Quote:
Originally Posted by jmine83
A contract that somehow negotiates that Universal has the right to use the Ford Explorer in the JP film and "all" of the associated licensed medias and merchandise, right? Therefore, any company that wants to purchase the rights stipulated in the contract for the purpose of producing a piece of JP merchandise "therefore" by proxy has the rights to use the JP Ford Explorer right?
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It really depends entirely on the terms of the contract they negotiated (which, just to make things more difficult, are quite likely confidential). The licence could apply to the film only, or to the film and toys but not computer games, or it could expire after a certain amount of time, or anything else their lawyers could think up.
And although this is probably less relevant to
Jurassic Park, films have more leeway in terms of incidental reproduction: if you shoot a street scene on location, for example, you don't automatically need permission from the manufacturer of every car that happened to drive by. But if Telltale went to the trouble of modelling a Jeep that matches polygon for polygon, it would be hard to argue that this was 'incidental'.
It's harder to know exactly what it means for Telltale to have the rights to the films but not the books. Perhaps Michael Crichton's contract said that once the movie was made, any unused aspects of the book returned to him; perhaps Universal's licensing department are simply insisting that the game be consistent with their films.