Techdirt. Stories about "lionsgate"

Filmmaker Behind The Pirate Bay Documentary Says Bogus DMCA Takedowns Take Away His Free Speech

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:01:43 PDT

We just wrote about how major Hollywood studios had included links to the freely available, Creative Commons-licensed documentary, TPB AFK, in a bunch of bogus DMCA notices to Google, meaning that perfectly legitimate links were likely being removed. The director of that film, Simon Klose, has now responded with an open letter in the form of a video, where he notes that this is a clear violation of his free speech. He points out that there are basically two possibilities. First, that these studios are purposely trying to censor a film about The Pirate Bay, which highlights the civil liberties questions raised by the studios legal pursuit of the founders of the site, and second, that their technology for finding infringing content absolutely sucks. He points out that neither of these situations is a good one. The first one sounds crazy, but, as he notes, not quite as crazy as some of the things that were revealed in the film, such as Warner Bros. hiring the lead investigator in the case while the investigation was still ongoing. But even if it was an accident, that doesn't change the fact that his legitimate content was being blocked from Google, and he considers it a free speech issue.

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Major Hollywood Studios All Sent Bogus DMCA Takedowns Concerning The Pirate Bay Documentary

Mike Masnick — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:13:00 PDT

We see so many bogus DMCA takedowns, and we hear the big copyright holders insisting that it's just an accident each and every time -- and not to worry about the collateral damage and censorship it leads to. So it seems interesting that TorrentFreak has uncovered a series of bogus DMCA takedown notices to Google from four different giant Hollywood players -- Viacom, Paramount (owned by Viacom), Fox and Lionsgate -- that each ask it to remove links to Simon Klose's excellent documentary about The Pirate Bay TPB AFK. As TorrentFreak notes, Fox, via DtecNet (another total failure for the "six strikes" company), asked Google to remove a link to the movie on Mechodownload. Viacom asked for links to be removed to the movie on Mrworldpremiere and Rapidmovies. Lionsgate asked for to remove a link to the movie from The Pirate Bay of all places. Needless to say, all of these were authorized copies that the movie studios were seeking to have hidden.

Beyond the obvious concern about censoring a movie that shows, perhaps, a more sympathetic side of the TPB crew and their legal situation, these kinds of take downs serve another, more nefarious purpose: making sure there is less value for authorized works on these various sites. You hear it all the time from these companies that these sites are "all bad" and must be taken down. Having authorized content really looks bad, so it's nice for them that they can remove it by filing bogus DMCA claims with no real recourse. No wonder the MPAA is so vehement that it shouldn't need to consider fair use before sending bogus takedowns.

Yes, I'm sure these were all just more "accidents" but the impact is very real. For struggling filmmakers like Klose, having authorized copies of his film removed from Google has a serious impact. Copyright maximalists never seem concerned in the slightest about the collateral damage on the people who have actually learned to use these platforms well. They prefer to protect those who fight against new systems of distribution, while harming those who have succeeded in using them.

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Lionsgate Censors Remix Video That The Copyright Office Itself Used As An Example Of Fair Use

Jonathan McIntosh — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 05:18:55 PST

It has been three and a half years since I first uploaded my remix video “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed” to YouTube. The work is an example of fair use transformative storytelling which serves as a visual critique of gender roles and representations in modern pop culture vampire media.

Since I published the remix in 2009 it has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube and fans have translated the subtitles into 30 different languages. It has been featured and written about by the LA Times, Boston Globe, Salon, Slate, Wired, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and discussed on NPR radio. It was nominated for a 2010 Webby Award in the best remix/mashup category. The video is used in law school programs, media studies courses and gender studies curricula across the country. The remix also ignited countless online debates over the troubling ways stalking-type behavior is often framed as deeply romantic in movie and television narratives.

This past summer, together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I even screened the remix for the US Copyright Office at the 2012 hearings on exemptions to the DMCA. Afterward my Buffy vs Edward remix was mentioned by name in the official recommendations by the US Copyright Office (pdf) on exemptions to the DMCA as an example of a transformative noncommercial video work.

