Now That Amazon Has Bought MGM, Will It Turn Against The Internet?

from the hopefully-not dept

As you may have heard, Amazon recently reached a deal to buy MGM Studios for $8.5 billion, expanding its in-house content studio, which is already quite massive, given its efforts to build up its Prime Video streaming service. For a variety of reasons (notably, everything Amazon has done with Prime, as well as increasing video streaming competition from Disney, NBC Universal, Warner Media/Discovery, etc.), the deal isn't that surprising.

I do wonder, however, if this deal brings Amazon a step closer to turning its back on the open internet. I mean, we already had Netflix join the MPA and start overreacting to piracy after being a good internet steward for many years. At this point, it seems like it may only be a matter of time until Amazon goes down that path as well -- though I'd hope they think better of it.

That said, it is notable that MGM is not a member of the MPA. It somewhat famously left in 2005. So maybe that helps keep Amazon on a path of actually supporting the open internet, and remembering the rest of its business (and how much it relies on an open internet). Still, watching how much the internet and the entertainment business has converged over the past decade or so suggests that we might finally get a realignment on these issues. It would be nice if that came with Hollywood finally recognizing the open internet is not the enemy, rather than the new tech players turning their backs on the open internet... but I'm not at all confident that's how this will play out.

Filed Under: content, copyright, internet
Companies: amazon, mgm, mpa, mpaa, netflix

Citizen Organizing Small Get-Together 'Rocky Run' Sent C&D By MGM Because Of Course She Was

from the cut-me,-mick dept

It probably won't surprise any of you to learn that film studio MGM tends to be on the aggressive side when it comes to enforcing its intellectual property. Still, it sort of takes my breath away watching them shut down a DIY, non-commercial and charity-benefiting "Rocky" run in Philadelphia. It all started last year, when a Philly journalist took the time to map out the infamous training run performed by Rocky Balboa in the second film. In the film, more Philly citizens join Rocky's run as the scene progresses. The map of the run was then put together and published, leading one Philly citizen, Rebecca Schaefer, to start a friendly get-together run that would follow the same path. The 31 mile trek was joined by a little over a hundred people, none of whom paid any kind of money to join the run, but who did manage to collect running sneakers for a charity.

Before the run could be joined this year, however, MGM sent the C&D letter.

And now MGM has threatened Schaefer with a lawsuit, sending her a cease-and-desist letter over the Rocky 50K Fat Ass Run. “To be honest, I was shocked it hadn’t come sooner,” Schaefer, the run's organizer, says. She’s changing the name of the Rocky 50K for its second edition on December 6th, a run that's become much larger than she ever imagined. The soon-to-be-renamed Rocky 50K has no entry fees or actual sign-up list; Schaefer makes no money on the event.

The reason for the C&D this year? Well, MGM is licensing an official Rocky Run put together by a sports corporation that will be taking in money for the event. The end result is that a small, charitable, non-commercial little running group will be forced to give up the name of the event so that an MGM-backed company can come into Philly for the first time to make some money. Lovely. Fans of the original Rocky Run are reportedly unhappy, voicing their displeasure on the corporate-backed run's Facebook page. Those comments, it appears, are being summarily deleted.

After becoming aware of the Cerulean-run competing Rocky 5K/10K event, some Rocky 50K fans say they had posted complaints to the new Rocky Run’s Facebook page, but that they no longer appear there. The organizers at first responded with a form letter-like comment that explained their event was officially licensed (and, yes, an actual race with road closures and prizes and an entry fee). The Rocky Run's organizers did not not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Look, MGM isn't wrong legally, but surely the company could have worked something out with this tiny, little DIY running group so that it could keep raising charitable donations under their original name. I'm fairly certain that 100 folks running thirty miles isn't a threat to the corporate Rocky Run, so what exactly would the harm be?

Fortunately, Schaefer appears to be taking all of this in stride.

“I can’t be negative about this,” she says. “My mom was like, ‘How cool is it that you did something that got a cease-and-desist?’”

Super cool. Damn the man, save the Rocky Run.

Filed Under: cease and desist, rocky, rocky run
Companies: mgm

Supreme Court Admits Copyright Infringement May Actually Help The Copyright Holder

from the some-good,-some-weird dept

We've written a few times about the mess in the law concerning how to figure out the statute of limitations on copyright. The law says its 3 years, but it's been interpreted very differently as to which three years it means. Is it three years after the first act of infringement? Or if something is "ongoing" (such as posting something online) can you then sue for the most recent three years? In a case that went to the Supreme Court concerning the movie Raging Bull, MGM argued that because the plaintiff, Paula Petrella, waited nearly two decades to bring a lawsuit over the script, the lawsuit should be barred based on the doctrine of laches (which has come up in other cases as well). Laches, of course, says that you can't wait that long to bring a lawsuit, because you're just piling up liability for the defendant. In short, the concept is that it's inherently unfair to know about a situation, but not to bring suit, because you're knowingly just letting the amount you'll sue for stack up before finally suing.

