Though I’ve kept up regular posting all month, I’ve reached the point where it’s definitely crunch time and I can’t maintain both the posting schedule here, client work and haunt preparations. There’s a lot to do before Friday night and I need to spend less time on a keyboard and more time with a paintbrush.

So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be largely taking off from normal PT duties. I’ll still be doing the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show at 5 PM ET tomorrow and posting it Friday, but there will be no 3 Count columns and no regular posts until Monday, when I’ll have my final “Creepy Copyright” segment, this one focusing on great public domain horror movies to check out on Halloween night.

Everything should return to normal come Tuesday, November 1st though I may decide to recover that day and just come back on the 2nd.

In the meantime, enjoy a brief respite from Plagiarism Today and enjoy your Halloween!

However, this year I wanted to combine my passion for copyright/plagiarism issues with my passion for Halloween and do something special for Plagiarism Today.

So, all month during Halloween we’ll be talking copyright and horror every Monday. We’ll start this coming Monday talking about the copyright challenges my better half, Crystal, and I faced when creating our new horror movie review series, Garbage Horror, then we’ll discuss how copyright law shaped the horror landscape, including our perception of zombies and vampires as well as some of our more modern characters.

The month will conclude with a special Halloween-day post about great public domain horror movies you can enjoy Halloween night for free legally.

All in all, I’m hoping it will be a fun but still educational look at the role copyright plays both in modern and older horror movies.

If you’re interested, last year I did a post about the copyright risks associated with Halloween, so you can understand some of the hazards associated with running your own haunted house or scary party.

So stay tuned next week for the first posting in Creepy Copyright as we take a look at the copyright challenges in starting a horror review series…

However, this doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about copyright issues. Halloween, like any other holiday, is a time ripe for copyright and other intellectual property pitfalls and there are even a few specific to the holiday. So, as a person who tries to do the right thing (legally and ethically) on matters of copyright, here are just a few of the copyright concerns (and solutions) I face every year when trying to put on my haunted house.

To be clear, as a non-commercial haunt, we coul get away with a lot more than we try to do. Not only does the law favor us, but we wouldn’t be a likely target. Still, we run everything we do as if we were a professional haunted house as that is an eventual goal for us.

Also, as usual, this isn’t meant to be a complete list by any stretch but, instead, is just to highlight some of the larger, more common issues that myself and others face around this time of year.

1. Music

A haunted house needs music. Not only does it set the atmosphere but it helps hide smaller noises such as actor movements that might give away a good scare. However, playing a music inside a haunted house is a public performance of the work and is not allowed without a license. Non-commercial use, such as what we’re doing now, has much greater leeway but professional haunters need to obtain music licensing from ASCAP and BMI if they are going to use recorded music in their haunted house.

How We Resolve It: There’s a band called Midnight Syndicate that does great haunted house music and freely licenses it to all professional haunted attractions if you display a poster. However, typically we record our own inside audio, using the actual actors voices to fit better with the theme each year, sometimes mixing it with public domain music loops available from The Internet Archive.

2. Movie Characters

Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, etc. may be some of the biggest names in fright but they are also copyrighted characters by their various studios. Though the fact they make costumes and masks grants some form of implied license to dress up like them in public, it’s unclear if that license would extend to professional or even charity haunted houses. While there might also be a fair use argument in favor of the haunts, if the use is transformative enough, but the studios often also hold trademark interest in the characters as well, further complicating the issue.

How We Resolve It: We have a very strict “no movies” rule in our haunt. Aside from the copyright/trademark issues, we just don’t think it’s that scary and work to craft original stories every year. We find this to be much more effective than relying on other’s stories.

3. Masks/Costumes

Masks, at least the part of them you that makes them a costume element, are essentially sculptures, which are copyrighted works. Though in selling them as a mask there is an implied license to wear them in the intended manner, it’s unclear how far that implied license would go, especially in a professional haunted house. However, I haven’t been able to find any evidence to date of someone being threatened or sued for doing this and any mask maker who did would likely go right out of business. Still, it’s an interesting copyright question without a clear answer.

