New discoveries about the Green Dragons Society and Internet Dojo Copyright Wars?
Got an email asking me if I knew that the lineage of the Green Dragon school may have been descended from Ku Yu Cheung. If this is true that is some serious background. Ku Yu Cheung was one of the legendary Iron Palm practitioners. Yu-Cheung was said to have the most devastating iron palm in the history, matched by, no one. He could break more than ten brick blocks with one strike.
Ku Yu Cheung is like the REAL "fist of legend." I am going to add this to my other little wrap up leads to follow. I also got the right spelling for Ta Shia, or "Shen Ta Shia" and found out the correct spelling of the Ta Shia's name. It is Douglas Nowokunski.
Here is an image from harmoniousfist.com showing Master Cheung breaking 10 bricks with his iron palm. Now I know some of you UFC and JKD types are going to give me the "...boards(or bricks) don't hit back" line. I am just reporting on who's who for the time being. We can get into our little stylistic arguements AFTER the film comes out. Anyway, wanna sit under a masters iron palm just for kicks. You can tell me if it hurts.
I do appreciate the email I get from people. I have been contacted by people from all over the world and recieved info from alll over the country and England. This continues to be a great supplement to my research.
BDFS Fall River threatens me with a Cease and Desist Order
Meanwhile I got an email this morning telling me the Internet Dojo Copyright Wars are heating up again at CountDante.com. I am supposed to be receiving a cease and desist order due to some footage of Dante I got from England and used in my promotional trailer (bomb it while you are there) to help me raise awareness about the project. It comes from some 8mm film footage. Bill Aguiar III says it belongs to him. Fair enough, if that is true. I asked his lawyer exactly a year ago for an inventory of images and film footage available in the archive of the BDFS. I never got a reply. So what am I ceasing and desisting from?
Mr. Aguiar wants me to sign a Trademark agreement, as I understand it, promising him $10,000 when the film is finished. I am willing to negotiate, when I get to that point, for licensing images and film footage that he alone has in his possession and rights too.
As he said in his post, he knows I "don't have squat." I do have a working email and phone that is freely available to anyone who wants to call, including bill collectors(they too know I "don't have squat"). Doesn't take much effort to call a brother up and explain the situation.
Heretofore. I have heard nothing from Mr. Aguiar or his lawyers since my email over 8 months ago outlining my willingness to pay for archival materials and the conditions under which I would do so.
98% of all materials on Dante I have came from Chicago people, old magazines and newspapers. I can easily complete the film without any imagery from the BDFS. That is not what I want to do. But I am not going to be stuck up over vaporous archival material. There is enough information in Massachusetts newspapers to allow me to tell the Fall River story. All archives offer at least watermarked copies so you can see what you are buying. Even the Newspaper will pull paper copies for me.
What a way to start my morning.
As I keep saying over and over and over again, I want to make the best film I can about the man John Keehan and the times he lived in, and chronicle the social history of American Midwestern martial arts in the course of it all.
Simple enough...
Comments
I'll keep you posted when I hear more from the "Church".
Hey Bill, truth hurts doesn't?
Yet it sets us free.
Master C. P.
I used to oversee permissions for big city daily newspaper. I often had to field requests from the History Channel, CBS, and publishers both small and large for photos and pages of the paper for various pieces of media that were being produced. Sometimes we'd have to scan several photos just so the TV producers could know what we had and if it was worth paying the paper for. If I had stonewalled CBS up front, they would have just stopped calling me and the paper would have been out small pieces of revenue for materials that were just gathering dust.
If Aguiar wants to publish a book or produce any other media with third parties, he is at some point, going to have to show someone, somewhere, the visuals that he has access to. No publisher will work with him if he doesn't.
The newspaper would have never ended up in the predicament that Mr. Aguiar has found himself in. Most of the requests that I fielded were for use of pages of the paper in either books or visual media. In that case, it was pretty obvious to anyone that said pages, headlines, mastheads, etc. were from the newspaper and therefore protected under its copyrights. In the case of photo files, they were in the possession of the newspaper so the only way that The History Channel, CBS or any publishers would know what we had was if I cooperated with them. A producer would call my desk and ask if we had any photos of, let’s say, the Eiffel Tower, we either would be able to help them or we wouldn’t. If we did assist them, I’d pull the photo file, scan lower rez (therefore unusable in print or film) jpegs of them and send them along with a rate card so the producers could ascertain their need for what we had. What we never did was attempt to charge a $10K fee up front without showing what was available.
Mr. Aguiar probably needs to think of risks vs. rewards at this point. Publishing and low budget filmmaking are not big money enterprises. (Writing isn’t a way to get rich quick, it’s a way to get paid slow.) The interest in John Keehan is highly limited and a long sell to even a martial arts public that has moved on from Royce Gracie to Matt Hughes already. Aguiar III would have a lot more to gain from being cooperative instead of being punitive at this point, but he and his representatives need to be realistic about just how small, tucked away and forgotten this pie that is the legend of Dante really is.
Hiding behind lawyers and having one of your students to it sounds like something a Green Dragon would do. *Pfft*
Whatever the case, he knows about Floyd and he knows how to make contact in the public eye. As somebody who knows alot Dante, Mr. Aguiar lacks the style and charisma that Dante had. He would have faced this openly. Too bad he's in charge I'm sure Dante would have been pleased (not).
Why doesn't somebody send him this link?
Hmmmmm ....