In this case, the two lower courts sided with MGM and said that based on the laches doctrine, Petrella could no longer bring her lawsuit. The Supreme Court reversed that ruling, noting that the statute of limitations issue (allowing a "look back" of just three years) more or less overrides, but also that since laches is common law doctrine, and not a part of copyright law, it doesn't count. As Matt Schruers notes, this is an odd ruling, in that the Supreme Court seems to have no problem bringing in other common law doctrines when it suits the court (or, really, when it suits Justice Ginsburg, who quite frequently is found leading the charge on these decisions):

It is somewhat curious that the Supreme Court comfortably imports some common law principles into copyright, such as doctrines associated with secondary liability, but not others, such as the equitable application of laches here.

But there's another, perhaps more important point, that is unrelated to the direct issue in the case, but which Schruers again highlights as quite important: and that's that Ginsburg -- a notorious strong copyright supporter -- appears to admit in a Supreme Court ruling that there may be benefits to the copyright holder from people infringing. This is a somewhat startling admission in a Supreme Court ruling:

It is hardly incumbent on copyright owners, however, to challenge each and every actionable infringement. And there is nothing untoward about waiting to see whether an infringer’s exploitation undercuts the value of the copyrighted work, has no effect on the original work, or even complements it. Fan sites prompted by a book or film, for example, may benefit the copyright owner. See Wu, Tolerated Use, 31 Colum. J. L. & Arts 617, 619–620 (2008)

While it is admittedly troubling that she seems to suggest that fan sites are infringing, it's still progress that the Supreme Court has now stated, clearly, in a majority decision that infringement can, at times, benefit the copyright holder. This matters because so many people in policy and legal circles like to insist that this is impossible. In fact, Schruers himself notes that when he recently suggested something not even as broad as that, they got slammed with offensive comments:

A more interesting wrinkle is Justice Ginsburg’s explicit embrace of a point that I had previously characterized as “taboo” — that not all infringements impose costs on the rights holder.  In fact, when I wrote last year that some infringements have no economic cost, and that other infringements will reallocate wealth instead of destroy it, the site admins had to install a profanity filter for the comment section.  Yet today, Justice Ginsburg goes a step further and states that some infringement “may benefit the copyright owner.”  (To my knowledge, Supreme Court opinions don’t have a comment section.)

We actually had written a post discussing Matt's original post ourselves, and ran into similar issues with folks insisting that what we were discussing was nothing more than "theft" and "re-distribution to grifters." Yet, here we now have the strongest copyright maximalist on the Supreme Court flat out admitting that sometimes copyright infringement benefits the copyright holder.

While there may be other issues with the ruling, this is at least nice to see.

Filed Under: copyright, laches, paula petrella, raging bull, ruth bader ginsburg, scotus, statute of limitations, supreme court
Companies: mgm

Warner Bros., MGM, Universal Collectively Pull Nearly 2,000 Films From Netflix To Further Fragment The Online Movie Market

from the this-isn't-helping dept

Michael Carusi points us to the news that Warner Bros., MGM and Universal Studios have agreed to pull nearly 2,000 films from Netflix's library, in order to put them in the Warner Bros. Instant Archive. You may recall that Warner recently launched this archive, which is an incredibly overpriced and ridiculously limited offering. Apparently, they're trying to bolster the offering in part by hurting Netflix. As we've warned, this sort of fragmentation does little to help anyone. Consumers don't want to have multiple accounts for multiple services. They don't want to have to worry about whether or not a particular title is available in one place or another. And they certainly don't want movies to suddenly disappear from the service they had been already paying to get.

Everything about this move seems designed to piss people off, not provide them a better overall experience. Sure, Warner wants films for its own archive, but removing them from other services doesn't suddenly make people run gleefully to join their service. It just makes people annoyed and resentful of Warner Bros., which is exactly not the way to encourage people to sign up for their new service. In the article linked above, it noted that some people were having "marathon" viewings of some of the films about to disappear from Netflix. Note that they weren't planning to sign up for Warner's lame archive, but rather watch while they could on the service they chose. One of the key lessons from the past decade or so of internet content is that you need to make accessing your content as convenient as possible. And Hollywood's response is to do the opposite. Incredible.

