Licensing question...

[enyawd72]

I thought about this while reading some of the Six Million Dollar Man threads regarding the Bionic Woman being a separate license.

I don't understand all the complicated laws surrounding these issues, but I'm puzzled by something. Why wouldn't the Bionic Woman be covered under the SMDM license?

The character was created and first appeared on SMDM long before she had her own series, same as the characters of Oscar Goldman and Rudy Wells, both of whom went on to appear in the Bionic Woman series along side Jamie Summers, yet Oscar and Rudy are considered property of SMDM while Jamie is not.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

[cjefferys]

I would guess that in using the official name of the spin-off show "The Bionic Woman" and it's logo, etc (they would be separate copyrights and/or trademarks) would require a separate license, especially since Kenner did not start producing a Jamie Summers doll until her show was it's own separate entity.

Just because Mego made Happy Days figures, that didn't mean they could start making Mork dolls after the "Mork and Mindy" show aired, using the excuse that Mork first appeared on Happy Days, so he's fair game. I'm sure they had to negotiate a separate license for Laverne and Shirley too. Licensing is a tricky thing for sure.

[Brazoo]

What cjefferys said.

Also, IPs based on a real persons likeness may have further complications. So using the name Bionic Woman may be one thing to license, but making a doll that looks like Lindsay Wagner might be another.

I'm not saying that's the case here, because I have no clue in this case. There was a high profile case a few years ago where Best Buy bought footage from Rocky 3 and Mr. T successfully sued. Buying the rights to use the footage from the copyright holders wasn't enough.

[ctc]

>Buying the rights to use the footage from the copyright holders wasn't enough.

Yeah. It USED to be that stuff like old tv shows were mostly considered throwaway, or filler. That's why we got so many classic shows as kids; the syndicated stations needed them for time, so the studios sold them cheap. Some time in the 90's things changed.... I suspect 'cos of Batman*.... and everybody grabbed up the rights to durned near everything. Hence why you get weird conflicts like this one, and why so many old shows took so long to come out on disk.

*As for the Batman comment: nobody expected the '89 Batman film to do very well. It was WAY too expensive, too overhyped and depended on a property that most folks thought was dead. ("Mainstream" folks had no idea about the comic scene of the day.) When it hit big "Hollywood" freaked out, and EVERYTHING was licensed, bought and hoarded 'cos nobody knew what the next big thing might be. That's also one of the reasons so many shows that had been rerun since Methuselah suddenly vanished. I kinda wonder if that was also why so many syndicated stations allowed themselves to be bought out as fledgeling networks: the loss of cheap filler made it too expensive to stay on the air.

Don C.