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A comment on Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacking” Slides. Parent comment

Re:Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacki... by rosser on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @02:12PM (#8724925)
Your humble opinion would be wrong. This is pretty clearly a "derivative work", which requires permission from the rightsholder.

For example, I could totally write a story that had characters named Gandalf and Frodo. But if my Gandalf happened to be a grey-wearing wizard, who walked around saying things like, "A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to," and my Frodo a hairy-footed fellow of diminutive stature with an extra-special ring, I'd better have had permission from the Tolkien estate, or a lot of money to burn on lawyers and fines.

EDIT: Pre-emptively, yeah yeah yeah, parody. Bringing that up in this context is probably diversionary pedantry at best, however.

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Re:Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacki... by biot on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @03:52PM (#8725633)
Bad example. The items in the movie are mostly paraphrases or summaries of the original. This would be more like releasing a movie where in one of the scenes a wall in the background contained a slide that said:

  WIZARDS
  - NEVER LATE OR EARLY
  - PRECISELY ON TIME
Does that require the Tolkien estate to grant permission?
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Re:Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacki... by notahacker on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @02:51PM (#8725215)
The other factor is that they're background slides.

The Tolkien Trust would be very interested in stopping you from selling a derivative version of Christopher Tolkien's maps but rather less interested if derivative version of Tolkien's maps appear as props in a movie scene involving a convention for fantasy enthusiasts in a movie whose theme and plotline is not even remotely related to the subject of hobbits or Middle Earth.

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Re:Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacki... by ForHackernews on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @02:37PM (#8725112)
That's not how fair use works. The only way to determine whether something qualifies as "fair use" is to take the case to court and have a court rule on it.
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Re:Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacki... by nraynaud on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @02:38PM (#8725118)
I'm pretty sure that the documentary aspect of the movie makes the thing fair use.
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Re:Wikileaks Movie “The Fifth Estate” Pirated My “Xbox Hacki... by fnordfnordfnord on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @04:36PM (#8725953)
"documentary"? The Fifth Estate is not a documentary.
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