As with so many things that fall in the not-so-sweet spot where the entertainment business meets the legal industry, this is a grey area.

The basis of the conflict is that you can't copyright a title. You can sue someone under trademark law if they make a movie with the same title as your own, but you would have to prove some kind of intent to deceive or confuse the public. That is a tricky thing to prove, and when super-rich movie studios are involved, it can be a costly process.

So to some degree, it seems like studios often decide it's just not worth fighting over.

But the question is, why does it happen? This is a creative industry we're talking about, so why don't people just apply some of their creativity to finding a new title?

Part of it is that, while the number of potential titles is theoretically unlimited, in reality that's not the case. This is where your specific example starts to figure in. There are only so many ways you can get the word "Christmas" into a movie title before you have to start repeating.

Internet Movie Database lists six completely different films called "A Christmas Story," and the now-classic 1983 version wasn't even the first.

Other repeated Christmas-movie titles include "A Christmas Tale" (not surprisingly, I guess), "Jack Frost" (a particularly bad case, since one was a heartwarming family comedy and the other a horror movie), and "Naughty or Nice."

And the thing is, this doesn't have to happen at all. The Motion Picture Association of America runs a film-title registry, which provides a list of all the titles of movies being produced by its members (which include every major film studio, so "Jack Frost," for example, would have been on there), so people can just look up the title of their movie in the registry and see if it's been used. The association also has a dispute-resolution mechanism, but it only applies to those who've opted in to the system.

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