September 29, 2014
Image by Agnes Chang.
The NYTimes had a piece in yesterday’s Business Section regarding one of the people behind one of the illegal-film/tv download sites that was taken down around the same time as Megaupload.
Most of the article was interesting -...

Image by Agnes Chang. 

The NYTimes had a piece in yesterday’s Business Section regarding one of the people behind one of the illegal-film/tv download sites that was taken down around the same time as Megaupload.

Most of the article was interesting - it was a personal-focused piece about what it was like running a download site and dealing with the aftermath of going to prison for it - but a few paragraphs felt shoehorned in. The laws involving hosting digital downloads of films that are still in theaters - especially if your team makes a few hundred thousand dollars a year from it - shouldn’t be mashed up with the laws regarding using images from films or shows in other (likely noncommercial) works. The former is generally counterfeiting; the latter is generally Fair Use. 
The article says:  

The pervasive cultural norm, especially among younger people, is that illegal downloading, at least when it involves material from big corporations, is no big deal. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research, studied attitudes around ownership on collaborative, user-generated websites. He found that young Internet users became angry when peers used their works without permission, but didn’t see a problem in lifting images from shows or movies for use in their own work.

“The farther removed you feel from the source,” he said, “the more likely you are to disregard the copyright and the intellectual property.”

A few points: 
1. Wow, talk about loaded language. “Lifting images”? “Young internet users”? It’s like using the term “piracy” (which the article, of course, does) even though courts have held that it’s too loaded and not enlightening. Why is this article even talking about “lifting images” from shows or films? Hana Beshara and her colleagues didn’t go to prison because they were lifting images (screencapping, making memes) - they went to prison because they were making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit from advertising, donations and fees for access to private boards. What in the world does that have to do with “young internet users” “lifting images”?  
2. Why it “no big deal” to use images or clips from large corporations’ content to use in their own follow-on content? Is it because, as the guy from Microsoft that they quoted says, because those who do it are “farther” from the source, or is it because it’s generally legal under Fair Use to do so? Any of FYC’s regular readers have seen our posts about Fair Use, and know that it’s a lawful use of copyright to use  images, quotations, gifs and bits of text from others’ works. It’s not copyright infringement when it’s done for purposes of news reporting, commentary, criticism and discussion - and that includes use in creative writing, art, vidding, YouTube vlogs, podcasts, memes and posts. 
The story about the website’s founders/admins was interesting. But those who create and share content on “collabroative, user-generated” websites are not doing the same thing as those who rip digital files of movies that are still in theaters and share them online, and it was poor reporting for the Times to write as if they are. 
We’ve asked Mr. Monroy-Hernández to chat with us about his research, and we’ll update the site if we hear from him. 

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