Paramount Afraid Tweeted Stills of ‘Top Gun’ Compete With Actual Movie
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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".
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?
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.
Now, if you will, try to define 'commentary' and 'parody' in ways that are culturally relevant to the audience. That's harder to manipulate than numbers. The definition of fair use relies heavily on the context. Is this any different from gifs on tumblr?
Who says Tumblr gifs are legal fair use? Copyright infringement may be tolerated or overlooked, but that doesn't make it not infringement.
For comparison, the Premier League has recently been going after goal highlight GIFs on certain sites, which is unfortunate, but it seems entirely within their rights.
http://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1ymeff/gfycat_removi...
The factor you claim is not relevant is factor #4 on that list.
This work is also transformative, as it's a new kind of work rather than a verbatim copy, though the extent to which it is transformative might be debatable. This is considered one of the most important factors, as well.
You are correct that copying the entire work weighs heavily against (but, importantly, does not preclude) a finding of fair use, but it's not clear that it actually copies the entire movie.
After all, it may cover the entire plot, but it simply does not cover the entire content. You cannot simply stitch the frames together and get the original, you'd get a slide show instead of a movie.
That aside, I'm not convinced that this would be a slam dunk for either side in court.
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.
QFT. (no copyright intended)
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?).
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.
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).
(By the way, this is a general rant, not a reference to this case.)
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.
But even if you had to, it's easily solved: They could have approached him, and said "look, we consider this infringement, and we want to ensure people don't think this is a free for all, but we like it, so why don't you write us a letter asking for permission, and we'll grant you a license as long as you acknowledge that in your twitter feed".
Instead they chose to demonstrate their total lack of understanding of the internet for everyone. It's not like the net is not full of Top Gun torrents to begin with, yet they opt to focus on ruining the marketing opportunity.
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.
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.
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...
Btw remember that bot that tweeted gifs of movie quotes, that counts as fair use?