Disney So Desperate To Stop Leaks It Subpoenas ImageShack Over Single Blurry Still Image Of New Star Wars

from the and-creates-a-streisand-effect dept

Yes, of course, Disney is trying to keep the lid on the new Star Wars film and is extra careful to try to stop any leaks coming out about the new film, but this seems like a pretty expensive and silly way of doing things. The company's expensive lawyers at Latham & Watkins have sought a subpoena to serve on ImageShack because someone -- a user with the name "Darth_Simi" posted what appears to be a single blurry cropped still image from the film (shown here as a thumbnail): The focus, obviously, is on trying to track down the leaker: And while I recognize that Disney thinks it's incredibly important to figure out who leaked that single blurry image, this whole thing seems questionable for a variety of reasons. First, it seems highly likely that the blurry, cropped single frame image is not, in fact, infringing because it's fair use. It is a very tiny portion of the copyrighted work, it was not used for commercial reasons and certainly isn't going to impact the market for the film. As such, the attempt to subpoena ImageShack to identify the uploader should be denied, as it's not infringement.

Second, if Disney really wanted to stop such things, going to court seems like a fairly dumb way to do so. As the Hollywood Reporter story above notes, the image only had about 6,000 views when its story on this image went live. By the time I saw it, the number of views of the image had doubled, and it wasn't that long after the story had gone up. Disney clearly isn't using copyright law to stop this particular use, but rather as a separate tool to try to track down a leaker.

Third, it's hard to see how this effort could possibly be worth the money that Disney is paying its expensive lawyers for. Preparing the filing and going to court isn't cheap. And all over what, exactly? A tiny fair use, blurry, cropped frame from a movie that is only likely to get fans more excited to see the actual film?

Oh, and just to make this clear, we believe that our use of the thumbnail above is fair use for the same reasons that the original posting on ImageShack was fair use, and we'll add that, in this case, it's more so because we're commenting on the image itself in a press report -- and the image is newsworthy because of Disney's lawyers' own actions.

Filed Under: copyright, darth simi, dmca, fair use, leaks, star wars, still, subpoena
Companies: disney, latham and watkins