Official SOPA/PIPA thread

[Spoonist]

It's more common as a British-ism than it is in the US, but it works well enough in English as a creative way of saying "to pick a fight with."

Didn't know that - thanks for the correction.

[S.L.Acker]

Fair use movie and game reviews are illegal now... Wow, the US and copyright law in general is worse than I had imagined.

Fair use is ok... but what they are doing arguably is not fair use.

Consider this fact: MST3k, which inspired many of the online reviewers, licensed the copyrighted works they made fun of. They weren't sure it was fair use themselves.

The balance of numbers are against the US sticking their fingers in the dyke at this point. How many different sites and people are doing reviews and 'Let's Plays' at this stage. Is it more worth trying to protect a big corporation or letting people make content using existing material?

[Civil War Man]

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Unless you don't consider reviews to be a form of criticism or comment, use of copyrighted material for the purpose of reviewing it is fair use.

EDIT: Parody is only considered fair use as a result of various court opinions.

[Formless]

Civil War Man beat me to the punch. Using quotations/snippets for the purposes of Criticism and Commentary are fair use, and that is why Channel Awesome's reviewers work is protected more so than Parody and Satire. Think about the following: how do you honestly criticize a film without criticizing the cinematography or the actors' performances? You can't, that would be denying the nature of the medium. But then is it not fair to show snippets of the film? Not only yes, but I would argue that traditional text reviews such as what guys like Roger Ebert and other such professional newspaper critics write are often lacking persuasive power because they can't show you what they experienced and what moments stuck out for them. They can only offer their naked opinion, often not even that much. That's no slight against Roger Ebert or any other critic that does text reviews (opinion is at the heart of entertainment reviewing after all), its just an observation. A guy like Noah Antwiler can, for instance, do a sketch parodying what he sees in the movie and then use that to prove his point about how little effort was put into the actual movie (see for instance his Simcoe the Magician Sketch and comments at the 15:30 mark of that video). Good luck doing that without showing footage from the movie!

[Formless]

You have to weigh all those factors to determine if it is fair use. Consider an extreme case: suppose they played the entire movie, unchanged except for maybe adding some cheering and booing in parts. At the end, the reviewer comes in and say "that was great!"

He was commenting on the movie, but surely you'd agree that there was no need to show the whole movie for that. It, without a doubt, impacts the marketability of the original work since you can substitute it wholesale.

Excuse me, but if you are not creating any actual content, you aren't a critic or a commentator. Just a windmill, Don Quixote.

[Formless]

But, the hypothetical creator did create content: the boos, the cheers, and the post-movie followup.

Do you not understand that I disagree with this point? What you have done is create an example that is so extreme as to be farcical. NO internet reviewer that I have ever come across puts that little effort into their work-- I somehow doubt anyone would bother watching them if they did. If I were to do the text equivalent of what you described on this forum (or hell, almost any moderated forum) to criticize or compliment other people's posts, I would quickly get labeled by the staff as a Retarded Spambot, and rightly so. Just putting words on a page isn't content unless they actually convey some sort of information. What information are you conveying simply by overdubbing cheers and boos onto clips, and nothing else? I suppose you convey a binary "like this scene, don't like this scene" opinion, but at no point have you explained what about it you liked or didn't like, communicated anything of any depth or specificity whatsoever. Just like if I went around the forum quoting people's posts in full (possibly broken into sections) and saying "I agree" or "lol, you're an idiot". Likewise for the post movie followup, which in your example consisted of a simplistic "YAY!" or "This movie sucks!" So little content as to be valueless on its face.

[Simon_Jester]

Formless, the point is to define extreme limiting cases.

A review which does not include any quotes or clips from the original work cannot be copyright infringement, clearly.

A "review" which includes the original work in its entirety, but dubs a few lines of cheers and boos and adds a laugh track, can be copyright infringement.

The dividing line, yeah, falls somewhere in between the few- but there is a line somewhere in there, where a "review" ceases to be a review and simply becomes a framing device for reproducing the original content.

[Formless]

The dividing line, yeah, falls somewhere in between the few- but there is a line somewhere in there, where a "review" ceases to be a review and simply becomes a framing device for reproducing the original content.

Simon, that's exactly my point-- not his, mine. What he presents as a review is transparently not one, yet his overall point in reality is that-- in his own words-- "there is a line, and it's not at "it was a review, case closed"." Why cite an example that doesn't even qualify as a review if the point is that the line should divide kosher reviews from infringing reviews?

An example to prove that point should be an example of something that both is a review and infringing, not a non-review that is obviously infringing.

Edit: in theory, I would agree with him. Its just that based on his comments, I don't know where he would actually place the dividing line. I certainly don't know of any reviewer out there whose work felt like a replacement for watching the movie or TV show. Well, I guess Lets Plays can fulfill that criteria sort of, but then again you don't get the experience of actually playing the game yourself. Kinda the difference between watching a chess match and playing chess or watching a Soccer game and playing Soccer, it can be remarkably different to play a game than to watch one in progress.

[Alyeska]

So the ESA withdrew support from SOPA.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/arch ... pport.aspx

Personally, I think its just a PR stunt. The ESA strongly supported SOPA. You don't go from strongly supporting a law to dropping support unless you are scared of backlash or the law itself is already dead. If something else like it comes up, ESA will support that too.

But, I guess I should give them props. Their concession on the proposed law and their stated reasons are more sound than the MPAA who still wants to drive the crazy train. I am going to keep an eye on this for a while.

