Tag: Disney

VidAngel: A Litany of Copyright Defenses

Photo by rootstocks

VidAngel offers what is functionally a video-on-demand (VOD) service plus “filtering” for viewers who want to see mainstream fare with certain naughty bits—sex, foul language, violence, etc.—removed. To provide this service, though, VidAngel allegedly violates the copyright owners’ exclusive right of reproduction and public performance, as well as Section 1201 of the DMCA prohibiting circumvention of technical protection measures (TPM) used to encrypt DVDs.

Movie studios Disney, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilms, and Warner Bros. sued VidAngel, and in December 2016, the District Court for the Central District of California issued an injunction, halting the defendant’s operations. The judge’s opinions in the order state that all arguments favor the plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits.  VidAngel has appealed the injunction to the 9th Circuit where briefs were filed last week.

The Family Home Movie Act (2005)

As a frame of reference, if a consumer owns a feature film on DVD, a statute called the Family Home Movie Act (FMA), allows the use of technological means (e.g. a product called ClearPlay) to make limited portions of his disk “imperceptible” while playing it in a private viewing situation.  Designed for audiences who want to “filter” out scenes containing the aforementioned naughty bits, the FMA affords the viewer a limited right to use technology to achieve this “filtering” without infringing copyright.  (As a no-tech option, there is of course no limit to the amount a viewer may close his eyes, plug his ears, and sing La-La-La during those portions of a movie he finds offensive.)

We can debate whether or not “filtering” motion pictures is truly a right, but there is apparently enough of a market that wants to “filter” that the subject has at least been an issue.  For instance, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) was opposed to filtering technology like ClearPlay, claiming that editing the films violates the right of the author to disseminate a work as he sees fit, which is certainly true. So, the FMA was enacted as a legal compromise, written very narrowly to provide the home viewer with the ability to “make imperceptible” limited portions of legally-acquired DVDs.

Enter VidAngel

The CEO of VidAngel, Neal Harmon, reportedly grew up in a household where, for religious reasons, he was not allowed to watch a number of mainstream movies.  Remembering what it felt like to be culturally out of the loop, Harmon founded VidAngel in Utah in 2013—it is now headquartered in Silicon Valley—as a way to provide families in similar circumstances with a solution.  According to testimony, VidAngel approached the studios with their model; and the studios were not interested. There are any number of reasons why a film producer will be opposed to enterprise-scale “filtering” by a third party, and the studios were certainly under no obligation to engage in that endeavor.

Deciding to forge ahead, VidAngel developed a convoluted workflow and business model based on a bold legal assumption that the FMA allows the company to provide an unlicensed video-on-demand and “filtering” service while avoiding liability for infringement. The overly-complex model looks a lot like what it is:  an attorney’s Rube Goldberg attempt to circumvent copyright law. And although VidAngel wants to make this a story about the right of consumers to “filter,” launching the hashtag campaign #savefiltering, that debate has little bearing on the infringing nature of the VidAngel enterprise.

VidAngel’s Model/Workflow

VidAngel buys feature film DVDs, which they decrypt, digitize, organize, and store as “segments” that are tagged to facilitate “filtering” by pre-selected criteria (e.g. blasphemy). A customer uses the VidAngel app—available on Roku, AppleTV, Chromecast, etc.—to select among the criteria and create his “filtering” preferences.  Next, the customer “buys” a DVD from VidAngel’s inventory for $20—let’s say 1988’s Working Girl. But having filtered for nudity, he does not want to see Melanie Griffith vacuuming topless. (There’s a cleanliness next to godliness joke in there, but I’ll let it go.)

Most of the time, the customer doesn’t choose to receive the DVD he “bought”—it does still have the unwanted scenes, after all—but instead, he streams Working Girl, sans topless vacuuming scene, and then “sells” the DVD back to VidAngel for a refund minus $1/day for a standard-def stream ($2/day for high def). Note, the DVD never changed hands; VidAngel “held the DVD” for the customer during the “buy-sellback” interval.

According to VidAngel’s testimony, 80% of the disks are “sold back,” so if this sounds like an absurdly complicated way to operate what is primarily a VOD service, that’s because it is overly complicated—and quite on purpose. Because what VidAngel is counting on is that during the brief period when the customer “owns” the DVD, that customer may then legally “direct” VidAngel to perform the same function he would otherwise be allowed to perform at home under the FMA.  That’s their theory anyway.

The fact that VidAngel markets its service as providing streaming for “as low as $1” belies its claim as a “reseller” of disks; and the fact that 80% of its customers “sell back” the DVDs seems  more than sufficient evidence to reasonably describe the core business as video-on-demand. But even if a court might agree that a VidAngel customer is temporarily the “owner” of the DVD, this should have no bearing in assessing VidAngel’s infringing activities; and their own workflow makes this clear.

