p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- We’ve had, “very few cases of people trying to exploit rights on other planets,” says Lynne Hale, a Lucasfilm spokeswoman on contracts the language of which is “standard in Hollywood”.

She’s thus quoted in a Wall Street Journal story which kicks off »»»

Decked out in sequined black and gold dresses, Anne Harrison and the other women in her Bulgarian folk-singing group were lined up to try out for NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” TV show when they noticed peculiar wording in the release papers they were asked to sign.

Any of their actions that day last February, the contract said, could be “edited, in all media, throughout the universe, in perpetuity.”

She and the other singers, many of whom are librarians in the Washington, D.C., area, briefly contemplated whether they should give away the rights to hurtling their images and voices across the galaxies forever. Then, like thousands of other contestants, they signed their names.

Authors and artists are being asked to sign over distribution rights to the biggest territory of all — the universe. But does that include black holes?

But, “The space and time continuum has extended to other realms outside the arts, including pickles,” Dionne Searcey and James R. Hagerty note in the piece.

“A 189-word sentence in a September agreement between Denver-based Spicy Pickle Franchising Inc. and investment bank Midtown Partners & Co. — which has helped raise capital for the sandwich and pickle shops dotted across the region — unconditionally releases Spicy Pickle from all claims ‘from the beginning of time’ until the date of the agreement,” they say, going on »»»

James O’Toole, politics editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, recently signed a release form for WQED, a PBS TV station in Pittsburgh, before he appeared on a news talk show. The contract allows the TV station to make use of “any incidents” of his life and reproduce his image or voice “throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised.”

Mr. O’Toole, who says he didn’t bother to read the release before signing it, took the news calmly.

“I’m very popular in some of the far reaches of the Milky Way,” he says …

However, Eric Goldman (right), associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, “says the language could be ‘a stroke of brilliant foresight’.”

“Throughout the world” would be one alternative, but that excludes possible future markets,” he says in the WSJ post, which adds:

“Some day, Mr. Goldman adds, people might ask, ‘What were they thinking? Why didn’t they get the Mars rights’?”

So what’s it al about?

“Experts in contract drafting say lawyers are trying to ensure that with the proliferation of new outlets — including mobile-phone screens, Twitter, online video sites and the like — they cover all possible venues from which their clients can derive income, even those in outer space,” says the story.

Cosmic copyrights, anyone?

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Wall Street Journal - Lawyerese Goes Galactic as Contracts Try to Master the Universe, October 29, 2009

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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