"Based on the video evidence presented, the Register is able to conclude that diminished quality likely would impair the criticism and comment contained in noncommercial videos. For example, the Register is able to perceive that Buffy vs Edward and other noncommercial videos would suffer significantly because of blurring and the loss of detail in characters’ expression and sense of depth."

-Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, October 2012 (Page 133)

Despite the clear and rather unambiguous fair use argument that exists for the video, Lionsgate Entertainment has now abused YouTube's system and filed a DMCA takedown and had my remix deleted for "copyright infringement." Below is a brief chronicle of my struggle to get Buffy vs Edward back on YouTube where it belongs.

On October 9th 2012 I received a message from YouTube stating that Buffy vs Edward had "matched third party content" owned or licensed by Lionsgate and "ads may appear next to it." Lionsgate acquired ownership of the Twilight movie franchise in 2012 (via the purchase of Summit Entertainment for 412 million dollars) so the claim appeared to be directed at the 1 minute 48 seconds of footage I quoted from the first Twilight movie in my 6 minute remix.

I always turn all ads off on my remix videos and never profit off them. But sure enough when I checked my channel, Lionsgate was monetizing my noncommercial fair use remix with ads for Nordstrom fall fashions which popped up over top of my gender critique of pop culture vampires. Incidentally this copyright claim also prevented the remix from playing on all iOS devices like iPads and iPhones because they are not ”monetized platforms“.

I thought perhaps YouTube’s Content ID System had automatically tagged the video and didn’t understand that it was a fair use. In the hopes I could get the mistake cleared up I immediately used YouTube’s built-in process to register a fair use dispute.

Less then 24 hours later however I received another message from YouTube informing me that Lionsgate had reviewed my fair use claim and rejected it, reinstating their claim on the remix and again monetizing the video with intrusive popup ads.

Concerned at what appeared to be a blatant disregard for fair use provisions, I contacted a lawyer at New Media Rights named Art Neill. New Media Rights drafted a rather detailed 1000 word legal argument citing case law and explaining how Buffy vs Edward was in fact about as clear of an example of fair use as exists. This included fair use arguments for the nature and purpose of the transformative use, amount used and market effect. YouTube's built-in system now allows for a second round of copyright disputes, called an appeal process. So I returned to YouTube and filed an official appeal of the reinstated bogus copyright claim by Lionsgate using the fair use argument and legal language from my lawyer. (See the full text of the fair use argument we made here.)

On November 26th 2012, after a month of waiting, I finally got a response stating that Lionsgate had decided to release their copyright claim on my remix. Victory!

Or so I thought.

That same day I noticed another notification from YouTube saying that my Buffy vs Edward remix had "matched third party content" owned or licensed by Lionsgate and that ads may appear on my video. Wait what? Deja-vu. Hadn't I just spent nearly 2 months dealing with exactly that? On closer inspection this new claim was for "visual content" owned by Lionsgate and the claim I had just fought and finally won had been for "audiovisual" content. No further information was provided as to what the difference was between the two claims or what content exactly was supposedly infringing.

It appeared as though Lionsgate just filed two separate infringement claims on the same piece of media.   Confused and slightly frustrated I once again embarked on repeating the same dispute process as before. I filed my fair use dispute via YouTube’s built-in form exactly as I had the first time around.

Again, just like the first time, it was rejected by Lionsgate within 24 hours and they reinstated their claim on the remix.

So again I filed my second long-form appeal using YouTube’s system, again making the detailed legal arguments crafted by my lawyer at New Media Rights which again lay out very clearly all the fair use arguments. And again, I waited for a response.

On December 18th I received notification from YouTube that Lionsgate had again ignored my fair use arguments, rejected my appeal and this time had the remix deleted from YouTube entirely.

I was dumbfounded. And to add insult to injury I was now locked out of my YouTube account and had a copyright infringement “strike” placed on my channel.

In order to regain access to my account I was also forced to attend YouTube’s insulting “copyright school” and take a test on fair use. Since I’ve been giving lectures on fair use doctrine for artists and video makers for a number of years this was a breeze, but still insulting because my video was not infringing in the first place.

