No names are changed or anything … is this what “life rights” are? Why do they say it’s a coincidence then?
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So first, most portrayals of famous people are usually going to end up getting permission to use the likeness or will fall under fair use (such as south park being a parody).
The disclaimer is more for everyone else who is generally not a public figure. There are hundreds of millions of people in the US, and there are not that many names. Chances are if you create a character, it will have the same name as a large number of people, and could possibly even resemble a few of them. These similiarities are not intentional, but absolutely can have consequences for people who share the same name. People may google the name and think that you are actually who the fictional character ia based off of, and react in some way.
That disclaimer is there to provide some cover, basically saying “We didn’t know about you, and didn’t intend to copy your likeness”.
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Regular laws don’t apply to anyone considered a “public figure”. Celebrities, politicians, athletes, etc. all fall under this umbrella.
You don’t need life rights to make a movie about them, but you do still run the risk of defamation lawsuits if you’re not careful.
The disclaimer you’re talking about applies to all the other characters who appear in that story may or may not be real and definitely aren’t public figures.
Actual lawyer here:
The warning stems from a very old California court case from the 1930’s. At the time, alleging that a woman had premarital sex or sex with someone who was not her husband was considered defamatory.
MGM made a movie in which it was alleged that Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia had premarital sex with Rasputin. She sued and won.
MGM adopted a schizophrenic defense strategy in the case in which they initially admitted that the character who had sex in the movie was Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia. Then on appeal they denied admitting that. Then when the appellate court questioned their position on the matter they kind of didn’t have one. At the end of the case, their defense was essentially that Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia wasn’t living in the US whereas MGM was a major contributor to the Californian economy.
The California Supreme Court was offended by that argument and one of the judges mocked them by saying that they might have had a better case if they put the fictional character disclaimer into the movie.
MGM didn’t understand that they were being mocked and copied the disclaimer that the judge gave them into all of their movies. Other studios saw MGM using the disclaimer and assumed that the reason MGM was doing it was because the disclaimer had some legal force. And now that disclaimer is in everything, including foreign media that isn’t subject to the laws of California.
Its a really stupid situation in which everyone is just copying the disclaimer without realizing why its there or what it does. In fact, its so standard that the credits department in every production company just puts it there and since it costs no money to do so, no one wants to be the person who approves removing the disclaimer that has been there for the past 90 years.
There is one exception to that – South Park – whose disclaimer is very clearly a parody of the disclaimer, rather than an actual disclaimer itself.
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