Global Copyrighting

Global Copyrighting Infringement

If you lived in Turkey around the time George Lucas released the first “Star Wars” films, you may remember a movie called “Turkish Star Wars”. You may also have seen some clips from this movie if you have ever visited youtube, or had a friend show you the movie for a laugh.

“Turkish Star Wars” was able to legally use the trademark title “Star Wars” because, apparently, the title was not actually protected in Turkey. This is because, if you have a trademark, that trademark is generally not protected anywhere except for where you actually use that trademark. So if there are no stores selling Coca-Cola in your jurisdiction, you are free to start your own company and call it Coca-Cola. The actual recipe for the cola is most definitely copyright protected throughout most of the world, but trademarks are only protected where they are in use.

So, “Turkish Star Wars” was able to get away with using trademarked names and titles. This is because of the era that the movie was released in. For a time, Turkey was going through massive political upheaval. During this time, it was very difficult to find American films. So if George Lucas’s “Star Wars” wasn’t officially released in Turkey, the trademark was left free for anyone who wanted it.

A common practice at the time was to capitalize on the lack of competition by making quick-and-cheap movies, remaking American hits with Turkish cast, crew, and setting. Besides “Star Wars” there is also a Turkish “Wizard of Ox” “The Exorcist” and “E.T.”.

What’s kind of funny about all this is that, even though the use of the title and character names was completely legal, the actual film pretty much qualifies as copyright infringement under Turkey’s current copyright laws, which have since been altered to align with WIPO standards. At the time, however, there was very little George Lucas could have done to have protected his intellectual property from the misappropriation committed by “Turkish Star Wars”, short of say, flying all the way to Turkey, in the middle of a political upheaval, and suing a small-time filmmaker and making very little to compensate for damages and so on, that is, if his case held up at all. Remember that Star Wars was not released in Turkey at that time, and so, the judge may very well have sided with the bootleggers.

The movie actually features an entirely original plotline. Turkish Luke Skywalker is not Darth Vader’s son, and Turkish Darth Vader wears a colorful Mexican wrestler costume. This might be seen as a way to avoid copyright infringement, but it’s more likely that the director simply did not speak English when he saw the original “Star Wars”, and did not understand the story. Another possibility is that the director hadn’t actually seen “Star Wars” at all by the time he shot the film.

Why do we say that?

Well, the movie is full of shots taken directly from the original films. More specifically, the shots taken directly from the original film are shots that are in the trailers to the films. For example, during a scene where Turkish Luke Skywalker is flying his X-Wing, we see that he is apparently sitting in front of a big screen TV playing clips of the “Blowing up the Death Star” sequence from the original “Star Wars”. Therefore, even if the story is entirely different, the appropriation of actual footage from the film definitely counts as plagiarism and copyright infringement. Not only that, but the music from the film is one hundred percent stolen from other films and television shows, such as “Star Wars” itself, but also, “Battlestar Galactica” and several others.

No legal action was ever brought against the filmmakers. It may have been that George Lucas simply didn’t think the matter was worth pursuing, or that he hadn’t even heard of “Turkish Star Wars”. That doesn’t really mean that the movie was not actually copyright infringement though. It’s kind of interesting, if you look at international cinema between the sixties and the eighties, it was pretty common practice to appropriate story elements and music and so on from other movies. Even as recently as John Woo’s “A Better Tomorrow II” in the mid 1980’s was full of music stolen directly from the Nicolas Cage vehicle “Birdie”. It’s not because this kind of thing was legal, at all, rather… it was just very easy to get away with. If the original author even knew what these people were doing in the first place, more often than not, a lawsuit just seemed like more trouble than it was worth.