Once I was allowed back into my account I found that YouTube is now penalizing me for this “strike” by preventing me from uploading videos longer than 15 minutes.

I consulted my lawyer again, and following the advice on YouTube’s copyright FAQ page, he reached out to the representatives of Lionsgate who administer their online content and had issued the DMCA takedown. What he found out from that correspondence was worrying.

Representatives of Lionsgate, a company called MovieClips that claims to manage Lionsgate’s clips on Youtube, confirmed in an email to New Media Rights that they had filed a DMCA takedown on Buffy vs Edward because I did not want them to monetize the remix. In fact this is exactly what the company’s representative, Matty Van Schoor, said in a response email to New Media Rights on December 20, 2012.

“The audio/visual content of this video has been reviewed by our team as well as the YouTube content ID system and it has been determined that the video utilizes copyrighted works belonging to Lionsgate. Had our requestes to monetize this video not been disputed, we would have placed an ad on the cotent [sic] and allowed it to remain online. Unfortunately after appeal, we are left with no other option than to remove the content.”

No other option? How about recognizing it is fair use and dropping the complaint? They did not answer or even acknowledge our fair use arguments via email, despite fair use being raised multiple times.   Perhaps this is just the action of a rogue studio, but it hints at a bit of a nightmare scenario for transformative media makers and remix artists. The fear is that fair use will be ignored in favor of a monetizing model in which media corporations will “allow” critical, educational and/or transformative works only if they can retain effective ownership and directly profit off them.

It appears that Lionsgate is attempting to do just that. What if every time The Daily Show made fun of a Fox News clip, News Corp. was allowed to claim ownership over the entire Daily Show episode in order to monetize it?

There are limitations on takedowns. For instance, as Neill from New Media Rights points out, the DMCA Section 512 prohibits knowingly, materially misrepresenting any information in takedown notices. At least one court, the case of the baby dancing to Prince in the Lenz case, has even required that DMCA takedown notice senders consider fair use before sending a takedown.

Buffy vs Edward has now been offline for 3 weeks. Over the past year, before the takedown, the remix had been viewed an average of 34,000 times per month.

Since none of YouTube’s internal systems were able to prevent this abuse by Lionsgate, and our direct outreach to the content owner hit a brick wall, with the help of New Media Rights I have now filed an official DMCA counter-notification with YouTube. Lionsgate has 14 days to either allow the remix back online or sue me. We will see what happens.

This is what a broken copyright enforcement system looks like.

One last note, New Media Rights has offered me invaluable advice and guidance throughout this battle. They are a small, non-profit two lawyer operation on a shoe-string budget fighting to make sure artists like me are heard. So if you can please consider donating to them here.

PS: Until we can get the takedown reversed, you can still watch the HTML5 popup video version of Buffy vs Edward here.

Reposted with permission from RebelliousPixels.com

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Did Hollywood Not Use Available DMCA Tools Just To Pretend It Needed SOPA?

Mike Masnick — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:11:00 PDT

The more you dig into Google's new copyright transparency reports the more eye-catching info you find. Julian Sanchez, for example, has noticed the rather interesting timing of massive explosions in Hollywood studios using Google's DMCA takedown system for search... in correlation with key elements of the fight to get SOPA passed. For example, there's a really big spike in DMCA takedowns for search the week of November 14th.

Hmmm... what happened that week? Oh, that's right: the House Judiciary Committee hearings about SOPA, where part of the "evidence" for why SOPA was needed was the MPAA's anti-piracy boss Michael O'Leary insisting that doing Google searches on certain movies led you to links to pages where you could download unauthorized copies. He was wrong, actually -- as our own tests showed, they took you to legal versions. But isn't it interesting to see that, for example, the very first search takedown that Lionsgate sent to Google happened on November 15th? Similarly, it's interesting to see that right after the SOPA blackouts made it clear that SOPA was going to die... there's another new "burst" of takedown filings. Twentieth Century Fox appears not to have used the system at all until January 30th of this year -- or a week or so after SOPA was officially declared dead. How about Paramount Pictures, one of the more vocal supporters of SOPA? It filed just one search takedown prior to the whole SOPA debate. But about a month after SOPA was declared dead, suddenly Paramount started using the tool. NBC Universal certainly had been a regular user of the system all along -- but right after SOPA died, its usage clearly trended upwards -- whereas prior to that, its usage looked pretty flat.

