Fan-made Zelda movie squashed by Nintendo
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A fan-made movie based on Nintendo's Zelda game franchise has been squashed by Nintendo's lawyers and is effectively dead. It's always kind of amazing to me the lengths that some people will go to use things that don't belong to them, especially in the money and time they'll spend in pursuit of that. Making any film no matter how small it may be, obviously costs a lot of money, money that can and should be spent licensing the rights to the things you're using.These guys got a lot further than most people do, going so far as to brazenly screen their film in New York and Los Angeles. Four years went into producing it and who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars, and yet nobody bothered to stop and ask Nintendo if they could use their property for the project.
I think the producers actually were pretty lucky, Nintendo let them off with just deep-sixing the film instead of suing them for willful copyright infringement, a cause that would have cost the producers a lot more money than they spent stealing from Nintendo:
We came to an agreement with Nintendo earlier this month to stop distributing the film. In the spirit of the holiday season they were good enough to let us keep the movie up for you to watch and enjoy through the end of 2009, but not past 2009. We understand Nintendo's right to protect its characters and trademarks and understand how in order to keep their property unspoiled by fan's interpretation of the franchise, Nintendo needs to protect itself -- even from fan-works with good intentions.
The only thing that's clear here is that these people did not respect Nintendo's rights when they made their movie and then started showing it to the public. To the contrary, could you think of anything more disrespectful than ignoring someone's rights to do whatever you feel like doing with their property?
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