How We Resolve It: Given the fair use, implied license and other defenses in this case, we don’t worry about it too much. However, we do limit our use of store-bought masks greatly, only using a few each year. Instead, we prefer to custom make masks using latex to have a more original look. However, we are careful not to pattern our masks after anything we’ve seen as that can create problems of its own (Note: Parody article but the most creative “commercial use” definition to date).

4. Stories

Most of the classic horror tales such as Dracula and Frankenstein have long fallen into the public domain. However, many of the more current stories, such as the stories of the characters above, are not. There’s actually a long history of disputes over horror stories, the most famous being the Nosferatu/Dracula battle from the early era of cinema that almost resulted in the destruction of all copies of Nosferatu, now considered a classic film. A more recent conflict would be “Living Dead” creator Gorge Romero’s lawsuit against Capcom over the video game Dead Rising, which was later thrown out.

How We Resolve It: As mentioned above, we try to create our own stories for each haunt and try to stick with more of a fake true crime theme than any horror staple. Though some non-copyrightable elements may be the same or similar to other stories, practically unavoidable in this niche, we try to be as original as possible as a means to separate ourselves and create our own folklore.

5. Names, Logos and Trademarks

Despite there not being many haunted houses, especially large professional ones, most of them have very similar-sounding names. In fact, my friends run Chamber of Horrors, a small haunted house in LaPlace, but there are at least three other haunts with that name in the country. Combine that with the fact that the logos almost always seem, at least at a glance, to be similar and that logos can have both trademark and copyright protection, something very common in the haunt world, and you have a huge potential mess on your hands if you have name or logo too close to someone else’s.

How We Resolve It: Fortunately, geography keeps this from being too big of a problem. There may be four Chamber of Horrors out there but they are scattered all over the country. Still, for our part, we once again try to put the focus on doing something unique. Our name is Bernie Baxter’s Traveling Sideshow and instead of using typical themes for our logo (blood, lightning, etc.) we went with an old poster look to fit with the sideshow theme.

Bottom Line

By now, this column likely sounds like a broken record. We’ve managed to avoid most of these potential copyright and trademark pitfalls by trying to do something original. However, the decision to do original work never came from a desire to skirt copyright or trademark law or out of fear of it, but rather, out of a desire to put on the best haunt possible.

Though this doesn’t mean I’ve avoided every potential copyright hazard, especially the extremely unlikely issue of using masks in the haunt, it’s helped me avoid nearly all of them without thinking about it too much.

On that note though, I need to get back out there and finish it up. With two days left to go there is final preparations to be made and actors to train. It is going to be a busy few days for me and I will see you guys in November!

For the next month I’ll be putting long hours into the haunt and working hard to make sure everything is ready for opening night, Oct. 28th. There are walls to be put up and painted, scares to be built and much to do between now and then. Fortunately, we’re actually a bit ahead of schedule.

Still, with haunt season in full swing, I’m probably going to be easing up on the posting just a bit. For the next few weeks the change should be barely noticeable but the last week of October (and likely first week of November) I’ll be almost silent on this site.

However, you’ll be able to find me on the other places that I blog including BloggingPro, BloggingTips, and my law column for FreelanceWritingJobs.

On that note, if anyone is interested in guest blogging for Plagiarism Today to help me pick up some of the slack, feel free to contact me and let me know. I’ll be very interested in guest bloggers for the next few weeks, especially toward the end of the month.

Otherwise, feel free to follow me at the other sites and stay tuned for some great posts on PT these next few weeks, even if there might be slightly fewer of them.

photo credit: Svenstorm

Regular readers of this site are probably very familiar with this drill but I’m going to be on semi-hiatus for the duration of the month. I’ll likely only be doing a few updates per week and will also not be doing any additional podcasts for the rest of the month.

The reason is simple, it’s October and every year I run a charity-oriented haunted house in New Orleans. It’s a small affair, taking place in our garage, but is a major build, especially in the weeks before opening.

This year things are even more stressful than usual as I’ve recently started a new position and have to maintain those duties while working on the haunt.

So if posting is a little bit slow for the next few weeks, please forgive me. I’ll return to a more normal posting schedule in November after Halloween.

On days where posting isn’t possible, I’ll try to highlight some of the older posts on the site for new readers and also maintain the 3 Count column to keep everyone abreast on the latest in copyright news.