In other words, you could certainly make a reasonable case that the studios went to Congress to complain about how they couldn't get rid of search results they don't like from Google... when they hadn't even tried to use the tools available which appear to do the job they wanted.

There certainly may be other factors, but it's possible that the studios had been holding back on using the tools as a way of providing extra "evidence" of a problem that had to be addressed by law. Again, as Sanchez points out:

How about before you break the Internet, you try USING THE F***ING TOOLS YOU ALREADY HAVE?

A reasonable question, but don't expect a reasonable answer.

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Hollywood Talent Turns To Kickstarter To Escape 'Institutional Censorship'

Leigh Beadon — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:39:00 PDT

In discussions about artists like Amanda Palmer using Kickstarter, plenty of people continue to insist that their success was made possible by their traditional industry backgrounds. We've already gone over lots of reasons why this is silly, most notably the fact that such artists do a lot of work and certainly don't coast on anything. But it also usually ignores the artists themselves, who more often than not clearly say that they are going it alone because traditional structures were holding them back. The fact that creators who have received some amount of benefit from labels/studios/publishers decide to move on anyway, and then see their careers grow, doesn't say less about platforms like Kickstarter, it says even more.

This sentiment is not limited to music, or to independent creators. Kickstarter is getting a lot of attention, and that's bound to attract bigger and bigger names. The latest, sent in by jtomic, is a feature film called The Canyons which involves some pretty serious Hollywood talent. The script is written by Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho) and directed by Paul Schrader (as in, the guy who wrote Taxi Driver and the screenplay for Raging Bull). Ellis, Schrader and the producer are putting up a bunch of the money themselves and turning to Kickstarter for the rest—all because they want to escape the confines of Hollywood:

The film is a collaborative effort stewarded by former Lionsgate producer Braxton Pope as a response to the changing landscape of the film industry. Pope, Ellis and Schrader are partly financing the film themselves through Pope’s new company Sodium Fox in order to maintain complete creative control of the distinct source material. According to Schrader, “We all experienced the frustrations of financing and institutional censorship. But now, with advances in digital photography and distribution, we can tell a story in the manner we choose. Movies are changing and we’re changing with it.”

They expand on this in the video, which includes some excellent comments from all three creators. Pope talks about how the Hollywood process encourages "groupthink" and makes it hard for a film to stay true to the artists' vision. Schrader and Ellis both compare the current revolution in film to that of a hundred years ago when the medium was in its infancy, and are clearly excited about the prospect of making a film without notes from meddlesome studio execs.

There are some pretty cool funding tiers too, many of which are unsurprisingly sold out. The cast itself is being largely crowdsourced through an online audition platform, netting undiscovered talent from around the world, and anyone who pledges at least $10 gets to vote on finalists. For $500, Ellis and Pope offered to watch your short film and share their honest reactions (with links) to their followers on Twitter & Facebook (all 10 slots for that one are already sold out). For $1,500 they'll do the same with a feature-length film. For $5,000, Ellis reviews your novel (again, sold out) or Schrader gives you notes on your script (a few left at time of writing). One lucky backer has already snagged the single $10,000 "De Niro's Money Package", which comes with a money clip autographed by Robert De Niro and given to Schrader on the set of Taxi Driver.

So there can be absolutely no doubt that these guys are using their momentum from the traditional Hollywood system to make this project possible—but I'm at a loss as to how that says anything good about Hollywood. I doubt any of these creators had any real need to finance a film themselves, but they saw a growing opportunity to go directly to their fans and make movies the way they really want to make them, and they jumped on it. That's not coasting on the past—it's embracing the future.

