Here why James Bond needed a license to take sensible and proper legal precautions with A View To A Kill. The final of Roger Moore's 007 adventures, A View To A Kill saw Bond investigate a powerful industrialist with ties to the KGB and Nazis (obviously), and a formidable assassin to do his bidding in Grace Jones' May Day. Max Zorin was played by Christopher Walken and his grand plan was to trigger explosions on the San Andreas fault, flooding Silicon Valley and thereby giving his company a monopoly on the production of microchip technology. In many ways, Zorin is a classic Bond villain trying to execute a classic Bond villain plan, and A View To A Kill is widely regarded as an unspectacular farewell to the Roger Moore era.
One area where A View To A Kill did break new ground is with the disclaimer shown at the start of the movie. Most people will be familiar with the generic movie disclaimer that often appears either before the movie or during the end credits - something along the lines of "any similarity to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental." This notice traces back over 100 years to the very beginnings of popular cinema and can nowadays be found in movies that clearly bear no resemblance to real life whatsoever. The warning at the start of A View To A Kill, however, is strangely specific, and reads: "Neither the name 'Zorin' nor any other name or character in this film is meant to portray a real company or actual person." Unsurprisingly, there's a story behind this message, Bond's first disclaimer.
It's standard practice for movie studios to carry out copyright and legal checks prior to filming, ensuring nothing in the script is going to attract lawsuits. This job wasn't properly carried out on A View To A Kill, and production went ahead with Max Zorin as the main baddie and Zorin Industries as his fictional enterprise. It eventually transpired that a company called Zoran Corporation had been operating in the United States since 1981. While the names aren't exactly identical, Zoran was a Silicon Valley tech company and computer chips were a major part of their product line. Upon learning that the next James Bond movie would feature an evil corporation called "Zorin" that planned to destroy Silicon Valley and seize the tech industry for themselves, the Zoran Corporation were not best pleased.
Zoran threatened to sue the makers of James Bond for defamation, but the conflict only came to light shortly prior to A View To A Kill's release, and it was too late to change the name of Christopher Walken's character to something less problematic. The two parties came to a solution - the disclaimer. A message would precede A View To A Kill assuring viewers that Zoran Corporation weren't really evil megalomaniacs with Nazi connections who planned to sink their competition in a watery grave.
On one hand, there are numerous similarities between Zorin Industries in James Bond and Zoran Corporation in the real world - the name, the Silicon Valley connection, the area of industry, etc. Plenty of movies and TV shows intentionally satirize genuine companies by changing a few letters around. How many times have the likes of Apple and Google have been spoofed in recent years? Having said that, Zoran was never a household name brand and an incredibly small percentage of James Bond viewers would've naturally made the connection between A View To A Kill's villain and the actual company. Ironically, the disclaimer actually draws attention to the parallel far more.
It seems a wild coincidence that A View To A Kill could accidentally create a fictional company whose name and business was so similar to a genuine brand, however, there is a potential logical explanation. Zoran Corporation took their name from the Hebrew word for "Silicon." Given A View To A Kill's setting and plot, it's possible that Max Zorin's character name was also derived from the same language, making the connection more about sharing the same influences than a spooky James Bond coincidence.
