Paramount Afraid Tweeted Stills of ‘Top Gun’ Compete With Actual Movie

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/paramount-afraid-tweeted-stills-of-top-gun-compete-with-actual-movie/

by gnicholas • 12 years ago

50 41 12 years ago

michaelq• 12 years ago

I built an app at the Launch hackathon last weekend that uses sound clips from movies. I'm concerned about fair use and the chilling effect that movie studios could have on using even tiny components of movies (sub 5-second audio clips, or, in this case, stills). Has anyone dealt with these kind of takedown requests first hand? Any war stories to share?

gnicholas2• 12 years ago

No war stories here, just my two cents. It is unfortunate that the cost of defending against spurious suits can be substantial—even if the law is ultimately on your side. Basically, the movie studios are much better equipped to send out takedown notices than you are to respond to them. And as this article makes clear, movie studios may take action against many entities—even those that probably increase movie sales. After all, the twitter feed probably spurs interest in Top Gun (and the publicity around the takedown notice amplifies this effect even further). So tread carefully, and good luck!

nwh• 12 years ago

You can have your whole server nuked just for having the name of a movie in a text file. It's the luck of the draw as to what your host does, and who decides to send a ridiculous DMCA request to them.

matznerd• 12 years ago

What is the context of the clips? It could be considered fair use. Your situation sounds different from this one, unless you are putting all of the 5 second audio lips in consecutive order...

Dystopian• 12 years ago

Never had to deal with takedowns personally.

I do personally know of a company that's paying for rights to use very short sound clips from movies though (from a very small library at that) - so it probably is on the studios' radar.

codezero3• 12 years ago

A few things: When Twitter gets a DMCA they have to act immediately, even if they plan to fight it. It's part of the safe harbor laws.

Tweeting potentially copyright protected material is not illegal until it's been proven to be in court. Fair Use isn't valid before someone gets sued. You can claim that if sued you will defend yourself under Fair Use, but it's up to a judge to decide whether your claims are valid.

Basically, nobody wants to go to court, having the content taken down is unfortunate, but also necessary so that both sides of the law are represented (holders and users of copyright).

mnordhoff• 12 years ago

Nobody wants to go to court, but a studio with a hundred million dollar legal budget can (though they won't for something silly), and your average ramen-noodling, tweeting university student can't. There is no equal representation between someone who can make any ridiculous DMCA claim they want and someone who cannot afford a court battle to prove them wrong.

(By the way, this is a general rant, not a reference to this case.)

codezero3• 12 years ago

The catch here is that content providers don't want to give in to DMCA complaints. That's why chilling effects exists. Providers will often go a long way to be as permissive as possible and to cause as much pain for frivolous complaints as possible. Also give some credits to judges. They won't just give in because a company is rich and litigious, well at least not in most districts :)

codezero3• 12 years ago

What I mean to say is that this is really a beef between the holders and the host. The supposed violator (person who posted) is something of an innocent bystander. And by that, I mean hosts are usually as sympathetic as possible.

rmrfrmrf• 12 years ago

This situation sort of reminds me skateboarders who skate in "no skateboarding" areas. It might be cool when you do it and no one will really care, but when the cops come and tell you to break it up, it's pretty stupid to get into a fight about it.

It doesn't really matter the quality or the size of the frames, either. I'd be on Paramount's side if someone were distributing Top Gun Viewmaster reels, too. If you don't have distribution rights to something, you can't distribute it regardless of how innocuous it seems.

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

On the other hand: What kind of people enjoy looking at stills of TopGun? Well, their (Paramounts Topgun's) biggest fans of course. Instead of killing this they should be realising there is value in tweeted stills of (famous) movies and they could experiment with their own twitter-stills (and behind-the-scenes and what not). People apparently want to consumne stills of your product,give it to them! (Edit: and provide the iTunes link).

onetwofiveten2• 12 years ago

It's really very different. Paramount are doing something that only hurts fans of their own movie. The fact that they are legally entitled to is beside the point. Paramount are legally entitled to pull all copies of Top Gun off the shelves and stop selling it. People would probably complain if they did that too. If there is enough of a public backlash, Paramount will reverse their decision. It's much less stupid than getting into a fight with some police.

Also, there is the matter that the public has the right to complain about laws that they feel are unfair. In this case, copyright law has over-reached beyond what many people feel is the purpose of the law (protecting content creators profits from infringing competition).

Your attitude seems to be one of "well, it's the law, what did you expect?" The answer to that question should always be "fair laws that exist to serve the public interest".

mhartl• 12 years ago

Whether it's illegal or not, Paramount is going to get what's coming to them for punishing true fans who produce what amounts to free advertising.

smirksirlot• 12 years ago

This. Lawyers and ilk don't understand the amount of interest, persistence and MONEY that fans/fandoms generate for a body of work. Doing this is stupid shortsighted - goodwill is something hard to generate and easily lost. Paramount should have instead gifted that person a giant fan pack and made it a huge PR opportunity.

