Last Updated on 09/01/2022 by てんしょく飯
Three full months after its release, “Top Gun: Maverick” is still going strong. However, Paramount Pictures, which is in a celebratory mood, has a bump on its eye. Shortly after the film’s release, it was sued for copyright infringement by the family of Ehud Yonai, the author of the magazine article on which the original 1986 “Top Gun” was based.
Paramount stated that the film was already ready as of January 2020.
In the U.S., for post-1977 works, the copyright holder can regain the right to use the work after 35 years have passed. Paramount acquired the film rights to Yonai’s article in May 1983, so it will expire in May 2018. Yonai’s estate sent a letter to Paramount in January 2018 giving them a little leeway and stating that they would stop using the work as of January 2020. However, Paramount did not respond and released the sequel “Top Gun Maverick” at the end of May this year with the license expired.
This would not have been a problem if the film had already been made when the rights expired. However, Yonai’s family insists that the sequel was completed on May 8, 2021, giving a specific date. Paramount, on the other hand, has stated that the film was already done as of January 2020, and it was thought that the key would be whether they could prove this.
Facts are not subject to copyright.
But in papers filed with the court last Friday local time, Paramount approached the case from a different direction and asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed. Their argument is that the sequel was not based on Yonai’s article in the first place, that the story is completely different, and that copyright issues are irrelevant.
Plaintiffs claim that Paramount Pictures’ 2022 blockbuster movie “Top Gun Maverick” infringes on the copyright of their 1983 magazine article. That the plaintiffs did not attach the article itself (to their complaint) is telling in itself, but that article is a nonfiction account of the Naval Fighter Weapons School known as Top Gun. By contrast, Top Gun Maverick is an action film about a fictional veteran pilot named Maverick who returns to Top Gun to teach graduates, including a man with a grudge against him,” Paramount states in the complaint.
They added, “By comparing the article and the movie, the Court can see that ‘Top Gun Maverick’ does not use any copyrighted material from the article. The only similarity between these two very different things is Top Gun, a real training facility. Plaintiffs do not have a monopoly on the right to make anything about Top Gun,” he continued, citing a statement from a past court case: “It is the most basic of copyright law that a fact cannot be held as copyright.
In other words, Paramount argued that the circumstances of Top Gun’s training, the pilots doing push-ups, calling each other by nicknames instead of names, the relationships between the pilots, and other elements that were in the original nonfiction article and also appeared in “Top Gun Maverick” were all facts and they claim that they are not protected by copyright. Regarding the aerial combat, which the article describes as “intense,” “powerful,” and “a situation where a small mistake can make the difference between life and death,” and the fact that such scenes are also developed in the movie, he states that “the article is telling a fact, and plaintiff cannot own that.
As for the use of the original article’s themes of “strong camaraderie amidst fierce competition,” “family-like relationships,” and “heroic pilots” in “Top Gun Maverick,” Paramount countered that these are very generic and not copyrightable. Paramount countered that these themes are very common and not copyrightable. They also point out that there is no dialogue in the article, and that the words in both the article and the movie are industry terms, i.e., they actually exist. The same is true of the characters: the article focuses on two men, Yogi and Possum, but these two, as well as the other pilots in the article, are real people.
Yonai’s description of the pilots’ personalities, if they are real people, is not subject to copyright. Paramount argues, “Because that personality was not created [by Yonai].
Something big is at stake on both sides.
In January 2018, when Paramount received the letter from Yonai’s estate, “Top Gun Maverick” had just begun production in earnest when it was decided to go with a storyline that would bring out Goose’s son Rooster. At that point, Paramount may not have thought too much about it, since the movie was supposed to be released before the January 2020 deadline in the letter. But when the release was delayed to allow time for post-production, and then a pandemic broke out and forced them to delay it further, Paramount took no action. Finally, Yonai’s family grew impatient and sent a letter to Paramount in mid-May, just before the film’s release, demanding that the film not be released. In June, Yonai’s family filed a lawsuit against Paramount after the company continued its promotional activities and went ahead with the release of the film as planned.
Since there is no way that Paramount could have not consulted their lawyers during that time, they may have been told by their lawyers what was written in this document from that time on and thought it was okay. Since this sequel is not based on a magazine article, they probably believed that it did not matter if their rights lapsed or not.
In fact, they would be very embarrassed if they were not correct. Top Gun Maverick has grossed $1.4 billion worldwide, and when the DVD is released in November, sales are expected there as well. Also, Miles Teller recently told the media that there have been conversations between him and Tom Cruise about a third film. For the same reason, even for Yonai’s family, they need to win this lawsuit. If they lose, they lose what they would have gained. For both sides, what is at stake here is huge. The battle in this courtroom may be as fierce as the battle in the air that unfolded in the movie.
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