George Romero, Zombies... And The Public Domain

from the a-rememberance dept

As you probably heard, over the weekend, famed filmmaker George Romero passed away. Romero's influence on film making is legendary -- and people today still seem amazed to find out that basically everything you think you know today about the concept of "zombies" exists almost entirely because of Romero and Night of the Living Dead. He really invented the entire genre, and the use of zombies as social commentary. But, perhaps just as importantly -- you may not realize that a big part of why Romero's vision of zombies as flesh/brain-eating undead creatures taking over the world -- is because his key movie is already in the public domain:

It's true. You can go watch the movie now and you're not violating anyone's copyright. A few years back, Plagiarism Today did an excellent job summarizing the story. In short, under one of the many quirks of the 1909 Copyright Act, a messed up copyright notice would put a work into the public domain (in fact, this quirk of copyright law was one of the main reasons given by some for why copyright should be automatically placed on everything in the 1976 Copyright Act). But for Night of the Living Dead a last minute name change meant a messed up copyright notice... and, voila, public domain.

The first prints of “Night of the Living Dead” didn’t use the title we know it as today. Instead, it referred to the movie as “Night of the Flesh Eaters”, one of the working titles of the movie. However, before release, the title was changed to its more familiar version but, when changing the title card, the distributor forgot to put the copyright notice on the final print.

Though that would not be a large issue today (the Copyright Act of 1976 removed all notice requirements), in 1968 that meant the movie was not protected by copyright and, instead, was placed immediately into the public domain.

But, more importantly, this "accident" also may have contributed to the movies popularity and influence on culture. As Plagiarism today notes, so many other works basically copied Romero's zombies and how they acted -- while others used clips directly from the film. All of that was perfectly legal. And tons of "derivative works" never had to worry about being hit up with copyright infringement claims.

Many movies either referenced scenes from “Night of the Living Dead” or films that used footage directly from its predecessor, often on TVs playing in the background.

All in all, hundreds of zombie movies have been made that built upon “Night of the Living Dead” in one way or another, ranging from low-budget films to blockbusters. Even many video games such as the “Resident Evil” series (and subsequent movies) also owe a great deal to it.

And while some will obviously point out that the distributor (who messed up the copyright notice) raked in tons of money from Night of the Living Dead while Romero himself made little -- the widespread success of the movie did enable him to go on and make many more films and more, for which he was paid quite nicely over his career. As Plagiarism Today rightly notes, the end result worked out great for Romero:

Even though Romero, without a doubt, missed out on a lot of money due to the copyright mishap with “Night of the Living Dead”, the story ends well for him. The popularity of the film enabled him not only to create a successful series of sequels that he retained copyright in, but also other opportunities to exploit his notoriety, including books, comics and more.

For the zombie movie industry, however, the lapse of “Night of the Living Dead” into the public domain turned out to be a boon. With a well-understood set of clear-cut rules, others were able to build on and expand on the work without paying a licensing fee or fear of being sued. This helped grow the genre, especially during the long wait between “official” sequels.

This is not, necessarily, an argument that all things must be in the public domain, but a reminder that -- contrary to the claims of some -- just because some stuff is in the public domain, or even just available for free, it doesn't mean there aren't ways to build real businesses and real creativity off of it. Romero was a film making genius in many, many ways -- and the public domain helped his career greatly. It's too bad we now deny that option to basically everyone else.

Filed Under: copyright, george romero, night of the living dead, public domain, zombies

Zombie Apocalypse? The Pentagon Has A Plan

from the the-best-braaaaains dept

If you're like me, you might be surprised to learn just where zombies turn up. For instance, an undead king-o-pop might show up in a video game. Or in a humor-driven warning from the Center for Disease Control. Or, as it turns out, amongst contingency plans by the Pentagon.

Buried on the military's secret computer network is an unclassified document, obtained by Foreign Policy, called "CONOP 8888." It's a zombie survival plan, a how-to guide for military planners trying to isolate the threat from a menu of the undead -- from chicken zombies to vegetarian zombies and even "evil magic zombies" -- and destroy them.

"This plan fulfills fictional contingency planning guidance tasking for U.S. Strategic Command to develop a comprehensive [plan] to undertake military operations to preserve 'non-zombie' humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde," CONOP 8888's plan summary reads. "Because zombies pose a threat to all non-zombie human life, [Strategic Command] will be prepared to preserve the sanctity of human life and conduct operations in support of any human population -- including traditional adversaries."

Ah, the undead sure do create cause for such strange bedfellows. It's a little bit heartwarming that the Pentagon would see fit to team up with our more-human adversaries against the zombie horde, isn't it? Imagine: the Taliban and the American military hand in hand, standing tall and steadfast against wave after wave of the undead. It's equal parts poetic and idealistic.