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The Ridiculous Hoops Mad Men Had To Jump Through To Use Part Of A Beatles Song

Mike Masnick — Wed, 9 May 2012 09:37:00 PDT

This story has been making the rounds about how Lionsgate, the studio behind the hit TV series Mad Men, paid somewhere close to $250,000 to license a Beatles song to use in a recent episode of the show. While the money is the part that everyone focuses on, the article talks about how involved the process was to actually get the approval of the Beatles to use the song:

Weiner, who says he once met Paul McCartney at a party but didn’t broach the subject of licensing, zeroed in on “Tomorrow Never Knows” last summer, when he got the idea for a story about “how people think they know what the Beatles are. Of course the Beatles are one step ahead of you at least.” That started a process he’d been through before, of sending “impassioned letters” to the band’s representatives, including primary gatekeeper Jeff Jones, head of Apple Corps.

This time, as Weiner cleared that initial hurdle, he continued to make his case for placing the Beatles “in a new context” by sharing story outlines and script pages with the team—“things I don’t usually do,” he says. Permission was finally granted based on the merit of the show and his plan for the song, not the amount of money on the table, he says. “The idea is that this is a financial arrangement, there is nothing further from the truth. This is completely an artistic collaboration.”

But, here's the thing, as the article notes elsewhere, part of the appeal of the show is the very, very, very thorough attention to detail to make everything about the show accurate to the time. In fact, we noted a story (that not everyone agreed was true) that suggested that copyright had gotten in the way of historical realism on the show in the past. But here, as the show's producers noted, the Beatles are such a huge part of the 60s, it's a little crazy that they can't have the music on the show without jumping through this series of hoops. It basically means nobody can accurately depict an important period of cultural history without permission from the band.

If anything, it seems like (once again) copyright is being used to stifle culture, rather than to enable and encourage it. It also highlights one of the more ridiculous parts of copyright law: the vast differences in the way different rights and licenses work. If this were merely being performed live in a venue, the venue could get typical ASCAP/BMI licenses and play whatever music they wanted (with a few limitations). But, since it goes on TV, you're suddenly dealing with new issues like sync licenses. That seems silly. If we're going to allow public venues to play whatever they want with a blanket license, why shouldn't that apply equally to a TV show like Mad Men, which is using the music to accurately portray a time?

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Kevin Smith Continues To Innovate: Offering VOD Before Theatrical Release... But Also Offering Incentives To Go To The Theater

Mike Masnick — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:26:00 PDT

We've been following, with great interest, entertainer Kevin Smith's business model improvisations for quite some time now, including some of his podcasting and speaking efforts (beyond just being a filmmaker). We've also been interested in his attempt to go around the "traditional" movie marketing and distribution schemes with his latest flick, Red State. While many attacked or panned his plans to tour directly with the movie and then self-release it in theaters, that plan has made the movie profitable, even before the theatrical release. And, in the land of Hollywood accounting, where most movies -- even the most "successful" are never "profitable," that's quite a feat.

The latest in this plan is that Smith has done a deal with Lionsgate for Video-on-Demand and DVD/Blu-ray distribution. From the beginning, he'd made it clear that he wanted to partner on those things, so this isn't a huge surprise. Where it does get interesting is that the VOD plan will hit the market on Labor Day this September. That's noteworthy, because the theatrical release doesn't happen until October, over a month after the VOD release. And... as we've noted, theater owners are so clueless about what it is they really offer the public, that they're absolutely spooked by any kind of non-theatrical release that doesn't happen many months after the theatrical release, insisting that they just can't compete.

So I would imagine that some theater owners who don't bother to actually understand what's going on will freak out about this as well (and potentially refuse to show Red State). However, as per usual, and very much in keeping with Smith's standard way of operating, he's put together a plan that gives people even more value for going to catch the flick in the theaters. Sure, you'll be able to watch the movie at home via VOD, but he's making sure that the theater experience includes a ton of scarce value as well:

Like let’s say Red State is showing at your local multiplex. But then right after the movie ends, a live, interactive Q&A with the filmmaker starts, beamed into the theater via satellite. Even if you’re not there in the room, you’re Tweeting questions from your theater and getting responses from the guy on the big screen. And then, after three hours of movie and interactive Q&A? Boom: LIVE PODCAST! That’s four hours of once-in-a-lifetime entertainment for less than $20: a movie, a show, then another show.

