Court Rules For Paramount In Lawsuit Over ‘Top Gun’ Movies

A couple of years back, Mike wrote about a lawsuit brought against Paramount Pictures over its Top Gun movies. There were several things that colluded to make this lawsuit a thing, as Mike laid out. First was the mess that is copyright termination rights and the second is movie studios’ habit for licensing factual articles for movie rights.

See, the original Top Gun movie, while being entirely fictional, was at least partially informed by a factual news piece written by Ehud Yonay in California. Yonay told the story of real world pilots with callsigns at an elite training facility. Paramount licensed the piece for rights for the movie. In all reality, it didn’t have to do this, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment, but it did. As Mike pointed out, studios tend to do this sort of thing as an insurance policy of sorts, to prevent annoying lawsuits that may or may not have any actual merit.

In the subsequent years, Ehud Yonay passed away. Shosh and Yuval Yonay, Ehud’s widow and son respectively, reclaimed the copyright for the article, 35 years having passed since the licensing deal. And because the surviving Yonays can’t claim there is any direct copying of Ehud’s article in the movie, because there isn’t, they instead claimed that both movies are “derivative works” in order to get around that. Derivative works are their own flavor of mess, since the very concept of derivation in creative expression can route around the idea/expression dichotomy and, well, here we get a suit that is so twisted into a copyright pretzel that you’ve got the surviving family of a journalist suing over two fictional movies after having reclaimed rights to a factual article neither of them had any hand in writing. Cool.

Well, not cool, according the court that ruled for Paramount in the case for the most obvious of reasons.

“To the extent Plaintiffs contend that the Works are similar because they depict or describe fighter pilots landing on an aircraft carrier, being shot down while flying, and carousing at a bar, those are unprotected facts, familiar stock scenes, or scènes à faire,” the judge wrote.

In a brief response, Paramount said it was happy with the ruling.

“We are pleased that the court recognized that plaintiffs’ claims were completely without merit,” a studio spokesperson said.

At the end of the day, if the court wasn’t going to by into the bizarre derivative argument, it’s the only logical way for the court to rule on this. There simply isn’t any actual copying from the factual article to the movies. Everything laid out in the suit amounts to attempting to sue over the “copying” of ideas, concepts, or other unprotectable elements. Again, the movie is filled with names, locations, plot points, and antagonists that are all completely absent from Ehud’s article. You know, because it’s fiction.

Now, the Yonays have already said they plan to appeal the ruling. They almost certainly shouldn’t. The ruling from the lower court is as plain as it is detailed.

“To the extent there are similarities between the characters in the Works, the characters in the Article are real people and are therefore not protected by copyright law,” he wrote.

The judge also noted the many differences between the movie and the article, including the plot, dialogue and setting, and ultimately concluded that the works are not substantially similar.

In fact, they’re not even really all that close. I would argue, actually, that the only lesson to be learned here is that studios should shy away from licensing the rights to factual journalism for fictional works entirely, if this is how those efforts are going to end anyway.