Snippets and Piracy

The other strange thing about the Hollaar essay is how disconnected from the real world it seems on the subject of piracy:

To address such examples, as well as the parody or satirical movie trailers – such as “Brokeback to the Future” – that are clearly transformative uses of a minimal part of a movie, the movie industry might follow the Copyright Clearance Center example and establish an organization that would provide clips of movies that could be used for such purposes, at a nominal royalty or perhaps gratis in some instances. To address such examples, as well as the parody or satirical movie trailers – such as “Brokeback to the Future” – that are clearly transformative uses of a minimal part of a movie, the movie industry might follow the Copyright Clearance Center example and establish an organization that would provide clips of movies that could be used for such purposes, at a nominal royalty or perhaps gratis in some instances.

While this is not a solution that would have met the requirement of the Lofgren bill “to make publicly available the necessary means to make such noninfringing use without additional cost or burden,” it may provide a more attractive solution because it can limit misuse. The clips could be digitally watermarked so that any unauthorized copies could be traced back to their source. This would also prevent the assembling of a complete copy of a movie from “fair use” snippets, since it would raise questions when there was a request for an uninteresting portion of a movie.

Who is he imagining doing this? There are peer-to-peer networks with almost every movie imaginable available for download. While logging onto a peer-to-peer network is a hassle, it’s certainly far less hassle than submitting hundreds of snippet requests and then manually assembling them into a movie. So Hollaar’s proposed snippet security processes only make sense if we imagine that at some point in the future we’ll have eradicated peer-to-peer software from the Internet. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

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