It was God’s will, Siege. Read your Bible some time, it’s all in there. Maybe you’d understand more about following what God wants, instead of what’s easy to do, if you opened it a little more often.
I’ll pray for you.
punha, you are goooooood…
Seige, however is jest bad!
Were my kid in school I wouldn’t want her teachers showing her ANY movie without getting my permission first.
One of the things I am really interesting in finding out is how the copyright infringement is dealt with. Mel Gibson has been very quick to file lawsuits against people who have bootlegged this movie.
So, how will they respond to a schoolteacher who obviously posessed an illegal copy of the film. The cynic in me wonders if Mel, being a good Christian guy, will be as litigious against a fellow Christian, who was possibly using this film to spread the word of god…er…teach history.
As an adamant supporter of copyright law, I am inclined to want to see this teacher fined. Otherwise, you are sending the message to these students that bootlegging is not a big deal.
Being the supporter of fairuse that I am. I should point out reproduction of part of a copyrighted work for educational uses generaly falls under fairuse. This is assuming of course he did it for education. I don’t think he did. Just thought I’d point that out.
On a related but different thought, whats this fixation some of you seem to have with copyright? Kids were shown an R rated movie. Thats bad. To read some of your posts I get the impression you think the possible copyright infringment was worse. What kind of screwed up priorities are those?
I don’t entirely agree. I can think of instances where a portion of an R-rated movie might be appropriate to use. In the movie Glory, for example, there are several scenes that explore the effects of supply lines to the troops in the Civil War. I might consider using the scenes where Col. Shaw is pleading with the Quartermaster for shoes. (I haven’t seen the film in a while, so there may actually be inappropriate material in this scene.) I’d review the excerpts carefully, though, before I used them, and probably run them by my department head or something, too.
And FWIW, we saw Ben-Hur in school. Several times! In a school with lots and lots of Jewish kids. One of my Latin teachers did love to show movies instead of teaching us. We saw Spartacus, Cleopatra, and a really cool little flick called “Violence Just For Fun” starring Jack Palance. (The other Latin teacher was much cooler, and would run the film backwards for us so we could see the chariot race in reverse.) Anyway, nobody got upset about it, probably because the movie was so damn boring that we all just slept through it anyway. Spartacus was much more fun. There was torture and dismemberment in that one.
You can legally use an excerpt of something for educational purposes, but it’s supposed to be an excerpt that you obtained legally. So, if I were to use the excerpt of Glory that I posited above, that would be legally and ethically acceptable, provided that I used a tape that I purchased or rented. I can’t go into Best Buy and shoplift a tape to use in class and call it legal. A bootlegged tape is no different.
Even if I can somehow obtain a legitimate copy of a film that hasn’t been released on video yet, like the ones that are provided to members of the Academy, it still wouldn’t be okay. It may be a technical copyright violation, but I don’t think anyone would be too upset if my friend in the Academy let me watch his copy of Monster, but it I took it and showed it to a bunch of people…very much not okay.
Teaching kids stuff they’ve all seen a million times before is worse than property theft?
No, you’re getting it wrong. What you’re noticing is attention being given to the one part of the event that is clearly and undisputably an objective violation of a specific law --bootlegging the film, theft of intellectual property – that’s independent of the content of what he showed or his intent in showing it.
The R-rating, the religiosity, the violence, the lack of parental consent, all those could be subjected to excuses and arguments ranging from the sublime to the legalese to the lame (e.g. there may be no actual LAW in DC against a minor being shown an excerpt from an R-rated movie, MPAA ratings being a private film-industry thing; there is no law excluding all religious material from the curriculum; “the children have seen worse”; “we can’t tailor everything to the parents’ prejudices”) resulting in people holding rallies to support a “right” to do this. Theft, OTOH, is something he can be nailed on that can’t be weaseled out of.
I’ve read the article and I think I am missing something here.
What exactly was he teaching in class that would corrolate to this film?
SnoopyFan:
Not even that old “How to Behave in the Cafeteria” film from the 1950’s nor Disney’s “Our Friend the Beaver”?
The available spin seems to be suggesting Social Studies as the subject of relevance.
Green Bean, I can’t believe that you’d need parental permission to see Glory. Of course, I saw it 3-4 times from 6th grade to 12th without ever having to bring in a permission slip.
As for Passion, I could see showing it in a Highschool religion class (comparative, that is.) It would have been more interesting than spending a week talking about passion plays, without any real feel for them. As for using it for historical reasons… I’ll defer to Dio as to the accuracy and note that it’s really annoying when you see a movie that’s contradictory to the actual events being historically protrayed. We once watched Young Frankenstein {frank - EN - shteen} in history, and it’s way harder to reanimate a corpse than that movie makes it out to be. 
