The James Bond franchise is responsible for one of the screen’s most iconic characters, over US$4bn in revenue and plenty of fierce IP debates, says Johnny Acton

One day in 1952, while sitting in his study in Jamaica trying to come up with a name for the hero of his new novel Casino Royale, Ian Fleming found himself gazing at a book entitled Birds of the West Indies. Its author was an ornithologist called James Bond. ‘It struck me,’ Fleming later wrote, ‘that this name, brief, unromantic and yet very masculine, was just what I needed.’ So he used it for the character who would become the most famous fictional spy in the world.

Depending on your qualification criteria, there have been 21, 22 or 23 James Bond movies to date. Collectively, they have grossed around US$4bn, a figure which rises almost threefold when inflation is factored in. This makes the Bond franchise the second most lucrative in cinematic history after the Harry Potter series. It is therefore less than surprising that it has been the subject of much litigation – much of it tied to the copyright of the books.

Copyright and a legend
The convoluted story of ownership of the rights associated with Agent 007 begins with his creator, Ian Fleming. In the early 1950s, Fleming purchased a company called Gildrose Productions and assigned to it the copyrights to Casino Royale and all his subsequent Bond novels. Now known as Ian Fleming Publications, it is this body that administers his literary estate. It has also, since Fleming’s death in 1964, authorized several ‘continuation’ novels to keep the Bond legend alive and productive.

In 1961, producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman purchased the film rights to all Fleming’s existing and subsequent Bond novels. The one exception was Casino Royale, the rights to which the author had sold to Michael Garrison and Gregory Ratoff in 1955, a transaction which ultimately led to a ‘non-canonical’ film version released by Columbia Pictures in 1967. Any suggestion, though, that the question of rights ownership was this straightforward was exploded at the Thunderball trial at the High Court in London in 1963.

Depending on your qualification criteria, there have been 21, 22 or 23 James Bond movies to date. Collectively, they have grossed around US$4bn.

Four years earlier, Fleming had collaborated with the Irish producer Kevin McClory on what would have been the first Bond movie had the latter been able to raise the necessary finance. The project did, however, result in an original screenplay written by Jack Whittingham at McClory’s instigation. And according to Robert Sellers, author of The Battle for Bond, it was this discarded script that Fleming used as the basis for his ninth Bond novel Thunderball. Crucially, he failed to either acknowledge or seek permission from McClory and Whittingham, who consequently sued him for copyright infringement. Nine days into the trial, Fleming settled with McClory to the tune of £50,000.

Shaken, but not stirred
Other notable Bond-related IP cases have focused on the music. In 2001, Monty Norman was awarded £30,000 libel damages by The Sunday Times after the newspaper suggested that John Barry, who had orchestrated Norman’s James Bond theme for Dr No, was the real composer of the piece. Bond’s lawyers have also targeted spinoff games (EON Films forced Cheapass Games to drop the name ‘Before I Kill You, Mr Bond’ from one of their products in 2000) and ‘Gems Bond’, a character used to promote a brand of sweets manufactured by Cadbury’s India.

One question that has yet to be seriously addressed, however, is whether any IP Rights attach to the gizmos and gadgets that are a feature of the Bond movies. A search of the USPTO database reveals that Danjaq (the parent company of EON Films) has not actually applied to patent any of them, perhaps in the knowledge that lethal Mont Blanc pens and the like would have trouble fulfilling the criterion of usability, let alone morality. Incidentally, Ian Fleming was well aware of his debt to the man who lent his name to Agent 007. In 1961 he wrote to the birdwatcher’s wife, Mary: ‘I must confess that your husband has every reason to sue me... In return, I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose he may think fit.’


This article was first published in IP Review, issue 22

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