Oh, look at that. Not only is he connecting with fans, but he's giving them a real, scarce reason to buy. He's adding additional value to the theatrical performance so that people have more reasons to go out to that, even if they can access the VOD version at home. And, he seems pretty aware of how clueless the big theater chains are about these things, as he walks them through the basics here, step by step:

Now, before some old dick like ol’ cranky Mr. “GET OFF HOLLYWOOD’S LAWN!” tries to make a beef with me and theatrical exhibitors in their ongoing war with the studios over the shrinking theatrical window and premium VOD’s role in decreasing box office revenue, let me remind REGAL and AMC, CINEPLEX or any other theater chain that I’m not the enemy. Please don’t lump me in with people trying to take money out of your pockets, Exhibitors. This is a (not-so) new way to make money and fill your empty buildings when there isn’t a Transformer to save you. On a fucking Monday night, no less.

Want fresh eyes and asses in your theaters? Try a one-night-only screening of a movie, a Q&A, and a live podcast: all for under $20 a ticket. The positive feedback you’ll receive from your paying customers alone will be worth it, but the concessions loot you’ll rake in that night will make you richer than the pharaohs (my people like to eat snacks). And if I can make this work? That means anybody can make this work. And that means more people coming to your theaters. Jump into digital bed with us: there’s not enough money going around anymore to quibble over restrictions that shouldn’t apply to a specialized film in the first place. I can sell these events out and make you money without spending money to do so – all while giving a normally slow night a massive shot in the arm. If not, no worries: there are lots of Mom & Pop single-screens out there who’ll welcome us warmly as well.

Of course, this is no different than what many of us have been saying for years, but Smith can back it up with paying customers, so maybe (just maybe?) one of those theater owners will take notice.

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Lionsgate Claims That Reviewing A Fake Script Is Copyright Infringement

Mike Masnick — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:31:31 PDT

Khyle points us to an interesting situation in which movie studio Lionsgate threatened a blogger for reviewing a script which purported to be for a movie called Hunger Games. Admittedly, the link here is from the blog in question, Forever Young Adult, and (for reasons totally opaque to me), the blogger chose to paraphrase the conversation with Lionsgate lawyer Liat Cohen -- so take this with at least some grains of salt. However, the gist of the conversation appears to be that Lionsgate claims that (a) the script that the blog reviewed was fake and (b) that review violated the studio's copyright. The blog caved and took down the post, so we can't see the full post to see if what was written really infringed on the copyright, but if the script is fake, simply reviewing it shouldn't infringe on anyone's copyright. The blogger claims that she never posted the actual script or anything -- just a review. There could be other (potentially serious) legal issues with reviewing a fake script, but I'm trying to see where the copyright infringement claim comes in.

Either way, the blogger complied with Lionsgate's demand to take down the review, and issued the following, quite amusing, retraction and apology:

Last week, we received a movie script from an unnamed source. That movie script appeared to be the script for the Hunger Games movie. Acting in good faith, we read the script and then offered up very general thoughts about the direction and tone of the script. At no time did we offer the script up to the internet, nor did we forward the script on to any other bloggers or websites. (Nor do we ever intend to. Frankly I don’t even plan to hang on to it for my own enjoyment, cause it sort of sucked.)

Lionsgate has claimed that this script is actually a fake. We have been given no further information than that, and I’m not really sure how they know that what we have is a fake since our post was so very general in nature. I can only hope that as soon as they read the words "Gale becomes a hobo" that they knew something was off, and if that’s the case, then THANK YOU, LIONSGATE.