Now, lest anyone take this too seriously, like the CDC's warning, the Pentagon would like to stress that they don't actually think that this zombie apocalypse is, you know, going to happen.

Military planners assigned to the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska during 2009 and 2010 looked for a creative way to devise a planning document to protect citizens in the event of an attack of any kind. The officers used zombies as their muse. "Planners ... realized that training examples for plans must accommodate the political fallout that occurs if the general public mistakenly believes that a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan," the authors wrote, adding: "Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional 'Tunisia' or 'Nigeria' scenarios used at [Joint Combined Warfighting School], we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken for a real plan."

In other words, rather than risk the paranoid hysteria that would revolve around a false plan to combat a real-life adversary, they made one up. It's actually humanizing to see a little humorous creativity coming from our men and women in uniform. And it appears the creators of the plan really did let their imagination fly. They designed methods to combat vegetarian zombies (yay!), evil magic zombies (sounds ominous), and chicken zombies (run, you stupid bastards!), outer space zombies (genre crossovers are so tired), bio-engineered zombies (calling Umbrella Corp.), and a pathogen-based zombie outbreak. Not all the military brass was impressed with the effort, it seems.

"I hope we've invested a similar level of intellectual rigor against dragon egg hatching contingencies," one defense official quipped.

Oh, you silly defense guy, untwist your shorts. Everyone knows there haven't been dragons in these parts in years.

Filed Under: defense department, pentagon, planning, zombies

Trademarks, Beer, Vampires, Zombies... And Lawyers

from the clown-shoes dept

Can't we all just drink along? Apparently not, as I seem to keep finding more and more nonsensical intellectual property cases related to sweet, beautiful alcohol. Who would have thought that beer could so often lead to confrontation? You may recall times when the IP and alcohol realms have clashed in the past, often over the designs of labels, sometimes over the names of real life people, and sometimes over the trademark of an (sigh) area code.

And now we can add mythical monster disputes to the ledger, as reader phlynhi writes us about a small brewer of beer, Clown Shoes, and how they lost the name of their signature beer, Vampire Slayer. The story goes like this. Clown Shoes made a beer and called it Vampire Slayer. A company called TI Beverage Group released a beer called Vampire Pale Ale after Vampire Slayer came out, but had applied for a trademark before Clown Shoes did. Rather than sending any cease and desist notices, they filed a trademark claim out of the gate, insisting that the court rule unfair competition and that any profits from Vampire Slayer be turned over to TI Beverage Group. Lovely.

Per Clown Shoes' website, they decided that the brand confusion at the heart of the case was a claim they could beat.

At the heart of the suit, we learned after seeking counsel, is whether or not a likelihood of brand confusion exists. Our position was that there couldn’t be much confusion between the two brands. The beers come from different countries, with ours being made in the USA and theirs in Belgium. This means they will end up in different sections of any beer store or on any beer list. Vampire Pale Ale embraces vampires in name and imagery, whereas Vampire Slayer does the opposite. Clown Shoes is the primary name of our beer, whereas Vampire Slayer is the secondary. The beer styles, American Imperial Stout as opposed to Belgian Pale Ale, are about as different as possible. Clown Shoes Beers’ branding is very distinct from Vampire Pale Ale. Etc.

Seems to make sense to me and Clown Shoes was ready to go fight their case in court. Then their attorney informed them that litigating would likely run anywhere between $300k and $400k. Yay, legal system! So they settled, resolving the case for an undisclosed amount of money and a resulting licensing agreement that would allow Clown Shoes to keep using the Vampire Slayer brand name if they choose to. They decidedly choose not to.

Immediately after we receive national label registration, the name Vampire Slayer will become Undead Party Crasher. The recipe remains the same, with smoked malt and holy water included. The new label expresses our feelings about the legal process and monsters.

Just remember, double tap to the head or sever the head from the neck. It's the only way to stop them. Zombies I mean....

Filed Under: clowns, trademark, trademarks, vamprie slayer, zombies
Companies: clown shoes, ti beverage group

Steve Jobs Is 'Big Brother' And Smartphone Users Are 'Zombies,' According To NSA Cell Phone Tapping Presentation

from the the-NSA-hates-you-for-your-freedom dept

Just in case you're not convinced the intelligence community views the public (American or otherwise) as little more than exploitable data generators, two paragraphs from Der Spiegel's full article on the NSA's cell phone exploits should do the trick.

The first deals with former NSA boss Michael Hayden and his iPhone experience.

