What's in a Name: Film Title Disputes Raise Legal, Business Questions

The news broke almost simultaneously: On the morning of Jan. 8, Fox Filmed Entertainment said it had greenlit "Avatar," an ambitious, $190 million science-fiction project that will be Oscar-winning director James Cameron's first feature since "Titanic," the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Only a few hours later, Paramount Pictures revealed it is developing "Avatar: The Last Airbender," a live-action version of the animated TV series of the same name to be directed by M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense").

Fox, which registered the "Avatar" title with the MPAA in 1996, immediately began marking its territory. "We own the movie title 'Avatar,'" a studio spokesman said as word of the competing names spread. "There won't be another film called 'Avatar' coming from anyplace."

The public chest-banging from a studio with millions of dollars invested in its project might indicate a coming legal showdown. But Fox and Paramount are signatories to the terms of the MPAA's Title Registration Bureau, a complex set of rules under which studios agree to secret arbitration of movie-title disputes. Founded in 1925, the Title Bureau now counts the seven major studios and hundreds of independent production companies among its subscribers, which means the vast majority of title disputes are handled internally. Further, the studios often resolve conflicts before they even get to an MPAA arbitrator.

"The different companies tend to work it out themselves," MPAA general counsel Greg Goeckner says. "Arbitration is actually fairly rare."

The title of a movie, of course, is more than just a matter of words. "(It) may be both an integral element of the filmmaker's expression as well as a significant means of marketing the film to the public," the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted in Rogers v. Grimaldi, 875 F.2d 994 (1989).

In 2002, New Line Cinema was forced to pull more than 11,000 trailers and thousands of posters during a battle with MGM over the title of its Mike Myers film "Austin Powers in Goldmember," which MGM argued was too similar to its James Bond "Goldfinger" film. A dispute involving "Return from the River Kwai" cost the production company its U.S. distribution deal with Tri-Star Pictures.

Trademark law does not generally protect a title of a work that is "within the realm of artistic expression." But as the Rogers ruling says, the holder of a title may in some cases "prevent the use of the same or confusingly similar titles" by others.

"If there's a reasonable likelihood that the public is going to be confused and the films themselves are similar and scheduled to be in the marketplace at the same time, then the arbitrators will generally not allow the similar