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Post #55968

Author
Pagz
Parent topic
I'm thinking lawsuit...
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/55968/action/topic#55968
Date created
25-Jul-2004, 10:22 AM
The thing is, price-fixing is blatantly illegal. What Lucas has done is in a much grayer area. The films are in fact the Star Wars trilogy, there's no getting around that. The issue here is that he has neglected to qualify that title with something like "The Special Editions" or some other such subtitle to inform people these are not the films they remember. The difficulty comes from the fact that these films are George Lucas's intellectual property, which basically means he can release them in whatever form he likes. While you might be able to successfully argue that he is misrepresenting his product, it's going to be a very hard sell, and even after the fact, unless you can show damages from such, the chances of winning are slim. With price-fixing there are damages, and those damages can be measured monetarily, not so in this case. Another thing to keep in mind is that Lucas has successfully released both TPM and AOTC in altered formats without having to retitle them for DVD release. It could very well be that the legal issues surrounding fraudulent misrepresentation do not extend to the realm of intellectual property. In which case, there's not a blasted thing we can do. Regardless though, it seems to me a lawsuit would hurt the cause a lot more than it would help. The lawsuit can't get the OT released on DVD, but it sure as hell can piss Lucas off enough to never release it. He already says he'll never release it, but we've seen George change his mind before, let's not give him any reason to set that decission in carbonite.