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Great Debates
41

Joey,

I agree with you that single vs. multiple copies or users is probably an irrelevant issue.

However, this situation doesn’t sound like “distribution” to me, since the same people own the item at the start and end of the process.

Consider two hypothetical situations and the actual case:

1- somebody who has the expertise and equipment, and edits his own videos;

2- somebody who also has the equipment, but is lazy and rich, so he has a servant edit his video for him;

3- someone who has neither the expertise nor equipment so he pays that storeowner to edit his video.

Is there any significant legal difference between the 3 cases? If so, what is it?

42

Yeah, that sounds right.

BTW, I’m going to pick up my car this afternoon. The paint shop is re-distributing it to me after painting over that scratch on the bumper I didn’t like.

Ugly

43

Yeah, the third case is someone making a business out of these edits. Notice, Paramount didn’t say the users don’t have the right to own the edited versions - only that the store didn’t have the right to create them.

If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear that this was an attempt at sarcasm. Just make sure that your auto manufacturer doesn’t have any copyright restrictions and you should be OK…

44

JoeyBlades, in response to the three scenarios I posed, said:

But that is why I included the second case, with an employee editing his boss’ video as part of his job. That is as much a case of somebody being paid to edit privately owned property as the storeowner case is. In both cases the editor is a paid agent of the owner.

45

As long as the servant doesn’t make a business out of doing these conversions, scenario 2 is virtually the same as scenario 1. Technically, he/she may be guilty of a crime, but it would be next to impossible to detect, in the first place, and hardly worth prosecution to prevent, in the second.

46

Well, here’s another hypothetical situation, one that I’m sure won’t ever really come up:

Someone makes a video about Bill Gates. The video is accurate and tells no lies, but it necessarily makes a few concessions to artistic license. Gates doesn’t like the video, but his lawyers tell him he can’t stop the studio from distributing it.

Question: Is there any law that says Bill Gates can’t send out a few lackeys and buy every copy of the video to keep it off the market? And then destroy every copy? (Note that there are number of problems with this scenario, not the least of which is keeping this quiet. Once word got out, the price of the videos would skyrocket.)

>< DARWIN >
__L___L

47

Well this video tape editing, while ridiculous, doesn’t seem to be illegal. However, the wackos in that town did do something illegal with Titanic earlier:

“When the Biesingers started editing “Titanic” they faced opposition from Paramount Studios, the company that owns the film. Before Sunrise began editing, Paramount had yanked “Titanic” from American Fork Towne Cinema after finding out the theater owner had edited it.”

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