It's a derivative work. Copyright includes an exclusive right to prepare derivative works. Good luck with your argument about it being unconstitutional.

Well, while I would say it's a classic, I would advise you not to watch Star Trek episode 30, "Amok Time," which features a rageful, murderous Spock.

Also skip Superman III and Superman IV.

Yeah!

Technically there is no copyright on the characters standing alone. The copyright is on the work the characters first appear in. (Or for later traits of the characters, the works in which those traits first appear) When you use characters, you're really making a new work which is derivative of that part of the previous work in which the characters are defined.

Character copyright is just a sort of shorthand for this idea, but it's not a distinct thing.

Possibly not in this case, but fair use is not applied in a strict way. Consider time shifting: It's not creative, it uses fictional works, it uses all of the work, but it doesn't materially harm the market for the work. Only one of the four factors is in favor of fair use, but time shifting is generally considered to be fair.

Sure you can. Check out 17 USC 201(d), which starts out saying "The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance...."

And yet it made sense to me, and I'm sober as a judge for some reason.

Well, works can also enter the public domain through other mechanisms, such as most famously having the copyright term expire.

But the earlier poster didn't say that they might become generic, he said that they might be generic. This would be the scenes a faire doctrine. I haven't watched the show, but I recall that it's a 5-person team, so I'd bet that they fall neatly into what TV Tropes calls the Five-Man Band:

The Leader -- The leader of the group. Can be a mastermind, charismatic, levelheaded, headstrong, or some combination of the four. Often also The Hero.
The Lancer -- Usually a contrast to The Leader. If the Leader is clean-cut and/or uptight, the Lancer is a grizzled Anti-Hero or Deadpan Snarker; if the Leader is driven and somewhat amoral, the Lancer is more relaxed and level-headed.
The Smart Guy -- The physically weak, but intelligent or clever member. Often nerdy and awkwardly played for comic relief. Sometimes unconventionally young (early- to mid-teens). Sometimes a Trickster and a buddy of the Big Guy.
The Big Guy -- The strongman of the team. May be dumb. Or mute.
The Chick -- A peacekeeping role to balance out the other members' aggression, bringing them to a nice or at least manageable medium. The Chick is often considered the heart of the group. This role is played by a woman or girl. Someone female. Otherwise, it is not a Five-Man Band.

This is a stock description of characters. Anyone is entitled to use it, regardless of whether the first work to use it is still copyrighted, and regardless of whether people are copying it from other copyrighted works. It's like how everyone is entitled to use a spooky eastern european castle, with moon-baying wolves, in a movie about vampires.

Now, if the Power Rangers characters are more defined than this, and if the use involved their more defined, non-generic character traits, that could be an infringement. But if Power Rangers doesn't do much character development and is more like a modern version of commedia dell'arte, where it's just about how the lovers will enlist the help of the servants to marry despite the wishes of their parents, and so on, but with robots and karate, the characters might well be considered generic.

It can. That's not to say it always does, or even commonly does. But any sort of use can be a fair use, including fanfic.

It could be. But fair use hinges entirely on the specific facts of the use -- it would take the right example.

They can be, but there are limits. The key is how well-defined the character is. Also, bear in mind that really the character is not protected by copyright per se -- the character is just a part of a greater work, which is protected by copyright. Whenever a work which establishes some trait of a character falls into the public domain, so too does that part of the character. Unauthorized uses of the character are really unauthorized uses of the work, which is what can give rise to infringement. A character cannot be copyrighted separately from the work in which he appears, however.

Or to the extent that the work is not protected, either because it is in the public domain, or because some exception to copyright law applies.

Clarity; To avoid paying greater fees for litigation down the road, even if they were confident that they would win; As a favor wrapped in a plausible excuse; For good PR. There are good reasons to do so, is the point.

No it doesn't. Copyright law in the US states that if a copyright is prima facie infringed, but constitutes fair use, then there is no infringement. Parodies and satires -- and for that matter, literally any other sort of use -- can potentially be fair uses, but are not necessarily fair uses. Certainly there have been both parodies and satires which were not fair uses.

It can easily be seen as a satire. Whether it's a parody is a slightly more difficult question. The legal distinction, for those unfamiliar with this, is that a parody somehow makes fun of the work being used; a satire makes fun of something else, but uses the work to do so. Making fun of the trend of 'gritty reboots' in cinema by using the Power Rangers is certainly satire -- it makes fun of other gritty reboot films and shows. I'd have to have seen it, and know something about the regular Power Rangers to have an opinion as to whether it's a parody, and I frankly don't care enough to bother.

The question of whether the filmmakers meant it as a satire at the time that they made it and released it, and whether that matters, is certainly an interesting one. I can't think of caselaw that indicates that the timing matters or not, but please feel free to cite some.

This is an incorrect view of fair use.

Fair use applies to any sort of use of a copyrighted work, which but for fair use would be infringing, and which is fair. I know this sounds like a tautology, but there it is. There is a four-factor test as to whether a use is fair or not, which we'll get into shortly. That's really what matters. True, there is a list of examples in the statute, but it's really meaningless: It's not an exhaustive list of all types of fair use, and the types of uses listed are not necessarily fair. While it was meant to provide guidance, the list of uses has turned out to only cause serious confusion. I strongly encourage you to ignore it completely.

