Originally posted by: ronlaw
As in the case with the RIAA, if something happens you won't get to argue your case unless you have money.
A C&D threatening all kinds of terrible things will arrive.
Ignore that, a case gets filed and a letter arrives saying "pay us $5000 and we will drop the case".
If you want to stand on your principles, better have some tens of thousands set aside to fight the case.
I agree that they probably could have shut things down earlier, however, technically the OOT was not available commercially on DVD before now, so fans were distributing something that didn't commercially exist, so it couldn't be argued that sales were being lost.
This might just clarify the legal point.
Still, it probably is just paranoia.
Which leaves making money as the motive. Entirely believable I guess. Some marketers idea of "leveraging the brand", perhaps. I don't really believe George Lucas is money grubbing like many do, but Lucasfilm doubtless contains dozens of sales people whose job is simply to find out new ways to make money off Star Wars.
As in the case with the RIAA, if something happens you won't get to argue your case unless you have money.
A C&D threatening all kinds of terrible things will arrive.
Ignore that, a case gets filed and a letter arrives saying "pay us $5000 and we will drop the case".
If you want to stand on your principles, better have some tens of thousands set aside to fight the case.
I agree that they probably could have shut things down earlier, however, technically the OOT was not available commercially on DVD before now, so fans were distributing something that didn't commercially exist, so it couldn't be argued that sales were being lost.
This might just clarify the legal point.
Still, it probably is just paranoia.
Which leaves making money as the motive. Entirely believable I guess. Some marketers idea of "leveraging the brand", perhaps. I don't really believe George Lucas is money grubbing like many do, but Lucasfilm doubtless contains dozens of sales people whose job is simply to find out new ways to make money off Star Wars.
I agree that the C&D letters are scary, and the RIAA/MPAA have gotten pretty nasty with their lawsuits. But I still say that the argument that we are distributing something that isn't available on DVD isn't legally valid. If Lucas wanted to just sit on Star Wars and never release it in any form whatsoever, he is still within his rights as long as he still holds a valid copyright, and can still shut down any distribution.
Now Lucas may not have cared about distribution of OOT DVDs because he didn't have it on DVD, and might start going after these projects after the release of the OOT, but he didn't need to release it on DVD first just to shut down this site, XO project, or anything else. I'm guessing that Lucas hasn't felt that we were worth the effort up to now.