IS IT ILEGAL TO WATCH OR LOAD A VIDEO FROM ON LINE SITES?? Here are some issues to consider, many of which need legal clarification and perhaps legislation: 1. If you rent a movie, and show it to ten friends, who did not rent that movie, are you violating copyright? What if you visit each friend separately and show him or her the movie? Is the owner of the movie being cheated out of revenue; which is another way of saying theft. 2. If you find a movie in the closet of your rented cottage and you watch it, are you violating copyright? Does every usage of an intellectual property imply the right for the owner of this property to charge a fee or to grant license? 3. What if you decide not to physically take that found movie to a hundred friends residences and instead distribute it to them digitally over the World Wide Web? What if you do that for ten thousand friends? At what point does that become illegal? Because this is essentially what peer exchange groups do. 4. What if you decide to make this a business, but you dont charge for those digitized movies. Instead you advertise on your site? What are you doing that is explicitly illegal? 5. Now, if I take a high quality copy of a movie like Black Swan and rent a theatre and charge people to watch it, that is obviously explicitly much the same as stealing your car and renting it or selling it to people. But if that is true, when did it become different from the examples above? Where do we draw the line? If the line is drawn at the point where you are directly making money by exploiting someone elses intellectual property, that would mean that the peer sharing groups are not doing anything illegal. But if peer sharing groups arent doing anything illegal, whether they are passing around a song or a film, then how can the rightful owner of that property make a living, whether that is Paramount Studios, or your friends garage band CD? The question you ask really has two parts and both are not so easy to answer definitively. 1. If you make a movie, or write a book, you are the original author and the law clearly stipulates in most countries, and the USA, that all rights to sell, share, distribute, the intellectual property automatically belongs to the original creator(s). So, does that not imply that every usage requires a license from the owner or anyone he or she has transferred (sold) those rights to? That would make you selling your VHS copy of Star Wars Episode II an automatic law breaker. 2. What other possible copyrights are implied if we accept the first premise. Is not the design of, say, a Starbucks Coffee Shop an intellectual property? If you take a grinning picture of your sister with that design clearly in the background should that require a legal remedy too? That would be an argument of absurdity, one would think, but where do we draw the legal line? This is not quite the same, but related. What about if you are driving your car down the street and your face becomes momentarily recorded by a camera that someone is using to shoot a documentary about animal cruelty or whatever. Have your rights been violated? What if that documentary makes a million dollars, do you deserve a cut in exchange for the use of your image? Filmmakers cant be expected to require legal releases from every single person who is in a shot like that, although some give it their best effort. What I am suggesting is that the Internet has changed nothing about these kinds of problems. It is only a method of distribution. But it has necessitated that we pay attention to what used to be a rather unimportant issue. I hope this helps shed some light on the murky question that you ask, and I apologize for not being able to provide clear-cut answers. So far, there are very few clear-cut answers that would pass the fairness test. Most of the laws that have been passed recently, and rules and regulations that have been passed by the US Congress in particular to address this issue, also dont pass the fairness test. This is because the who is wealthy, influential, and powerful test is easily passed by mega-corporations like Sony and Comcast and, it should be no surprise, the law has tended to favor their interests over our interests. By our, I mean We The People.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:56:16 +0000
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