On
October 20th, 2014, Eric
Dahl filed a complaint against Toyota Motor Sales alleging copyright
infringement. Dahl claims that
Toyota’s new commercial , featuring a young girl who wins a storage locker
containing one of B.B. King’s famous “Lucille” guitars, is exactly like Dahl’s
real-life experience. While most
commercials and television have some basis in real-life, Dahl’s experience is
written in his book, B.B. King's Lucille and the Loves Before Her. He spends several chapters describing the moment he
found B.B. King’s stolen guitar in a Las Vegas pawn shop. While the commercial depicts a young
woman who finds the guitar in a storage locker, both Dahl and the young girl in
the commercial return the guitar to B.B. King, who rewards them with a Lucille
of their own.
This
issue invites the question: how similar is too similar? According to 17
U.S.C.A. § 106(2)[1], the owner
of the copyright has the exclusive right to “prepare derivative works” based on
the copyrighted material. In this
case, Toyota allegedly consulted with Gibson guitar employees to ensure an
accurate depiction of the story from the book with the intention to derive
their commercial from Dahl’s story (assuming Dahl’s allegations are true, of
course).
However, there are
billions of people with billions of stories; the chance that someone may have had
a very similar personal experience to another person is at least possible, if
not probable. If one person writes
a book about some occurrence in his or her life and another person writes and performs
a similar play, who gets to tell the story? Telling someone to stifle their own life experiences because
someone beat them to a copyright seems a little too Big Brother, however, we as
a society also have an interest in preventing corporations like Toyota from “selling”
someone else’s moments for profit.
Dahl
seeks damages and profits attributed to the advertisement. He also intends to seek an injunction,
preventing the commercial from airing any longer. Arguably, there will be almost no way to determine what
profits came directly from this commercial as opposed to any number of other
commercials aired by Toyota or by individual car dealerships. Nonetheless, Dahl
seems to have a strong case for recovering damages and obtaining a permanent
injunction based on the striking similarities between the commercial and his story.[2]
Only time, and Nevada’s district court, will tell what will become of the
claim, but it certainly seems that the odds are in Dahl’s favor.
-Amanda Marston (Staff Editor, Denver SELJ)
