Seth MacFarlane sued over ‘Ted’

Celebrity animator and producer Seth MacFarlane, who is known for creating series like ‘Family Guy’ and ‘American Dad’ has landed in a copyright infringement case over raunchy comedy animation movie ‘ted’ which released in 2012 and had Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg in leading roles . The movie was the 12^th highest grossing movie of 2012 and was a commercial success.

Bengal Mantle Producers allege that the animation movie ‘ted’ is heavily inspired and ‘strikingly similar’ to their series "Charlie the Abusive Teddy Bear," the central character of the series with the similar name, a series of Internet videos which were aired in 2009, claiming that Ted infringes on the copyright of its videos due to the Ted bear largely matching the background story, persona, voice tone, attitude and dialogue of the Charlie bear. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said “Both Charlie and Ted reside in a substantially similar environment; including that both Charlie and Ted spend a significant amount of time sitting on a living room couch with a beer and/or cigarette in hand. Charlie has a penchant for drinking, smoking, prostitutes, and is a generally vulgar yet humorous character."

MacFarlane has not commented on the controversy and is busy making a sequel to the film title ‘Ted 2’. It is interesting to note that it is not the first time that the characters created by him have created controversy, especially in terms of content borrowing. Animated series ‘family guy’ has been criticized in the past for being too similar to animated series ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘South Park’. His own series ‘family guy’ ‘American dad’ and ‘Cleveland Show’ have been criticised for being ‘too similar’ to each other in plot and characters. On October 3, 2007, Bourne Co. Music Publishers filed a lawsuit accusing Family Guy of infringing its copyright on the song "When You Wish upon a Star", through a parody song entitled "I Need a Jew" appearing in the episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" (although it was ruled in 2009 that since the song was taken for comical use it was not an infringement).

Will the latest lawsuit affect the release or commercial success of the movie Ted-2 is yet to be seen, but it leaves us with a question of inspiration vs. infringement in creative endeavours. How much inspiration leads to intrusion is still debatable. What happens when a person repeats their own work, would that be infringement of one’s previous work? When is really the time when a designer realizes that their work is getting copied by someone else and it is time to file for an infringement suit?

Tattoo- Your Expression or Mine

Tattoo artists are artists who create on human canvas. Tattooing as an art has been around for ages and is one of the oldest forms or art and expression. There has been a patronage by both celebrities and common people and they have becoming more mainstream and acceptable than ever. This article discusses the ambiguity in copyright for permanent tattoos which are a debatable form of art for copyrights, the designs on tattoo sticker/ stick on are covered under the copyright law and the copyright ownership remains with the creator (usually no dispute there).

The art of tattooing has two people involved, the artist who creates and the person whose body is being used as a canvas. This brings us to a discussion of whose tattoo is it anyway; the artists or the person who is tattooed? Logically the answer is the person on whom the tattoo is inked is the owner as they are walking around with the tattoo, and the tattoo is going to be on their bodies forever (unless the person decides to modify or surgically remove them) and they have paid for it as well. This is now being disputed by tattoo artists who claim that they have a copyright on the tattoos as tattoos are art form and they are artists. They are now increasingly asking for the compensation for their tattoos appearing on silver screens and video games along with the images of the person who has been tattooed, as it would happen naturally with any other form of artistic expression which is protected under copyrights.

A few tattoo artists have even gone ahead and sued companies that have shown unique tattoos created by them in various capacities. Notable cases include Tattoo artist Stephen Allen suing video game maker Electronic Arts and former Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams over a tattoo Allen put on Williams' bicep. The tattoo appeared on the cover of EA's "NFL Street" video game claiming copyright (source: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-raustiala-tattoo-copyright-20131006-story.html) and tattoo artist Victor Whitmill against Warner Bros. For showing a tattoo created by him for Mike Tyson in the movie Hangover-II. The former case was dismissed the latter case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

Now this leads us to a lot of questions as if the tattoo artist is the owner of the tattoo they can prevent the tattooed person from tampering or removing their creation, which sounds vague as people have a right over their own bodies and someone else asking them to stop modifications of any sort sounds absurd.  Also tattoos themselves are often heavily borrowed from surroundings and are often copies of existing artworks, which means that they themselves can be infringements of someone else's creation. Another issue with tattoos is that the tattooed person is actively involved in creating the tattoo which is often based on the persons personality, their past experiences and life events, and they are the canvas for the artists creation, which makes them as actively involved in the process as the artist himself. Moreover if the tattooed person is a celebrity it is often possible that their images are used to promote products especially in the case of sports persons whose images are used for virtual games and the tattoos on their bodies are a part of their persona.  In this case the tattoo artist cannot claim that the tattoo be removed from the illustrations/ caricatures/images as they are an integral part of the celebrities image.

 Although artistry of the tattoo artist as an artist working on a different canvas cannot be denied in this case, tattoo art and copyright is a grey area in the field of intellectual property, which need further investigations and probably amendments in the existing structure of copyrights, or a different law altogether. The rights of the tattoo artists remain ambiguous till then.

Singapore Pirates Alert!

To curb the menace of illegal downloading and the failure of various ISP providers to comply with anti-piracy measures, the Singapore government has approved a proposed copyright law which shall come into effect starting August 2014. The websites that show support for piracy will go down, if content creators lodge complaints with internet service providers. If the websites fail to remove the content from these websites they can be blocked.

The law targets websites like torrents and Pirates bay etc. which are notorious for uploading content for which they have no rights upon them and regularly infringe copyright of various artists.

Before this law the owners could just request the ISP’s to remove the content, and could sue the content provider, which meant long and expensive court battles, which the content generator usually avoided.

Since the gateway can easily be by-passed by experienced users using  VPN’s and the illegal content providers constantly changing their IP addresses it remains to be seen how useful these changes can be for piracy in the future and how vigilant ISP’s can remain in tracking the piracy menace.