IanCal• 12 years ago

I wonder if there's something more complex. If they don't fight this, would they have less recourse if someone uploads the film to youtube?

jlarocco2• 12 years ago

I'm more surprised there's a group of people who thought it wasn't illegal.

I don't see what the big deal is, either. If Paramount wanted it distributed that way, they'd do it themselves. Anybody else who wants to distribute a movie frame by frame on Twitter, why not make your own movie for it?

omershapira2• 12 years ago

This being fair use or not is debatable (and hence the legality, which you find shockingly straightforward).

The big deal is that 'culture' and 'fandom' are wired in mysterious and awkward ways to 'property'. If it was a consensus between distribution companies that audiences wait for a fandom code of conduct, we wouldn't have fans of anything, and more devastatingly to the tech bubble, we wouldn't have Tumblr.

jlarocco2• 12 years ago

IMO there's not much debate about it. Seeing how it's been interpreted in the past, it seems obvious (to me) that this wouldn't be fair use.

chrismcb• 12 years ago

I don't understand why some people thing that it might be fair use. It doesn't even seem close to being debatable. Fair use revolves around commentary (and criticism) and parody. While fair use TENDS to be in small doses, it doesn't have to be. But I don't see how this falls under either commentary or parody. The guy tweeted the ENTIRE film. The fact that it doesn't compete with a dvd or itunes is not relevant.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

I'm more surprised there's a group of people who thought it wasn't illegal.

I think it's one of the following:

1) there's a group of people who wants it to be legal, really bad. So they fool themselves.

2) there's a group of people who knows it is illegal, but does it anyway. So they fool themselves.

jwarkentin• 12 years ago

3) There's a group of people who aren't lawyers, don't give a crap and just want to enjoy life without arguing over the technicalities and legalities of everything, especially things that can't provably affect the profits of Paramount. They likely didn't give the legality much consideration.

mkingston• 12 years ago

"If Paramount wanted it distributed that way, they'd do it themselves."

Probably not. This is the first time I've heard of a movie being tweeted like this. I think from a perspective of pure self-interest they probably would've been better to embrace it (retweeted?).

onetwofiveten2• 12 years ago

The big deal is that this goes against the original intention of copyright law. Copyright law is only supposed to provide incentives to create works of art. The restriction on personal freedoms is supposed to be outweighed by the cultural (and economic) benefits this has for society. When copyright is used to restrict non-competing derivative works, this is not the case.

I think many feel there is an implicit social contract between content creators and the public. Art borrows from and adds to culture. Protecting artists is a good idea, but when you use those protections to stifle people messing around with your art, then I think that's going too far. People messing around with art is an important part of how culture progresses, and without the cultural context of the time Top Gun would never have existed.

debt• 12 years ago

I'm surprised no one has developed a way to upload all the frames of a film to various image hosting sites(imgur, flickr, etc) and written software to piece them all together to recreate them as a single movie file.

gliese1337• 12 years ago

I'm not. Unless you also have a way to get the soundtrack and re-sync it with the reconstituted movie, it's kinda useless for anything but silent pictures (which tend to be old enough to be public domain anyway).

vidarh2• 12 years ago

Encoding the soundtrack in image frames would be trivial. It's just data, after all.

jeremysmyth• 12 years ago

Why bother doing that when you can just upload it to one of the many, many video hosting sites with dubious legal footprints?

Just to be clear, the Top Gun "frame by frame" tweeting isn't frame by frame, by any stretch. It's more like a series of panels in a comic, with each panel showing a piece of action or a line of dialog, typically one frame for every several seconds of the movie.

xerophtye• 12 years ago

Random question, if the guy had messaged Paramount pictures and informed them of this cool plan and asked their permission, would it have worked out? Or is that just too optimistic?

Btw remember that bot that tweeted gifs of movie quotes, that counts as fair use?

Crito• 12 years ago

They almost certainly would have ignored him. If he were lucky, he might get a form letter that boiled down to "No."

mashmac2• 12 years ago

Here's a checklist from Columbia University which helps clarify what qualifies as fair use: http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-ch...

netcan• 12 years ago

In one sense I think that any of the copyright (or IP generally) discussions on HN are superfluous. We've said what we have to say a dozen times.

OTOH, I kind of feel like these are deep issues that need time and repeated debate to fully digest. The idea of property is itself an manmade invention and it some self self evident truth that property should be defined one way or another. I think that example like this do go back to a crucial part of property's definition: control & exclusion.

Without exclusion rights, I think it's hard to call something a property right.

cafard• 12 years ago

I had forgotten that it was s silent movie, but then it has been almost thirty years since I saw it.

lurkinggrue• 12 years ago

I prefer my movies in animated .gif format or ascii via telnet.

Paramount Afraid Tweeted Stills of ‘Top Gun’ Compete With Actual Movie

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