Lucasfilm ordered Disney to lift the copyright claim that they recently placed on Star Wars Theory’s Vader Fan Film. Here’s what happened.
It would be an understatement to say that popular Youtuber Star Wars Theory has had whirlwind of a week.
For those who are unfamiliar with the situation going on between Disney and Star Wars Theory, an in-depth article was published yesterday reporting on it, but just to quickly recap it, here is what happened.
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Last month, Star Wars Theory released his Darth Vader Fan Film, which as of now, has been viewed over 7.2 million times in the three weeks that it has been up on Youtube.
When he first began to make the Vader film, he contacted Lucasfilm who gave him their blessing to make it, as long as he made it without crowd funding and left the video un-monetized, meaning that no ads would run on it, hence there would be no revenue to collect from it.
Earlier this week, Theory posted a video saying that Disney and their partner company Warner Chappell had claimed that because the custom score used in the film used a rendition of the Imperial March score, then it was in violation of their copyright policy.
They used this copyright to claim that the entire film was now their intellectual property and were now going to run ads on it and collect the revenue themselves.
Theory was given the option to appeal it, which he stated he was not going to do because he would likely lose and then Disney would delete the film and possible get his channel taken down.
In essence, they altered the deal and told him to pray they don’t alter it further.
Yesterday, on January 16, Star Wars Theory posted another update video on his channel regarding Disney’s copyright claim, but this time it was good news.
According to him, after a backlash from Star Wars fans, Lucasfilm stepped in and told Disney that Theory made the film under a certain set of rules and that they needed to release the copyright claim that they placed on the Vader fan film.
This means that going forward, no ads will run on the Vader Film and that it will remain free to view on Youtube for everyone.
This was a very good move by Lucasfilm, who have taken a lot of criticism from fans over the past few years since Disney acquired them. It’s nice to see that they are still dedicated to their fans and stepped in when their parent company Disney tried to profit off of an independent fan film which the creator wasn’t even making money off of.
Star Wars Theory sounded extremely grateful for this in the recent video he released and stated that he will continue work on Episode II of the Vader fan film series.
Thanks for helping out with this one Lucasfilm. It’s good to see that you still watch out for the fans.