With over 2 million films released the modern film industry is one of the biggest industries in the world and it is only growing.  Somewhere along all these movies of course there have been some lawsuits over who owns the right to movie stories. The recent movie Avatar directed by famed James Cameron has had multiple lawsuits over people claiming Cameron stole their ideas for a movie. This came as no surprise seeing that the movie was criticized for being fundamentally the same as movies such as Ferngully or Pocahantas. But how do you go about claiming ownership of a movie and it’s story? Movies are complex when it comes to Intellectual Property, there are layers of Copyrights and Patents that make up the different legal ideas behind a film.

            In order to find out how to own a story line you need to figure out if a story line would need a patent or a copyright. But where do you even start with getting the rights to a story? Legal ownership at it’s most generic is Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property is the whole range of how you can legally own works of art, logos, books, trademarks, etc. Intellectual Property is an umbrella term of different groups, which each governs a different genre of property. These genres are Copyrights, Trademarks, Patents, Industrial Design Rights, and Trade Secrets. The confusing part about story lines is that they don’t exactly fit perfectly into any of the categories, but plots are closest to Copyrights and Patents. Merriam Webster defines Copyright as “The exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell or distribute, the matter and form of something (as a literary, musical, or artistic work)” So in order for something to be copyrighted it must be in a physical state, such as a poem written on paper, research from an experiment, or a unique painting of a vase. Patents on the other hand are defined as “a writing securing for a term of years the exclusive right to make, use, or sell an invention” Now the term invention is rather broad, it could include a new type of engine or something as weird as a specific way to mix chocolate, say by waterfall. A good way to check to see if something is patentable would to see if it is either a machine, a man-made object, a specific process, or a composition of matter. Some examples of patents are a machine that writes down poems on paper, a way to perform a certain experiment, or a specific vase. A major difference between patents and copyrights is who can use them. Patents give exclusive use to the owner of the patent and only to the owner of the patent. Through the use of Fair Use anybody can use part of a Copyrighted material. As long as it meets a set of guidelines that is.

            So what are stories? They can’t be copyrighted since they don’t need to be physically recorded. Imagine if you owned the copyright on a story of a movie that became a blockbuster over night and the next day you hear that a speaker is telling your story to massive crowds in order to make money. Your copyright doesn’t cover that, the speaker isn’t using a physical rendition of your movie. If they’re not copyrights, they fall under patents then. At first glance stories don’t seem to fit as patents either, but stories are a process of relaying a set of ideas or plot points. Let’s use Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet as an example. The story of this play can be broken down into just a few key plot points.

            However, you’re going to need a little bit more than plot points in order to be granted a patent for a story. You can’t just a process of relaying plot points, there are legal stipulations you have to pass. The most obvious requirement is that the story be unique. This is the same idea behind why you can’t start a car company called Foord or call a new brand of soda Pepsy. The story must also be described well enough that an expert in the field, say a director, would recognize the process and be able to reproduce from that process alone. This brings a problem, can’t everybody just tell a story? The story of The Three Little Pigs is the same if told by a 10 year old child or if told by Alfred Hitchcock. The difference lies not in the plot, but how the plot is told, i.e. the story. Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t just some guy with a camera, he knew what he was doing. So you need to explain the process well enough so that if Alfred Hitchcock had to make the story as per the described process he would create a story nearly identical to the original. The last requirement is that the plot is clearly described. This means no “Boy is trained by elder and overcomes evil forces threatening his way of life.” That describes literally thousands of movies. Imagine if the modern engine was patented with such a basic description as “A machine which uses reactions from liquid fuel to create mechanical motion.” The owner of that sole patent would hold a monopoly on all engines under that description. You wouldn’t be able to go invent an engine with a different style of cylinders, or a different form of spark plugs. The creative potential would be squandered, not to mention the effect on technological progress. This is why detail is key. There needs to be enough detail in the description so that the plot is instantly recognizable as being unique. Once all the requirements are sufficiently met, you can continue with the legal work of patenting your story process.

            Plot is essential to movies, without it’s plot a movie would be nothing but a bunch of meaningless visuals. That’s because all that extra stuff, the characters, the music, the recognizable objects, etc, in the movie play a part in the story. The deaths in the plot of Romeo & Juliet would mean nothing if the characters that died were nobody. The movie elements combine with the plot to give meaning to the story. These elements then carry meaning with the audience. It is important that legal ownership of these elements be controlled so that others do not use them. To do this you can use trademarks to gain ownership for names of characters, settings, or other things, words and phrases, logos or symbols, and images. Trademarks for these things are much easier to understand than the story patent. The same can be said for Copyrights for scripts, or other physical media.

            Copyrights covers physical media, but as technology progresses our definition of media is continually progressing as well. It uses it’s Printed Media Doctrine which defines that the media that is subject to copyright must be recorded in a tangible product. This used to cover things such as paper, canvas, or cloth, but now the Printed Media Doctrine has to deal with modern forms of storing information. Hard drives store data and information, but it isn’t readable by humans without a computer that can read it. CDs and DVDs also store media in a way that is incomprehensible by human eyes. The way it is seen by laws, a DVD player playing a DVD is the same thing as a book with information inside it. A easier way to see this is to look at flight simulator machines, such that are used by the military or flight schools. These virtual flight simulators are composed of stationary computers and software, but it has a comparable result as flying a real plane. The way the information is accessed is different but the information displayed is still the same. Therefore, the DVD or film reel with the movie on it can be Copyrighted. Which is why you would need a license in order to show a film, or why pirating is illegal.

            When broken down into it’s three legal chunks movies become easier to categorize and easier to understand legally.  In order to know what section of Intellectual Property you need to worry about you need to understand what each section covers. With the slow update speed of our current laws there are some hitches concerning technology in Intellectual Property, software is a sort of grey zone between Copyright and Patents, which makes understanding the system rather confusing. Movies are made of different parts of Intellectual Property when it comes to content, with part Copyright, part Trademark, and part Patent.