
Paramount Afraid Tweeted Stills of ‘Top Gun’ Compete With Actual Movie - gnicholas
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/paramount-afraid-tweeted-stills-of-top-gun-compete-with-actual-movie/
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rmrfrmrf
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.

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digitalengineer
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).

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jlarocco
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?

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omershapira
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.

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chrismcb
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.

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omershapira
Tweeting the entire film (24f * 60s * 110m) every half hour for a month (2f *
24h * 30d) would leave the film at the first minute of credits. Obviously that
wasn't what was going on.

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?

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TillE
> 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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1ymeff/gfycat_removing_gifs_due_to_takedown_notices_from/)

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codezero
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
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.)

~~~
codezero
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 :)

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michaelq
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?

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gnicholas
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!

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mhartl
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.

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smirksirlot
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
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?

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vidarh
No. You need to defend _trademarks_ or you lose them. You don't need to defend
copyright.

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.

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debt
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.

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gliese1337
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).

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

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netcan
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.

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mashmac2
Copyright fair use is ambiguously defined, really.

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...](http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-checklist/)

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

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xerophtye
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?

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

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