Michael Hayden has an interesting story to tell about the iPhone. He and his wife were in an Apple store in Virginia, Hayden, the former head of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), said at a conference in Washington recently. A salesman approached and raved about the iPhone, saying that there were already "400,000 apps" for the device. Hayden, amused, turned to his wife and quietly asked: "This kid doesn't know who I am, does he? Four-hundred-thousand apps means 400,000 possibilities for attacks."

What most people would view as a feature list, the NSA views as a way to turn a person's phone into an informant. What Hayden references goes much deeper than simply grabbing location data and call records, something most intelligence and law enforcement agencies can already obtain without a warrant.

In the basest terms, the NSA wants to be inside your phone and will do anything to get there, but rather than follow that particular idiom into a dead end filled with rapey metaphors, we'll move on to the part where the NSA blames you for creating such attractive data.

In three consecutive transparencies, the authors of the presentation draw a comparison with "1984," George Orwell's classic novel about a surveillance state, revealing the agency's current view of smartphones and their users. "Who knew in 1984 that this would be Big Brother …" the authors ask, in reference to a photo of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. And commenting on photos of enthusiastic Apple customers and iPhone users, the NSA writes: "… and the zombies would be paying customers?"

No doubt whoever put together this presentation was pretty pleased with applying the Big Brother epithet to a private corporation. Without a doubt, many tech companies gather a ton of data on their users. Pre-installed apps routinely ask for permission to use location data and nearly every website visited gathers that along with anything else they can pick up. But private corporations aren't Big Brother because, for one thing, they're not the government. Apple can't spy on you and then use that data to imprison you. Only the government can.

Not that the NSA wants any tech company to start gathering less data. It loves the data and it loves being able to shake down these companies for their collections whenever deemed necessary. Referring to customers as "zombies" is the sort of thing you'd expect from neckbearded hipsters and other self-proclaimed individualists who tend take a dim view of any popular activity. It's rather jarring to hear the lingo deployed in a government intelligence agency presentation.

A private individual referring to iPhone customers as "zombies" is one thing. The NSA doing it is quite another. People who don't take an active effort to protect their information are being labeled as sub-human by a government agency. If these smartphones users don't care about the data they're leaking, then they really don't have an "expectation of privacy" to be steamrolled. That's the argument. As Der Spiegel puts it, the agency is arguing that the smartphone-buying public is "complicit in its own surveillance."

But they aren't, as one recent decision on acquiring cell phone location data without a warrant pointed out:

People buy cell phones to communicate with others, to use the Internet, and for a growing number of other reasons. But no one buys a cell phone to share detailed information about their whereabouts with the police.

The agency clearly feels that if the data is willingly being produced by cell phone users, it should have access. By reducing smartphone users to "zombies" and painting cell phone manufacturers as "Big Brother," the NSA is dehumanizing its targets. These aren't people -- they're just data producing entities, too brainless to be bothered with niceties like piviacy and security.

Filed Under: nsa, nsa surveillance, smartphones, zombies

DailyDirt: Save Yourself From The Zombies, If You Can...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you're looking forward to Halloween, it's coming up in a couple days -- and there will probably be plenty of zombies roaming around your front lawn (if you have a front lawn). Just give them some candy when they come to your door, and they'll go away. If they keep coming back, start handing out rolls of pennies, maybe? Here are a few zombie-related links to help you prepare for this Wednesday.

• Some zombies aren't the undead, they're just unthinking folks who might be "in the zone" and focused on other things. Aren't we all zombies in a way? [url]
• ZAICO is the Zombie Apocalypse Insurance Company for all your post-apocalyptic needs. Don't get caught unprepared -- but maybe choose a low deductible plan because cash might be a bit tight after the zombies take over. [url]
• A mathematical model of how zombies spread tells us that we need to deal with the zombie apocalypse quickly or else things will get out hand rapidly and bring the end of civilization as we know it. But how would different kinds of international relations policies deal with a zombie threat? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: apocalypse, halloween, insurance, undead, zombies

DailyDirt: Real Zombies...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Since it's Halloween, there are probably a lot of folks dressed up like zombies. But as we've mentioned before, Mother Nature has created a few of her own actual zombies. Here are just a few more examples.

