to drag its tail."
- With significantly larger arms (though not quite as big as Gojira's).
Take a look and compare Gojira to the T-Rex from the 1933 version of King Kong [youtube.com], or to any other movie featuring dinosaurs up until the late '80s. What do you get? You get a "Rex" standing upright on its hind legs, walking forward, dragging its tail.
The only reason Gojira has human-ish arms is that they were putting a rubber suit on a fucking human to get the effects.
This is a joke. Gojira is, in fact, just a mutated oversized Rex. They gave him fire breath because the Japanese, like most Asian cultures, have a dragon obsession and fire breath is cool.
Re:allow me to rephrase (Score:2, Insightful)
Regardless, there are important differences between trademark, copyrights, and patents; there are separate laws for each.
There, fixed that for you. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Re:allow me to rephrase (Score:2, Insightful)
In your diatribe the only problem (as far as trademark law is concerned) is whether people thought Care-zilla was the same thing as Scare-zilla, and were thus tricked into paying buying into it.