Re: MST3K, Rifftrax, & sundry
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 1:34 am
Playboy has an article up called The Battle Over the Worst Movie Ever, about the feud between Hal Warren's son and a fan named Ben Solovey, who's released a remastered version of the film. (It's SFW, though a private browsing window might be in order so playboy.com doesn't show up in your history.) Warren insists that Manos is copyrighted, not public domain as everybody else has thought up to this point.
By a strange coincidence, just this morning I reread a 2012 blog post that I wrote on this very subject. Here's what I said then:
In 2013, he discovered among his father’s belongings a notice of copyright for the screenplay. A friend dug through the Library of Congress records and confirmed it was more than just a submission—the script had been logged, which Warren interprets to mean the movie itself is protected.
No one, however, knows for sure, as no precedent exists and no one seems willing to spend the money to have a court figure it out. “No copyright filed for theatrical release and no copyright notice on the film from that period is a fatal, defective thing,” says Ian Friedman, Solovey’s attorney. “But in the end, it’s not whether you’re right or wrong. It’s whether you want to litigate it.”
By a strange coincidence, just this morning I reread a 2012 blog post that I wrote on this very subject. Here's what I said then:
And so while, again, it's totally understandable if Warren has a sense of ownership toward the property, and is miffed when somebody else exploits its public-domain status without his family's blessing -- well, if somebody hadn't exploited its public-domain status without his family's blessing, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If Manos hadn't entered into the public domain and wound up in a box of movies that eventually made their way to Frank Conniff and MST3K, there would be no Manos sequel, no Manos restoration, no Manos documentary -- because nobody would know what the fuck Manos was.