• Did you know that the government sprays a baculovirus into the forest that can cause gypsy moth caterpillars to act reckless and even suicidal? The virus infects the caterpillars, takes over their molting genes, and re-programs the zombie caterpillars to liquify and rain contagious bodily fluids down upon other gypsy moth larvae. [url]
• North American wood frogs can survive being partially frozen (up to 70 percent of their internal water turned to ice) and twitch back to life. The frogs can stay in suspended animation for about 4 weeks, and it takes them about a day to thaw out and return to the living world. [url]
• Ants in Borneo have been found with a curious ability to explode and spew a sticky yellow glue over their enemies. The lethal sticky substance can take out other insect invaders and protect an ant colony from attack. [url]
• European paper wasps, infected by parasites, are turned into zombies that leave their hive to gather with other zombie wasps -- so that the parasites can mate. Wasps with female parasites become crazy queen wasps that fly off to infect more wasps. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: ants, caterpillar, frogs, halloween, insects, parasites, virus, wasps, zombies

DailyDirt: Zombies!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are plenty of zombie movies where viruses decimate the human population with diseases that turn infected hosts into crazy, blood-thirsty undead bodies. Biotech research reports (and maybe even the CDC!) make some of the premises for these zombie movies sound plausible, but mother nature itself has created a few zombie phenomena as well. Here are just some examples.

• Toxoplasma gondii infects rodents, cats.. and people -- possibly causing weird behaviors and strange culture quirks. The Happening has already happened, sort of. [url]
• Fungus-controlled ants are compelled by their mold-masters to die in nice neighborhoods for spores to thrive. These ants are programmed to die on north-facing plant leaves, roughly 25 centimeters off the ground, in an area with 94-95% humidity and a temperature between 20-30 Celsius. [url]
• A wasp's venom can turn a cockroach into a "dog on a leash." The wasp ends up laying eggs in the belly of its cockroach-pet -- and the wasp young eat their way out. [url]
• Another kind of wasp lays its eggs in an orb spider, and the larvae control the spider to build a special web for them. Is there a Spiderman villan based on this wasp? [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: ants, fungi, spiders, viruses, wasps, zombies

Well Done: CDC Warns Of The Zombie Apocalypse

from the brains dept

It's probably not all that exciting to blog for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) blog. It's probably not always easy to get attention from your everyday reader. So, kudos to the CDC for having a bit of a sense of humor in figuring out a good way to get its message on emergency preparedness out to folks who might never otherwise be compelled to look at the blog. It had Assistant Surgeon General Ali Khan explain to people how to prepare for (and hopefully survive) the Zombie Apocalypse:

There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That�s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you�ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you�ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.

And, from there it goes into general disaster preparedness, at times relating it back to the impending zombie invasion. We do plenty of complaining about bad government actions around here, but I say kudos for not releasing just a totally bland (it does get a bit dry in the middle) disaster preparedness blog post, but instead, for coming up with a good way to get the info out there that might actually spread (in a good way...).

Filed Under: brains, cdc, disaster preparedness, zombies

South Korea Wants To Mandate Everyone Must Install 'Security' Software To Prevent 'Zombies'

from the and-maybe-open-your-computer-up-a-bit dept

Amelia Andersdotter alerted us to a story coming out of South Korea, where there's an ongoing effort to pass a "Zombie PC Prevention Act," which would require every citizen to install special "security software," on their computers. But, some are worried about the unintended (or secretly intended?) consequences of such an act. The Korean government will officially designate which security solutions are allowed, leading to questions about what might be in or not be in such software. On top of that, this law also has quite a backdoor for government agencies to spy on pretty much any company, because it would empower the Korean Communications Commission to "examine the details of the business, records, documents and others" of anyone, without a warrant, based merely on the suspicion that an employee or the company as a whole did not use such mandated security software.

An interesting sidenote in all of this is that just as the push to pass this Zombie PC Prevention Act came about, suddenly a hard-drive destroying malware started making the rounds, and some have noted that it acts in a manner that doesn't make any sense when you look at typical malware. Instead, it acts sort of like a "zombie," but whereas typical zombies try to remain hidden, this one does a lot to make itself known. The suggestion -- though, admittedly, with little proof -- is that perhaps someone has released such an attack in order to build up support for the law.

That may be too much of a conspiracy theory for some, but it is still worrisome that the government might mandate a particular brand of security software. It's obviously a good thing, in general, for people to secure their computers, and to try to ward off malware such as zombies. But should it really be the government's job to step in and mandate what software you put on your computer?

Filed Under: south korea, zombies

Michael Jackson's Estate Complains About Dancing MJ Zombie In Game

from the beat-it dept

ReallyEvilCanine alerts us to the news that the game Plants vs. Zombies has decided to change its dancing zombie, because Michael Jackson's estate complained that the zombie looked too much like Jackson. It's true. The zombie is obviously designed to look like Michael Jackson, and my guess (details are lacking) is that the estate threatened a publicity rights claim over the use: This seems pretty silly. Publicity rights rules were put in place to try to stop people from thinking a famous person had endorsed a product. I can't see how anyone could have possibly thought that Michael Jackson or the Jackson estate had endorsed this particular game, or the dancing zombie Jackson.

Filed Under: michael jackson, publicity rights, zombies