VidAngel Infringes Before a Customer Exists

In order to prepare files for “filtered” viewing, the company has to decrypt a DVD and then make and store copies of entire films on its servers (i.e. in fixed form). For practical reasons, the company must perform these two infringing activities prior to any customer “buying” any disks. There is simply no other way to organize the workflow and provide the service they offer. Because the infringement against the owners’ right of reproduction, and violation of the DMCA, occurs before a customer becomes part of the workflow, VidAngel’s claim that it is shielded by the FMA on the grounds that they “filter” at the direction of a DVD owner is simply impossible. The only owner of the DVD at the time when decryption and copying are performed is VidAngel. Moreover, VidAngel has predetermined a set of criteria for “filtering,” and no matter how many possible permutations of a given film this may produce, the company has still acted to create a finite set of “filters” it makes available to a prospective DVD owner rather than its claim to “filter” at the direction of an actual DVD owner.

Next, when VidAngel streams a movie, this constitutes a public performance in violation of another exclusive right protected by copyright.  Again, VidAngel puts its faith in the FMA, arguing that because they only stream a “filtered” version of a movie to the customer during the period when the customer “owns” the DVD, they are not publicly performing any more than if the customer himself were to engage in the same function at home using a legal “filtering” technology as permitted by the FMA.

Here, VidAngel appeals to the “spirit” of the FMA and not the statute, implying that Congress believed generally in the principle of “filtering” when it wrote the law. Whether this is true of Congress or not, VidAngel is asking the court for an extremely broad (dare I say, leap of faith?) interpretation of narrowly written legislation that does not allow a party doing the “filtering” to publicly perform a film beyond the confines of ordinary private viewing.   The FMA simply does not anticipate a model anything like VidAngel, which is exactly why the company is straining to create its own loophole in the law with its over-complicated pretense of “selling and buying back” DVDs.

VidAngel Claims Fair Use

Finally, VidAngel appeals to fair use doctrine, claiming that the “filtered” versions are “transformative” under the first prong, that the service is not a substitute under the third prong, and that the service does not create potential market harm under the fourth prong.  I suspect the appellate court will agree with the district court, which found that the fair use test favored the plaintiffs across the board; but it was the judge’s response to VidAngel’s fair use claim under the fourth prong that I find particularly revealing about the rationales being applied in VidAngel’s defense.  The court states:

“VidAngel attempts to support their arguments by offering customer survey results that indicate that over 51% of VidAngel customers would not watch their offerings without filtering. The survey results are ultimately detrimental to VidAngel’s arguments. The fact that 49% of VidAngel’s customers would view movies without filters shows that VidAngel’s service does serve as an effective substitute for Plaintiff’s unfiltered works, for approximately half of VidAngels users.”

Not that attorneys for VidAngel aren’t on the ball, but they actually presented evidence to indicate that nearly half of VidAngel’s customers may be poached from the potential customer base of the rightful owners of the works.  That certainly seems like a good way to fail on the fourth prong of the fair use test, but the self-defeating oddness of this argument is consistent with the major theme running through this entire case:  that the overly-complex design of the VidAngel model reveals a strenuous, ham-handed, effort to thread the enterprise through the legal boundaries of copyright.  It is little surprise that the lower court found all of VidAngel’s arguments untenable, and it is hard to imagine that the appeals court will not sustain the injunction.

A Moral Enterprise?

Advertised in their promo video as “Movie Heaven,” VidAngel presumably targets a market with sincerely held religious beliefs, even though the first laws they seem to have overlooked are Commandments #8 & 10: Thou shalt not steal, and Thou shalt not covet, respectively.  For all the assumed piety in VidAngel’s “filtering” crusade, the company clearly feels no sense of moral conflict about its for-profit, unlicensed exploitation of the thousands of people whose labor makes the movies. In fact, it is notable that among the content a VidAngel subscriber may have “filtered” from viewing is the end credits listing the names of all those workers.  I’ll leave the moral rationalization of that to the operators of VidAngel themselves, but as far as the copyright implications go, it seems like they don’t know what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks they’re doing.

What is Parody?

Every once in a while, a story emerges, usually involving the use of music in either a humorous, provocative, or even offensive context that is then assumed by many to be an example of fair use in the form of parody. Aside from the fact that parody itself does not automatically guarantee a use would be judged fair in an actual court case — there are several other factors — the word parody itself is frequently used as a catch-all description for a variety of works that are not, in fact, parody.  Most notably this year, the case involving Goldie Blox’s use of the Beastie Boys’  song “Girls,” though ruled in favor of the Beasties*, has left some lingering confusion about the nature of parody.