Companies: mgm, netflix, universal, warner bros

Hollywood Bending Over Backwards To Appease China

from the and-i-thought-they-were-all-thieves dept

For decades, we've been hearing complaints from the entertainment industry about just how evil China was, and how rampant "piracy" was in China and how the country needed to crack down... blah, blah, blah. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Great Wall, it seems that Hollywood has finally realized that there are over a billion people in China, and a lot of them are interested in paying for American movies. Back in March, when the MPAA's yearly numbers came out (showing continued growth, of course), the report repeatedly mentioned the rapidly growing Chinese market.

What's interesting, though, is that this is now causing Hollywood to actually rethink how movies represent people in China. That link is to a recent segment from the radio show On the Media, where they talk about how Hollywood suddenly is bending over backwards to make Chinese consumers happy -- including changing the content of movies so as not to offend the Chinese. The key story: when MGM remade the movie Red Dawn (yes, another remake), it replaced the "Soviet" enemy threat from the original with a Chinese threat. Except... after the movie was done, the studio realized that might cut out the Chinese market, so they went back in and re-edited the film to make the Chinese people into North Koreans instead.

The studio is now digitally removing Chinese flags and military symbols from the movie and are hard at work re-recording dialogue so that no one mistakes the brazen invaders for the Chinese.

There seems to be something rather ironic in the fact that Hollywood spent so much time bitching about the awful Chinese market... and now they're making massive changes to movies just to appease that market... But, of course, there's a bigger lesson here: actually providing markets with what they want, rather than worrying about piracy, seems to be a pretty good way of making money. It's just too bad that Hollywood hasn't realized that back here at home yet.

Filed Under: china, hollywood, piracy, red dawn
Companies: mgm, mpaa

Pink Panther Studio, Producers And Star Sued For Joke Theft

from the a-lawyer,-a-copyright-and-a-loser-walk-into-a-bar... dept

Historically, jokes have always been things that were shared and passed on. The power of a joke is not in the idea behind the joke, but in the telling. Yet, in this era when people have it drilled into their brains over and over again that every creative thing is "ownable," we're now seeing this great tradition of joke sharing and joke telling stifled by claims of "ownership." The latest such example, found via Michael Scott, is that two people are suing over jokes in the Pink Panther movies. Specifically, Jean Epstein and Gary Stretch have sued "MGM, Sony, Fox, producer Robert Simonds, star Steve Martin and others" because they say the Pink Panther movies violate their copyright on certain jokes. Apparently, Epstein and Stretch made a short film that they placed on YouTube and iFilm, which included a few jokes that are similar to jokes in the movies. So, be careful next time you're "performing" a joke you heard somewhere else. Perhaps you'll get sued for copyright infringement.

Filed Under: copyright, gary stretch, jean epstein, jokes, pink panther, robert simonds, steve martin
Companies: fox, mgm, sony

Online Movie Distribution Should Be Widespread, Not Focused On Specific Sites

from the spread-the-wealth dept

There's a lot of buzz over the fact that MGM has apparently worked out an agreement to put some complete movies and TV shows on YouTube, in an attempt for both YouTube and MGM to build alternatives to things like Hulu. The content selections look pretty weak so far, as if MGM decided to test this program out with its least desirable content (which hardly seems like a fair test). Either way, the point seems a bit silly. Working out specific deals with specific sites misses the point.

You don't see movie studios today looking to do exclusive deals with one chain of movie theater to distribute their movies. No, the idea is to get the movie seen in as many places as possible to make it as convenient as possible for whoever to watch it. The same should be true of studios who realize that they want their movies available for free online. They shouldn't just focus on doing a deal with one site, like YouTube, but in setting up the parameters where any site can distribute the movie for them. Otherwise, you end up with a patchwork of different deals, and different sites, and no one really knows where to go to get anything. Why not just set up the parameters, and let any qualifying site serve up the content instead?

Filed Under: movies, online
Companies: mgm, youtube

Wall Street Banks Back Off Plans To Finance Films

from the no-motion-pictures dept

In the past year or so, there's been a surge of interest on Wall Street in financing Hollywood films. As the cost of making motion pictures continues to spiral higher, it makes sense that studios would look beyond its traditional networks to raise money. That being said, we had some hope that investment banks and hedge funds could be a positive force in the industry, since they'd likely be reluctant to write a blank check for some of the big budget, big star boondoggles that have characterized the industry of late. Well, it looks like we'll have to wait awhile before we learn how this plays out. The credit crunch has prompted Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to postopone plans to raise $1 billion to fund films at MGM. The banks could still do the deal if they see a lot of investor demand for it, but that seems pretty unlikely in light of current conditions. Meanwhile, the Hollywood studios might have to make do with a bit less cash.

Filed Under: credit crunch, finance, hollywood, wall street
Companies: deutsche bank, goldman sachs, mgm