A recent story in entertainment news was the Conan O’Brien v. NBC (no, not a court case, and will never be) fiasco. As I’m sure we all have heard and read numerous times, Conan was basically ousted from his new time slot as a result of poor ratings for “The Tonight Show” and Jay Leno’s failed experiment. This series of unfortunate happenings has had an impact on everyone involved and has turned into a complete mess.
The part of this debacle that was especially interesting to me was the fact that NBC owns all of the intellectual property rights to Conan’s many characters that were created for “Late Night.”
While this is an obvious work-for-hire situation, it raises a few interesting questions about this part of copyright law. Who wins here? Conan, if he decides to host a new show on a different network, can’t take his characters with him. NBC would be foolish to use these characters in another format or a different show because the characters and segments are wholly associated with Conan O’Brien. Viewers like me and I’m sure many others in the class will never be able to see these characters and segments, such as “Conando” and “In the Year 3000”, in their exact form again.
I understand the law and therefore understand the legal reason NBC has retained these rights. Although Conan claims to not want his hard earned intellectual property, should NBC have granted him rights on the fact that they are taking his show away and want to do the right thing? I think that would make NBC look a little better in the viewers’ eyes at least.
A similar situation to this occurred when David Letterman left NBC to go to CBS in 1993. Letterman changed the names of his characters and bits and went on to use them on his new show. Similarly, what I would like to see Conan do is use the characters that him and his writers created on his new show (if that’s what he chooses to pursue), but apply the fair use doctrine using an alteration on the characters as a parody on the characters that NBC has rights to.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60H0CH20100118
This whole situation reminds me of the saying “if I can’t have it no one can,” which is probably what NBC is going for – if they can’t use Conan’s characters, he shouldn’t be able to either. Although, I actually think this might be a good thing for Conan. It gives him a lot of opportunities to parody and take shots at NBC.
Although I don’t know that much about work for hire, it seems to be that it doesn’t do what copyright law attempts to do. Instead of protecting the rights of authors/creators work for hire kind of enables companies to get the most out of creators without having to worry about their copyrights. Sure, a comedian could create characters first and then sell those ideas to the highest bidder, but that isn’t really how the entertainment industry seems to work. It just seems to me that the work for hire is an unfair system for creators.
I agree with this point of view.
I am willing to admit that I don’t fully understand work for hire, but I would like to see some examples of how (if?) it is advantageous to the creators.
In my opinion, that is a good idea for Conan. If the idea is one’s own independent creations, one definitely can use the fair use doctrine to his/her advantage. The entertainment industry has its own set of rules and it does seem a bit unfair for the independent creator. However, I’m sure Conan can create even more unique characters that would maintain high popularity on a different network.
I watched Conan on tour a couple days ago and it was very funny. I can’t wait for his new show to come on TBS. It will be the beginning of a new chapter in late night TV.