[Terralthra]

Formless, the point is to define extreme limiting cases.

A review which does not include any quotes or clips from the original work cannot be copyright infringement, clearly.

This is not true. A work which has as its main ideas the plot, characters, themes, etc. of a copyrighted work would be a derivative work, regardless of how much or little it used clips, quotes, or excerpts. These works are protected by the "comment and critique" clause.

[Tolya]

This is looking more and more like a cash shakedown that politicians served to the big internet companies. There are probably truckloads of politicians that were "lobbied" by Google/Yahoo/whoever gives a fuck to drop their support. Makes me sick.

ESA's move makes me laugh. The rat has left the sinking ship.

[Channel72]

This issue is one of those "know it when I see it" type problems, similar to pornography, where a case-by-case judgment call really needs to be made that takes into account things like the ratio of original content to copyrighted content, the intention of the reviewer, etc.

In general, anything like MST3K would almost definitely be a copyright violation, because the entire copyrighted work appears. I basically consider myself to have seen the actual movie being riffed after watching an episode of MST3K. (Most of those movies are only tolerable anyway with Joel and Servo cracking jokes.)

Online reviews which "recap" the entire movie are obviously in more danger of violating copyright law than reviews which merely show a few clips in order to provide analysis and criticism. A good starting point to help make a ruling would be the ratio of original footage to copyrighted footage. Some online reviews are composed entirely of clips from the source material, whereas others simply intersplice copyrighted material with original content. The former are obviously in more danger of being considered a copyright violation. However, even in the case of the former, it seems unlikely that any person would consider them an acceptable replacement for watching the original material.

Basically, a reviewer like sfdebris, whose reviews consist entirely of footage from the source material, is in more danger of being found in violation of copyright law than reviewers like the people at ChannelAwesome, where (mostly crappy) original content is spliced between copyrighted footage. But ultimately this is a subjective issue which would have to be settled on a case-by-case basis. The aggressiveness and motivation of an offended copyright holder would probably strongly play into the final decision.

[Channel72]

Anti-piracy/copyright laws that govern streamable content, (content like audio/video, etc. where the entirety of the product need not necessarily be available in order to obtain satisfaction from it) should probably use some kind of percentage system - e.g. "fair use means that no greater than 30% of the copyrighted material may appear in the review", or whatever.

[Agent Sorchus]

That is not very helpful. Yes SFDebris has more footage that is from the original as compared to his own, which is always nothing; but the value of the footage is actually less on average since it is more often looped, stopped and given completely new voice over. Compare this to the hacks at Channel Awesome who (outside of their best) always play through scenes unedited, using the original sound and everything with only a bit of commentary which is more of laughing at the work than engaging with the work and making commentary on the work or the ideas presented therein.

Judging something just by the percent used of footage to created footage and not including audio edits and how the commentary interacts with the used footage would give a twisted idea of the value of the review versus fair use of the footage.

And this just comes back to the idea that criticism and commentary shouldn't have a set of guidelines to follow, but be a case by case thing that has to be proven in court as not fair use. Any guideline or common sense idea of what is fair use is incredibly easy to game, to create a sense of having fallen within the realms of fair use but being completely useless as anything that fair use covers. ie critic and commentary

[CaptainChewbacca]

In other piracy-related news, Wikileaks has revealed that the US government conspired with some hollywood studios to target filesharing companies with the intent of establishing 'common law' rulings about piracy, which they could then use to justify more formal laws about piracy.

And we're pulling that shit with a nation we LIKE.

[Alyeska]

Couple pieces of news.

Jon Stewart did a show about SOPA. He had some pretty good things to say about the Blackout and opposed the laws.

And recently Chris Dodd, the president of the MPAA, has outright admitted on national television to bribing congressmen over SOPA/PIPA and is going to withdraw all support from every congressmen who reversed their position as a result of the blackout.

I don't think Chris Dodd realizes what a mistake he made.

[Agent Sorchus]

Alyseka do you have a link to the admission of bribery by Dodd?

[Alyeska]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201201 ... ught.shtml

[Alyeska]

Surprise surprise. Chris Dodd is a lying sack of shit.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/chris_d ... crusading/

[Dave]

Ars Technica floats the idea that the GOP could win favor with the public by opposing SOPA/PIPA (to counter the Democrats who are supposedly paid by Hollywood).

I don't claim to be familiar enough with politics to be able to comment intelligently on the topic, though.

[Alyeska]

It could very well happen. Businesses are known to support political interests that the majority individuals of the business oppose. The senior members of an organization might vote one party but support another through the business.

The Tech Industry is made up for more educated individuals. They are far less likely to support GOP interests on an individual basis. But the group think in a business, they could very well support the GOP.

[Alyeska]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/1 ... tay-bought

More content producers trying to kill public support.

“[The bill] is an issue that has no business being decided politically – by anybody on one side or the other – and the fact that it might be becoming a political issue is unfair to the content producers,” said Hindery, who’s contributed more than $3 million to Democratic candidates and groups.

[CaptainChewbacca]

You know, I wouldn't have thought the polarization would go this way, but with Republicans trying to paint themselves as the party of 'freedom and small government' it seems that the Democrats are getting stuck on the side of big business and hollywood, which are 2 things middle america hates and politicians can score easy points by opposing.

[Simon_Jester]

It's possible. Never underestimate the Democratic Party's ability to paint a target on its own forehead.

[Alyeska]

Chris Dodd managed to ignite a fire storm. They have managed to amass half the required signatures to get an official White House response. In less then a day.