Wednesday, Dec. 11, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
LOS ANGELES -- Two and a half years ago, Jason Ruspini, a self-proclaimed "member of the 'Star Wars' generation," paid his beloved saga the ultimate high-technology tribute: He designed and posted a 'Star Wars' Web site.
Fans loved the page; Lucasfilm, which owns the rights to "Star Wars," did not. With devotees dropping in at a rate of up to 40,000 per day, Lucasfilm made a discreet phone call to the University of Pennsylvania student.
"They nicely asked me to shut it down, with the implication that if I didn't they would bring in a lawyer or something," said Ruspini, now 21. "It was a total surprise."
What happened next, though, apparently came as a total surprise to Lucasfilm, the San Rafael, Calif.-based company owned by "Star Wars" creator George Lucas.
Lucasfilm was about to learn the hard way what the rest of Hollywood is just beginning to understand: that ownership on the Web may be one of the prickliest problems facing copyright law since the codes were written years ago.
Ruspini posted excerpts on the Web site of his conversation with a Lucasfilm executive. Outraged "Star Wars" devotees vented their furor on Lucasfilm. Ruspini says they flooded the company with angry e-mails, demanding to know how it could presume to assert such totalitarian control over a product some fans had woven into the very fabric of their lives.
Four months after the January 1996 phone call to Ruspini, Lucasfilm backed down. In a letter posted on Ruspini's Web site, the company apologized for apparent "miscommunication" and vowed to develop a Web policy soon.
"Technology is advancing fast enough to worry about copyrights of film now," said John Raffetto, a spokesman for the Creative Incentive Coalition, a Washington, D.C., lobbying group representing the movie industry.
Hollywood is in a dither over the possibility that its greatest asset -- motion pictures -- is easily available, for free, to anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer and an Internet account.
Industry executives say current copyright law cannot protect them from rampant piracy -- they need precision-sharp technologies and enhanced legislation to block limitless video reproduction in cyberspace.
This call to action has incited its share of controversy; as the industry pushes for legislative changes on Capitol Hill, it's run up against law professors, librarians and movie fans who call the new copyright proposals a covert grab for control of now-public information.
"It really violates the entire nature of the copyright law," said Karen Coyle, a library automation specialist with the University of California, and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "(The law) wasn't intended to restrict access. The idea was if people had control (over the science and arts they produced) they would want to publish their information. It is not intended to restrict."
But the studios say they are genuinely concerned about the future.
"The Internet is an amazing phenomenon that creates opportunities and issues to which we are all responding," said Richard Glosser, the vice president of interactive programming at Sony Pictures. "We'll do what we can to protect ourselves. We'll do our best."
Today, Lucasfilm has no official comment on the debacle, other than the statement the company posted last spring in an attempt to staunch the burgeoning ill will.
"We are sorry for any confusion that may have emerged from any miscommunication on our part," the company wrote in its notice, which called fans "an important part of our 'Star Wars' family" and included a promise to develop Internet guidelines.
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