RE: [dvd-discuss] Slightly OT - Japanese copyrights

["Kroll, Dave" <Dave_Kroll(at)cargilldow.com>]

"What about something that offers the subtitling as a service?"

TechTV did a story about similar services.  (I think it's been mentioned
here, too.)
http://www.techtv.com/freshgear/reviews/story/0,23008,3372874,00.html

It appears to be acceptable.  (Although I it appears that means
 "not-yet-sued", rather than endorsed or licensed.)

According to www.moviemask.com:
Are there copyright issues involved with MovieMask?
No, there are no copyright issues involved. Bruce Ewing, Copyright 
Attorney, spoke on Fox News saying, "what the software manufacturer 
is doing is simply giving viewers another way to view a copyrighted work, 
and absent any copying, it's not going to be copyright infringement."

http://www.clearplay.com doesn't appear to have any pages
on "legal" or "copyright", so I can't tell their position.

Surely the issues must be similar between subtitling and
"masking".  (Maybe not.  Change the facts, change the verdict.)

David Kroll

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Charles Ballowe [mailto:hangman@steelballs.org] 
Sent:	Thursday, February 28, 2002 11:33 AM
To:	dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject:	Re: [dvd-discuss] Slightly  OT - Japanese copyrights

On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 11:53:38AM -0500, Ernest Miller wrote:
> Space shifting is generally legal and if you subtitled a movie that you
used
> yourself you probably would be fine.  However, distribute that movie and
you
> will get in trouble (having violated both copying and distribution
rights).
> 
What about something that offers the subtitling as a service? If I was a 
retailer who sold copies of a movie, which would be legal by contracts
with the copyright holder etc -- even then they make the copies, not me,
and also run a service that allows people to send me copies of movies they
own and I send them back subtitled (or they buy it from me and I sub-title
it before sending - saves 2 stages of shipping, they don't need to have 
held it before it becomes their copy). Especially if I have a way of
overlaying
the subtitles without making a copy of the work, I don't see a problem -
unless
I'm missing something in the law. It may be creating a derivative work, but
the derivative work isn't being sold, the service to create it is. 

> This, of course, is what does not make sense to me.  Copying is legal for
> personal use (mostly) but not if you distribute it.  Why not get rid of
> copying as a violation at all?  Why not just have public distribution be
the
> crime?
> 

This gets into the question of what to do about private distribution. I
would
argue that Napster, for example, wasn't public distribution. It's easy to
say that the Internet allows communities to form that are world wide. If you
restrict sharing to only one such group (while membership may be open to 
anybody) it's no longer really public. It's a long shot arguement, but it
is based on parallels between social networks and computer networks.