BC Law IPTF Blog

So if you don’t know the premise for ”The Shining” you should probably stop reading this and find your way back to the cave which you call “home”.

If you’re one of the more enlightened folks, however, you might appreciate Robert Ryang’s fake trailer* of Kubrick’s classic (www.ps260.com/molly) which, after some selective editing of the original film, presents the movie as a wholesome, family flick.  The clip received widespread attention last year after a close friend of my ex (and co-worker of Ryang), Dustin Stephens, posted the the “secret” link to the trailer on his blog, El Follador. 

Although lauded as a creative triumph and lesson in editing’s importance, to some in the film industry Ryang’s work represents a potential copyright infringement quagmire.

As reported in the Globe, Ryang spoke in Boston this past week on a panel at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference, where he voiced his opinion on the right for amateurs to use copyrighted material without approval.  Central to Ryang’s argument is an oft used defense to trademark infringement - that material is fair game if its use does not compete with nor divert profit from the original. Hmm, interesting.

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2006/08/01/ 

Overall, the article is informative, but I do have one gripe.  Maybe I interpreted this incorrectly, but I thought it was weird that the contributor likened the video mash-ups impact on film to Napster’s effect on the music industry.  Sure, they both deal with copyright infringement, but I do believe that generating spoofs through creative inspiration is categorically distinct from the unauthorized distribution of music that has not been modified from the original.

*originally created for AICE’s 2005 Trailer Park competition

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Copyright, Blogs, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.