With no other knowledge to go on, and our dwindling champagne budgets in danger of being seized by a multi-billion dollar company who you would think have better things to do than send nasty emails to YA blogs, we are hereby retracting our opinions on the possibly fake Hunger Games movie script. We take it all back, Internet! Hunger Games movie? What Hunger Games movie? What’s the Hunger Games? Is it, like, Battle Royal but for Americans who hate foreign films?

Of course, all this just makes me think that Lionsgate is a bit too itchy on the trigger finger against anyone who says anything even remotely critical about one of their films.

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Ashton Kutcher, Lionsgate Play Up 'Pirating' Own Film As Part Of Promotion Stunt

Mike Masnick — Tue, 1 Jun 2010 13:19:00 PDT

The Hollywood Reporter is scolding actor Ashton Kutcher and Hollywood studio Lionsgate for a weak promotion for their new movie, Killers. Apparently, Kutcher has been going around telling everyone that he likes the movie so much he's going to "pirate" the film and put it online. First he tweeted the following:

I'd like 2 invite U to the premiere of Killers. June 1 I'm going live 2 the web & Pirating the 1st 10 min of Killers from the premiere

From there, he apparently went on The Ellen DeGeneres show and said something similar:

"I love it. I like the movie so much I'm going to show it online, on the web, I'm going to pirate the first 13 minutes of the movie."

Since then he's made a number of similar statements in his Twitter feed, suggesting that he's going to broadcast those 13 minutes straight from the theater at the premier. Of course, as THR points out, this is all a publicity stunt by Lionsgate, previewing the first 13 minutes of a film -- something that a bunch of films have done in the past, especially when a studio doesn't think the film will get very good reviews. THR's chiding is silly, complaining about how calling this "piracy" is some sort of insult to people in the movie industry:

Probably not so awesome for anyone who works in the worldwide antipiracy community. Or the people who have been laid off recently from the studio home video divisions because sales have plummeted in part due to rampant online theft.

As if the film wouldn't find its way online otherwise? As if the problem has something to do with this more efficient distribution system, rather than an inability of the industry to adapt.

However, what I found really telling about the whole thing isn't the "poor choice of words," but how the industry appears to have this total double standard on the issue. One day it will claim that camcording a movie is absolutely destroying the industry, and that tough new laws are needed to put people in jail... and the next day it will play up the fact that its going to bogusly pretend to "camcord" one of its own movies and release it (or, the first few minutes of it) online. Like Viacom insisting that YouTube is destroying its business, while surreptitiously trying to upload its own videos in a way that looked "pirated," the industry says one thing and does another all the time.

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More Media Companies Realizing That They Can Profit From 'Pirated' Content On YouTube

Mike Masnick — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:31:24 PDT

Pretty much every day or so, we end up getting into a debate somewhere in the comments here on Techdirt concerning the rather important distinctions between "theft" and "copyright infringement." While there are a bunch (the lack of a "loss" on the part of the owner being a big one), one important one is that you don't see anyone choosing on purpose to allow theft of their own products in order to boost their business -- yet, we see folks purposely choosing to allow copyright infringement to boost their own business models all the time.

In fact, the NY Times notes that a growing number of media companies have stopped sending takedown notices to YouTube, preferring to use the videos on YouTube as a part of their business model. Google has helped them out in this manner by allowing copyright holders to "claim" videos that they did not upload, and choose to share in the revenue created by ads, rather than requiring a takedown. Among those who have stopped doing takedowns entirely are CBS, Universal Music, Lionsgate and Electronic Arts. Universal Music is a bit surprising, given how it's been even more adamant than any of the other major record labels concerning how evil copyright infringement is. The NYT's is surprised by CBS's involvement, given that it's the sister company of Viacom, who is famously suing YouTube for $1 billion. Yet, CBS has always been much more open to YouTube, recognizing that if its shows were being uploaded, that was a sign of having a lot of fans, not something to be shut down.

The president of digital media at Lionsgate makes the point pretty clearly. saying that the company:

“[Doesn't] like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content. For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They're not trying to be evil pirates, and they're not trying to get revenue from it."

If only others would recognize this simple fact. Of course, a good starting point would be recognizing that copyright infringement isn't "theft."

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