I am interested how to write a star wars story legally? This thread is not intended to be legal advice, but should be an orientation to prevent legal conflicts. 1. For example, you want to write a story about Han Solo, a character who is subject to trademark. I assume that disney is the copyright holder of the trademark, or is Lucasfilm also involved? But what if you refer to stories of the expanded universe? Who is the copyright holder there? Are there trademark of these authors? I found a good overview, which of course can not serve as legal advice. https://www.upcounsel.com/disney-trademark-infringement As far as I understood, you need the consent of Disney to use characters that are subject to the trademark. Does anyone have experience with this? How easy would it be to get that consent from Disney? What do the star wars trademark cover? Vehicles, places? What else can you think of? 2. As a second example, you want to write a story without characters, vehicles, places and anything else that is subject to the trademark. But you want to clearly locate your story as a star wars story. As I understood here: https://www.upcounsel.com/disney-trademark-infringement it should be legal to use fair use to make a reference to star wars by naming star wars characters, locations or anything else without obtaining the consent of the trademark copyright holder? 3. As a third example, one would like to refer to star wars by referring to an existing story that should be subject to copyright. For example, you wrote a story with your own characters, vehicles and locations, but referred to the battle of yavin, which is clearly a copyrighted story. Would this violate copyright rights? Does it generally make a difference whether a story is sold for money or merely published on a fansite, for example, in order to let rights holders take action against such a publication. I am curious what you think or know about this topic.
You can write all the fan fiction you want. You can't make money from it, legally. That's about all there is to it. And Disney and Lucasfilm don't just give permission to fans to write stuff. They hire professional, published authors to write for their IP.
What makes you so sure that every non-commercial fan story won't lead to a legal dispute? On the other hand, why wouldn't it be possible to legally write a commercial Star Wars story by, for example, using fair use to identify your story as a star wars story. I lack the source in your statement to back up your claim.
The fact that substantial fan fiction archives exist without harassment from Disney / Lucasfilm legal departments is one big indicator. Here is one. Here is Wikipedia's article on Legal Issues with Fan Fiction. The TL;DR is that fan fiction is not liable for copyright infringement if it falls under the doctrine of fair use; fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis; and that "Works of fanfiction are more likely to constitute fair use if they are "transformative" with respect to the original work, if they are non-commercial, if they appropriate relatively little of the original work, and/or if they do not tend to detract from the potential market for or value of the original work." If you're still worried, yeah, talk to a copyright / trademark lawyer. But so as long as there is a.) no effort to make money from the story, b.) no attempt to pass it off as any sort of officially created or approved story, and c.) no plagiarism of an existing official story, you really are good to go. Fan fiction has a long history; I have Star Trek fanzines from the 1960s in my personal archive, but the practice is older than that. Just stay in your own lane and all is well.
The thing about Fair Use is it's not a doctrine with a bright-line. Two different judges could look at the same set of facts, and rule completely differently. So, while not-for-profit fanfiction that largely meets the four-factor test would likely go in the defense's favor in most courts, it could still go the plaintiff's way in others. Ultimately, the only 100% safe way to write a Star Wars story is to write enough original fiction that the folks at Lucasfilm hire you to write for them. But you're probably 99% safe by following the fan fiction guidelines enumerated by The Positive Fan above. As an aside, it's important not to conflate copyrights and trademarks. While they're both kinds of intellectual property (along with patents), they're different things with different rules. Han Solo is both a copyrighted character (he's a concretely expression of an idea from a creative work) and a trademark (he's a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies a product or service as being from Disney/Lucasfilm). Not all characters would qualify as trademarks (I doubt, for instance, that Wuher would qualify as recognizable to the public in a manner that would let him serve as a trademark), and for those that do, they're only restricted from being used in the trade dress of the product in question.
I mean, people write fanfiction all the time and nobody gets sued for it. Disney or any other creator would have nothing to gain from doing so, and they'd just piss off a ton of fans.
Yes, which is what makes it 99%. But one cannot rule out the possibility that someday, someone in the relevant chain of command at Disney/Lucasfilm will make a drastically stupid decision in the cost/benefit analysis of whether suing fanficcers is a good idea. I mean, in the past, Disney has sued daycare centers for having their cartoon characters painted on the walls; who's to say someone like whoever did that, someone with more litigiousness than PR sense, won't come along again?
