how do studios get away with the “purely coincidental” disclaimers on TV/movies like The Dropout

Question

No names are changed or anything … is this what “life rights” are? Why do they say it’s a coincidence then?

In: 5

Answer 1

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.