For those reading along, the four factor test is:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The key thing to bear in mind is that the test is not to be applied in a strictly mathematical way; it's really just a tool to provide guidance for the ultimate question of: Is the use fair?

Fair uses have been found when most of the factors weigh against it. And the four factors are not the only factors worth considering; courts must consider them, but can also consider additional factors if they like, with no rules as to what those factors are.

In any case, you're looking at the 'amount and substantiality of the portion used' in too mechanical a fashion. Remember, the copyright for a character is really all about the details that go into describing the character. What does he look like? What clothes does he wear? What sort of method of speaking does he have? What kinds of behavior are typical for him? And so forth.

For example, if the character in question were Harry Potter, the character would be used less if, for instance, his scar did not appear, or there were no mention of his crappy home life. Those aren't the only traits that define the character, obviously, but the fewer you use, the more likely it is that you're engaged in fair use. (New traits made up by the user, which do not appear in the original work don't matter, btw; so if you add fluency in Magical Esperanto, it doesn't weigh against fair use, since it never arises in Rowling's books or in the movies)

Again, I haven't seen anything involving Power Rangers, but if it's just that the characters are dressed in similar outfits and otherwise bear no relation to the originals, this would indicate that relatively little of the characters were used.

And of course, remember that even if 100% of a work is used, it can still be fair use, under the right circumstances. Instances of time shifting and space shifting have been found to be fair uses, and they use all of the work.

It doesn't sound absurd to me. Whether it has artistic merit has no connection to whether it's legal. The silent movie Nosferatu is a classic but infringed on the copyright of the novel Dracula. Luckily, while the courts ordered the film destroyed, one copy survived, and we have that to thank for the preservation of the film.

There's no central registry of copyright registrations, assignments, and licenses. There probably should be, but there isn't. How would Vimeo know that the filmmakers didn't have permission? They could've gotten the rightsholder to grant them an oral or implied license, and there would be no way for Vimeo to distinguish that from them having no license at all. It's not Vimeo's job to know these things, and usually they're in no position to find out. Requiring rightsholders to search for infringements is the best way to go.

No there's not. There is no moral aspect to copyright; it's amoral and utilitarian. Though if pressed, I would say that it is more moral to create and publish works than it is to prohibit the creation and publication of works (particularly if it's just about money).

What part of "Congress shall make no law..." don't you understand? That these "federal laws" are even on the books is just proof of how far we've strayed from constitutional government. That everything nowadays is just wedged under the "commerce clause" is the tip of the Hindenburg.

No, they fund things that have a military application, some of which are interesting. But it's not like the good old days, when they'd fund things that were interesting, regardless of military value.

If you're going to go around reading Wikipedia pages, you may as well finish reading them before citing them.

Here's what the very same Wikipedia page says, one paragraph after the one you quoted:

The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation (and frequent re-computation) of routing tables. This was a major contribution to the good survivability that the ARPANET had, in the face of significant destruction - even by a nuclear attack. Such auto-routing was technically quite challenging to construct at the time. The fact that it was incorporated into the early ARPANET made many believe that this had been a design goal.

The ARPANET was in fact designed to survive subordinate-network losses, but the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965â"1967), said:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried.

Which agrees nicely with what I said in my earlier comment.

You then went on to say:

No, they weren't the only place with money. But ARPA was founded in 1958, and it wasn't until 1973 that they were required to only spend money on defense-related projects. Before that, they had a habit of giving money to all sorts of interesting projects. JCR Licklider, an obscure, yet tremendously important person in computing history, wanted to build computer networks and was a higher-up at ARPA in the 60's. His successor was Ivan Sutherland, who should need no introduction, and Sutherland brought in Bob Taylor, who finally got a network funded and built. Since you like Wikipedia, here's a passage from Taylor's entry:

Among the computer projects that ARPA supported was time-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of using punched cards or punched tape in a batch processing style. Taylor's office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing at MIT, a terminal connected to the Berkeley Timesharing System at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third terminal to the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.

Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal.

When ARPA got out of the business of spending money on interesting work, the National Science Foundation was supposed to pick up the slack, but this never happened. While I can understand how some people might cast aspersions on projects that used military funding, even if they're not meant for military applications, the money spends well enough.

No it wasn't; that's just an urban legend. The ARPAnet was a way of allowing researchers to share resources. Thus, a user in San Francisco could use a computer in Los Angeles, and wouldn't even need a new, dedicated terminal to do it. Its resilience has more to do with the poor state of telecommunications at the time demanding it, and certain design features that allowed for a useful combination of efficiency and flexibility.

As for why it was funded by DARPA, that was where there was money.

If you were playing the original doom and heretic, I kinda doubt you're a millennial, unless your parents thought doom was appropriate for under 12-year-olds or you couldn't find anything newer to play by 1998...

> everything you do pre-calculus is pretty trivial

Which is really sad for those who don't believe in made-up infinitesimals...