C
I can believe that a public school teacher would show 60-90 minutes of a bootlegged, R-rated movie. Is it at all possible that what he actually showed was 60-90 seconds of the Passion? If so, that would be a horse of a whole different color…
Well, at least you got what some people (at least at the time) considered a good movie.
Know what movie I saw in school? Twice? “Top Gun.” Yes, that’s right. American History with a soundtrack by the Righteous Brothers. Woo.
Julie
Not to be confused with Evil Angel’s “Very Friendly Beavers (vols. 1 thru 43).”
Green Bean I don’t think we disagree - the issue to me isn’t “its R rated”, it’s “Without my persmission” - I would not agree to a situation where a teacher was making the decision of what was appropriate for my child to see. I agree that there may be some scenes from some R rated movies that would have some value. But I should be aware of it beforehand -cause ulitimately it’s my decision if I want my child exposed to it.
I’m seeing more attention placed on the boot legging then on the boot legging then the fact kids were exposed to a movie they were too young for. I have not seen the movie but from what I hear it’s pretty graphic.
First I think “nailed” is interesting choice of words given the subject. As I said before if he can prove it was for educational uses it could be fair use and therefore not copyright infringment or “theft” as you seem to call it. So there is a good chance he could “weasel” out of this if he can prove it was for education.
What this amounts some guy runs a stop light in broad daylight on a busy road. He has a missing headlight. Some people who see this are more upset about the faulty headlight then him running the stop sign.
Might as well be mad at the stop light runner for the right reasons.
If you mean the copyright infringment that could fall under fairuse.
I think that would be because bootlegging is clearly the far worse infraction, here. If all he’d done is show a bunch of kids an R-rated movie, so what? I watched an endless stream of R rated movies when I was that age, and younger. Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Alien, and worse. Didn’t have any sort of negative effect on me. <twitchtwitch> Showing an R rated movie to kids is stupid, but only because a teacher should know that your average parent is probably going to completely freak out over it.
On the other hand, this guy using his position as a public school teacher to proselytize to other people’s children is massively unethical, and there’s no way this guy could legally own a copy of this movie, so “fair-use” doesn’t even enter into the picture.
Unless Mel Gibson personally gave this guy a copy of the movie, then he has obtained it illegally. It’s still in theaters. It has never been offered for sale, nor broadcast on television. The fact that he owns it at all is a violation of copyright laws.
Hm. Putting aside for the moment the legal problems of a bootleg copy, I could see some instructional value for the film (once it’s released on video), * given the proper context*. For instance, I could see some use for it in teaching my art history classes, particularly when discussing Passion scenes from Renaissance art (which, one could argue, is the same spirit of Gibson’s film). For instance, the “Ecce Homo” scene could have been taken directly from a Northern Renaissance painting. The Crucifixion scene would provide the class with the temporal sequence of all the symbols that artists pack into Crucifixion paintings–John with Mary and Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, , the two thieves, the Romans giving Christ vinegar to drink, Longinus piercing the side of Christ, etc.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t feel comfortable showing a class the Flagellation scene (and I’m teaching college kids, mind you, not 6th graders), and there’s no way I would show an hour of the film–nothing more than a short two or three minute clip would be appropriate. In the Crucifixion scene, I’d be fast-forwarding through a lot of it, just to get to the good (heh, heh) parts (“OK, let’s just skip past that silly raven… blah blah blah… oh, wait, there’s the sponge soaked in vinegar, let’s stop there for a moment…”). Even then, the clip would need to be contextualized–I would discuss how it related to the scene in a particular painting, and I would remind my students that neither the painting nor the film should be considered historically accurate–these are artistic expressions of faith, and need to be understood on those terms.
I don’t know enough about this teacher’s class to say whether or not it would ever have been appropriate for him to use any clips from the film–although I seem to recall learning about different religions in my social studies classes in high school. However, it seems like a moot point, since if he’s shown such an extended “clip” of the movie, it probably means he’s shown a lot of very disturbing, violent scenes that no amount of class discussion would help contextualize.
Still, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that there’s absolutely nothing inThe Passion that could conceivably be linked to a course of study–only it would have to be very carefully handled (just like any religious material), and one would have to take the audience into mind. I think short clips would be appropriate for high school students in a class that deals with the Catholic Church and Renaissance art. For a 6th-grade social studies class… hm, only a very short clip of the non-violent material, and heavily contextualized with class discussion–and only from a legally-obtained film.
This guy has clearly failed to meet any such standards.