Stardust: copyright in biographical films

Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca writing to his friend on the shortness of life once said: “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it”. Never before had I appreciated this slice of ancient wisdom more than on a cold summer night in 2021 when I decided to sit through just under 1 hour and 49 minutes of Gabriel Range’s ‘Stardust’, the box office flop that was David Bowie’s unofficial biographical film.

I say unofficial because Stardust is distinct from other successful biographical films of music stars released in recent years such as ”Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘Elvis’ in one important aspect. The creators of Stardust had failed to acquire any rights to Bowie’s body of work; as a matter of fact, the idea of the film was met with complete disdain by Bowie’s family.

The result is a movie which features none of Bowie’s music, in a movie meant to celebrate the rockstar’s influential music career; a factor that undoubtedly contributed to the harsh criticism the movie met.

Putting aside the copyright of Bowie’s music aside, the existence of Stardust is a reminder of the fact that there is no copyright in your own life story because copyright protection does not extend to facts. This was demonstrated in Maltz v Witterick 2016 FC 524 where the court dismissed a claim for copyright infringement on the basis of the defendant using facts from a person’s life where those facts were shown in a documentary made by the claimants.

While I understand the rationale behind not extending copyright protection to factual subject matter as it would impede on the dissemination of freely available factual information, something still feels intuitively wrong about the fact your own life story can exploited for profit. Perhaps this isn’t a matter suited for copyright and something like invasion of privacy is more appropriate.

Let me know your thoughts.