The other night, my kids showed me this video by an obviously very talented young performer named Jon Cozart. He takes four famous Disney songs based on four famous Disney princess movies and sings a medley of four new narratives expressing his own jaundiced view as to what happens after happily ever after.  They’re funny, he has a great voice, and I’m not surprised this video has over 37 million views; but it isn’t parody even though it calls itself “parody” on YouTube, and I was even tempted to call it parody myself.  (Note that I am using Cozart’s excellent video as an example and am expressing opinions.  There is no case involving his work.)

A parody must lampoon the original work itself. So, merely writing new words to accompany a popular melody, or even riffing on the sounds of the original words, does not make the new work a parody unless the new work directly targets the content and soul of the original.  Thus, Cozart’s rendition of “Under the Sea,” which conveys a narrative in which a mermaid suffers the deprivations of ocean pollution, is a work of social satire and not parody.  In fact, the works of the most famous artist in this genre, Weird Al Yankovic, are largely not parodies either because the original songs are not the targets (or victims) of the joke. For instance, in the early 80s, when Al turned Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll” into a song about ice cream gluttony called “I Love Rocky Road,” he used wordplay and the familiar refrain to create a brand new comic piece, but he did not parody or comment on the mood, attitude, spirit, or content of the original song or its creator(s). This is why, even if it were not Al’s standard M.O., he would have had to pay for a mechanical license to produce the new song as well as a synch license for the video.

This video by producer The Key of Awesome, mocking Lorde’s song and video “Royals” is a far better example of actual parody.  In fact, near as I can tell, this producer primarily makes legit parodies.  The new lyrics (and new visuals) directly mock Lorde, her song, the original video, and even the spirit of the song and its performer. (Sorry, Lorde, nothing personal.)  This is a very different animal than taking the melody of “Royals” and writing lyrics to express something, comic or not, that is external to the original work.  For example, I wrote a few weeks ago about the Westboro Baptist Church borrowing Paul McCartney’s “Hey Jude” to write, perform, and distribute a video of themselves singing an anti-semitic rant called “Hey Jews.” My own kid commented that, offensive or not, the song was probably fair use as a parody, and I had to administer a dope slap. Again, in order for the Westboro Baptists to produce a parody, they would have to rewrite the lyrics to directly mock McCartney’s message to young Julian Lennon, or at least attempt to mock some intrinsic meaning in the original work that, I guess, also expresses how much they hate jews. I have no idea what that would sound like, but that’s what it would have to be to accurately be called a parody.

And that brings us to what I believe is confusing about what happened in the Goldie Blox v Beastie Boys case.  For that video, which was really a commercial, the producers rewrote the lyrics to “Girls.” Had they produced the song as a stand-alone work without the video, one might be able to call it a parody because the original lyrics were misogynistic, and the new lyrics were about female empowerment. But even then, there are a few factors that muddy those waters.

For starters, the original “Girls” is arguably a satire of misogyny, and so parodying that work technically conveys a pro-misogyny message, which was certainly not Goldie Blox’s intended communication. And this notion of an expectation that an audience will understand when a parody is being conveyed is actually relevant, both legally and creatively. As established in the landmark case Leibovitz v Paramount, the parody maker must have a reasonable expectation that a broad segment of the public will get the joke, that the work being targeted needs to be in the contemporary, public consciousness to the extent that the parody itself will be broadly understood. This isn’t simply a legal precedent; there is no point in making a parodic joke for which the intended audience has no frame of reference. “Girls” is a 20-year-old song that doesn’t get a lot of contemporary airplay or use in other media; and it is very probable, therefore, that Goldie Blox’s audience of parents, likely to be in their early to mid-30s, may not have the song present in their consciousness. Thus, that segment of viewers would not be immediately aware that any attempt at parody was at play.

Confusing this aspect even further is the video itself. We see young girls building an elaborate contraption and looking brainy, nothing that conveys mockery of anything at all. So, by experiencing the video in conjunction with the song, but without any knowledge of the original “Girls,” the viewer is completely ignorant of any attempt at parodying anything whatsoever. Rewriting the words to an existing song in order to promote a broader message about girl power, especially for the purpose of promoting a business, might arguably produce a piece of social commentary, but it deviates very far from targeting the content of the original work for the sake of parody.

Even in the age of the Internet, words still have meaning. And just because there are market forces at play that would like to see every form of remix and reuse classified as a fair use, this is no reason to abandon our ability to make literate distinctions among various types of works. It isn’t simply a matter of policy or law, but is a matter of cultural understanding.

*CORRECTION:  Thanks to commenters for jarring my memory.  GoldieBlox settled without a court ruling.  They paid a fine to the Beastie Boys, who donated the money toward some cause related to empowering young girls.