Re: Copyright question

[Steven D Holmes <papillio@juno.com>]

I suggest you make a parody of it.  Lots of people make silly parodies of
Star Wars.  It seems you could do the same of The Matrix!

- Steve

On Fri, 03 Sep 1999 11:44:18 +0200 Karel Bagchus
<H.Bagchus@cable.a2000.nl> writes:
>Hi,
>
>I would like to hear your thoughts on my following problem:
>
>A while ago I went to see the movie "The Matrix" which I just loved 
>from
>start 'till end. After looking around a bit on the net, I found the 
>movie
>website http://whatisthematrix.com. They have a screensaver to 
>download
>("The Matrix Code") that emulates the scrolling characters on the 
>"matrix
>monitors" that you can see in the movie.
>
>However, I wasn't impressed with the screensaver at all, and since I'm 
>in
>the screensaver business I thought, "I can do better then that", and 
>made
>my own "Matrix Tap". But it has gone far beyond being just a joke and 
>a
>replica of the original, it has configuration options for character 
>color,
>character highlight occurence, highlight luminance threshold, string 
>morph
>speed, scroll mode and scroll speed.
>
>and I wrote a fax to Warner Bros. proposing a deal that they can use 
>my
>screensaver for free, and that I would get a copyright clearance so I 
>could
>put it up on my website as well.
>
>My motivation for asking the clearance was:
>
>"Although the therm 'The Matrix' is common in many Science-Fiction 
>novels
>and scrolling characters on a screen are visible in many movies, I do
>recognise the fact the the initial idea came from seeing the movie 
>'The
>Matrix' that Warner Bros. holds copyrights over."
>
>They responded with:
>
>"Please be advised, as a general policy, Warner Bros. does not license
>material for use on non-Warner websites".
>
>Now my question is this: Would I be in trouble if I changed the name 
>from
>"Matrix Tap" to let's say "Geek Code" and set the default character 
>color
>to blue instead of red, and take any reference to "The Matrix" out of 
>the
>source code, and then put it up on my website.... Would I be safe or 
>in
>trouble ?
>
>Karel.
>
>-------------------------====#### Class Logic 
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>		Karel Bagchus 
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