AMC (American Movie Classics) has a show called "Mad Men" about an ad agency in the 60s. Some people like this show so much that they create fictional profiles on Twitter and pretend to be characters. AMC caught wind of this and decided it wasn't too thrilled.
After all, people might have thought that it was really the characters coming out of the television and coming to life like some bad Wes Craven movie, only to Twitter about what is going on in their lives. AMC had to set us straight.
It would be one thing if it were people claiming to be the actors that portrayed such characters. It would also be one thing if people were paying to read these tweets, but they're not. This is just a group of (presumably) grown-ups playing.
This is like if rights-owners ordered me to stop pretending to be a Ninja Turtle with my friends on the playground when I was a child. You would think the Mad Men/Twitter issue would be more a debate of lameness than a legal matter, but apparently AMC didn't see it that way...at least at first.
Now AMC has decided to just forget about it. Brian Heater at AppScout writes, "Someone must have pointed out the irony of shutting down the free advertising that is Mad Man fanfiction tweets. AMC has just backed off on a plan to shut down fan-created "Mad Men" character Twitter accounts."
Perhaps they just realized how ludicrous the whole thing seemed. If AMC's stance had been justified, any rights-owners of any show could demand that handles for any social media sites, forums, instant messengers, and even email addresses based on fictional character names be terminated. Anyhow, it seems cable-television drama character-themed role-playing is safe for another day.
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Fan Fiction / Character Tweets Are Nothing New...
...I've seen plenty of people blog at sites like Blogger as their favorite characters so using Twitter to do the same strikes me as the latest variation on a not so new phenomenon. Have all those now not the newest flavor on the block in technology been shut down by humorless legal departments at entertainment companies as well?
Personally I have better things to do with my time than pretend to be a movie or TV character on a blog or Twitter. But as long as the conglomerates are rushing to the web and want to set up their own virtual real estate for their characters and shows and films you kind of have to expect this sort of silliness.
Who deserves credit?
Twittering as your favorite character in a tv show is inspired, if a bit creepy.
However, AMC should have shut every faux-twitterer down. Those are their characters. The producers, writers, and actors, have rights. They should be respected.
That said, expect any and all projects from now on have twitter rights written in. Having paid writers twitter on behalf of their characters is brilliant. but it should be done by or at least under the supervision of whoever created the character.
Imagine if you created some popular peice of fiction and somebody else "sampled" it to get themselves some traffic. You'd be pissed.
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