[Foundation-l] Smurfs Movie is infringing on wikipedia copyright

Sat Dec 17 19:00:30 UTC 2011

Hi folks - I can confirm that this is not an infringement of the WIkipedia
marks.

Sony approached us almost 2 years ago to seek permission to use the
Wikipedia marks in the film. As with almost every film production company,
they are meticulous and incredibly careful about use of trademarks and
brands.  You can appreciate they are particularly careful about this
because films actually derive lots of revenue from selling the placement of
other marks (coke, pepsi etc) in the films for millions of dollars.

We approved their use of the marks, and at that time we were asking
official trademark re-users to provide us with a small amount of money
(under $1K) to help us cover the non-trivial amount of legal work to draft
or re-draft an agreement, then to carefully monitor the use of the mark for
the period of time its permitted.  As far as I'm aware, we don't permit
'terminal' or infinite reuse of our marks for marketing of films -
something that would severely limit our protection of the brand and our
identity.

Some notes on this whole process: in the coming year the legal/trademark
team hopes to make the application system much simpler, and also we expect
to start publishing a public list of those orgs who have permission to
reuse the marks in a public setting.  Thereby minimizing the surprise
factor to someone who just sees our mark being used in a film.  We're also
moving away from this payment system (although not necessarily completely)
and instead looking to increase the number of permitted reusers, but also
to ensure clearly labeled permissions and reuse, and particularly
important, to clearly label appropriate use of CC works.

In this case Sony's general offer is to provide compensation or to provide
a credit like "Wikipedia used with permission of the Wikimedia Foundation."
 We opted for the compensation in this case, but in future we're going to
require the clear indication of permission.  This is pretty standard in the
industry (one way or another).  For example, films often use mastheads like
the New York Times in movies but never credit the paper.  They've either
paid the paper or the paper has permitted it because it enhances the
visibility of their work.  A blanket trademark statement in the credits
usually implies that all marks belong to their owners.

Not everything is approved when we ask.  We ensure a couple of basic points
before proceeding with an agreement:
* does the reuser intend to mock or parody Wikipedia?
* does the reuser position Wikipedia or our other brands in a manner
inconsistent with the most obvious use? Do they show Wikipedia showing ads?
Do they use the brand in advertisements or other places we'd never approve?
* do we reusers radically change the information or article in a Wikipedia
page in a film (not the actual article itself)?  In general we see this as
being potentially acceptable, provided they completely change the
information so as to not violate the terms of CC. For example, often
they'll ask to create a completely new article (for the film only) on a
fictional topic.
* does the reuser intend to actually edit Wikipedia (for real) in the film
or production?  Or to put it another way, do they actually break Wikipedia
in the intended reuse?
* is the film extremely violent or sexual such that inclusion of our brand
would be adversely affected?

We also review script segments, film synopses, marketing material etc to
make sure the project is real and that any efforts we make are going to be
worthwhile.  We take this proces pretty seriously, and though it looks
larger than it is, our legal team has done an amazing job of optimizing
these requests so we can quickly approve or deny requests.  We approve the
majority of requests, I'm happy to say, because ultimately if the intended
use of our project name or marks is benign within the film (or it casts us
in an accurate, good light - most of them do) then we see this as a net
positive effect.  Wikipedia is used every day by millions of people around
the world.  It's part of our regular life, and it's not surprising to us
that the media and creative world want to include it to support accurate
story telling.

One final note: we treat commercial requests differently from the classic
media requests.  If Coke or Google or Nike want to use our brand, we engage
in a different conversation. Arguably both Hollywood and Coke are in the
same business: making money, but film, TV, documentary projects can often
tell a bigger and more important story.  Also, we continue to encourage
lawful, fair use of our marks in journalistic efforts.  Though fair use is
different around the world (or non-existent) we regularly tell
permission-seekers they can use our marks for what we'd consider to be
fair-use media requests here in the US.

Hope that sheds some light - I know it's a lot of info to digest!  Btw, I'm
kind of sorry you had to sit through The Smurfs Movie...

jay

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is that screenshot actually from Wikipedia?
>
> It looks like the name is File:Blue Moon.JPG (though it is hard to
> tell from the video), but we have no such image under that name.
>
> The article [[blue moon]] actually uses a different image, and as far
> as I can see from browsing the history it always has.
>
> So, it seems like it might not even be a real screenshot of Wikipedia,
> but rather a page that had been further edited for their purposes.
> For example, they easily could have swapped in a public domain image
> of the moon from NASA.
>
> -Robert Rohde
>
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl>
> wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 12:59:05PM +0100, Mike Dupont wrote:
> >> I found a clip with the wikipedia lifting being shown :
> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJxqFMPe95c
> >
> > Do we get properly credited in the end credits?
> > if not, it's time to
> >
> > ...UNLEASH THE LAWYER!!!...
> >
> > (Who can have a nice sit down and a cup of tea, and make sure they
> > modify the credits properly. :-) )
> >
> > sincerely,
> >        Kim Bruning
> >
> > --
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
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>
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-- 
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
blog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 6609, @jansonw