Paul, Now I am confused.
I received word back from Fredrik Malmberg of CPI stating, "The Howard estate had a literary agent who protected the copyrights. They later assigned all rights to Conan Properties in the 1970's. All other artists, writers and editors have assigned rights as part of work for hire agreements." How would I find out for sure what CPI's actual rights are regarding REH's original stories? Would their claim be on file somewhere as a matter of public record? I guess I ought to move this over the REHinnercircle at Yahoo Groups, I just signed up a few minutes ago. :-) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Paul Herman Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 9:28 AM Here's the deal. PotBC is indeed PD. That means you can create a derivative work from it, your screenplay, no problem. BUT, CPI holds a TRADEMARK in the name "CONAN" with regard to all sorts of stuff. Whether it covers plays or not is an interesting question, but I know it covers movies, so its pretty close. That doesn't mean that they can somehow reclaim the copyrights that way, they can't. Indeed, I'll be publishing that story along with the rest of the Weird Tales Conan stories at some point in the next year or two. Nor can they stop you from writing your screenplay, and getting your own copyright on it. What it does affect is how your derivative work is marketed. If you put CONAN in big letters at the top of the poster, you'll likely get a nastygram, and maybe a valid one, from CPI. If the word CONAN doesn't appear anywhere in your advertising materials, then they have no basis to complain. Trademark law is all about how things are presented to the buying public, what's on the label, or in the advertisements, NOT what's inside.
