At The Volokh Conspiracy, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh analyzes, and criticizes, Tuesday’s Missouri Court of Appeals decision to uphold the $15 million verdict in Tony Twist’s lawsuit against Todd McFarlane:

The Missouri Supreme Court, which upheld Twist’s general legal theory, faced a potential obstacle to its ruling: Fiction writers in fact often name characters after famous people, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they include those people as characters, as in the movies Forrest Gump and Zelig, or in Steve Martin’s play Picasso at the Lapin Agile (which has as its lead characters Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein). Sometimes writers just refer to those people in passing, or name characters after them — consider Yogi Bear; the characters Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne, and Benito Hoover in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; characters nicknamed after Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, in Federico Fellini’s Fred & Ginger; and the reference to Joe DiMaggio in Paul Simon’s Mrs. Robinson. The list could go on.

The Missouri Supreme Court tried to deal with by creating a distinction between (a) speech that is said “with the intent to obtain a commercial advantage” — speech that is “predominantly a ploy to sell comic books” — and (b) “artistic or literary expression.” But this distinction just can’t work.

(Thanks, Shawn Levasseur, for the link.)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 8:11 am and is filed under Comic Books, Industry, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.