Continuing to lead the world in moronic IP law suits, it’s little wonder that in-theaters The Hangover 2 was nearly stalled because of a copyright claim. Did someone already make a sequel? Was the film based on a script lifted from an online forum for starving writers? No, this multi-million dollar project almost didn’t hit theaters because of tattoo artist S. Victor Whitmill, who claimed copyright on the infamous face tattoo gracing the beaten mug of former boxing champ Mike Tyson.

Let’s forget for a moment that Whitmill was paid for his work. That Tyson didn’t demand the tat and say: “As payment, you’ll just own the copyright, and maybe you can sue someone eventually,” knowing he’d make the tribal face ink a household image.

The beautiful irony is that Warner Bros is behind The Hangover franchise. So here’s a company known for heavy-handed interpretation and enforcement of copyright law now being stalled by someone making similar claims. That door apparently swings both ways. It seems that even though Whitmill and his lawyers weren’t able to get an injunction against The Hangover‘s theatrical release, they may well be able to stall the DVD release or any subsequent release of the film until the “proper” settlements change hands.

Sure, Warner Bros is large enough to dominate in court, but then they have an image to worry about: one that lauds the strict and draconian enforcement of copyright law. Indeed, this hasn’t stopped companies such as Disney from acting pirate while claiming priest.

The only saving grace with such a joke of a case is that it’s likely to be settled out of court for some ridiculous sum and won’t lay down any legal precedent. The die has still been cast, to some degree, however, if any dollars change hands. We can count on more frivolous suits in likewise ludicrous claims of infringement. After all, the tattoo is really no more original than any of a million other tribals. Taken out of context (that is, not on a famously furious boxer’s mug) it’s unlikely anyone would be able to identify the design amid other tribals. It’s not exactly like wrestler Sting’s obvious hack job of The Crow make-up.

Of course, this will not represent some watershed case either way, as our courts are full of likened IP cases of similar silliness, of which we can only expect more and more.

It should come as no surprise that former Senator Chris Dodd has decided to renege on his decision to avoid congressional lobbying. While making some rational decisions on net neutrality during his congressional stint, we can expect a complete 180 when he’s heading the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) at a cool $1.2 million annual salary.

But this is nothing new. For years heads of the FDA made spotty decisions, only to then take high-dollar posts at the food firms that benefited from those decisions. But this does surface a rather sad trend in IP law. That it cannot be coincidence that so many lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists harbor a supposedly organic but near fanatical loyalty to thick copyright. After all, the money currently resides with those in favor of heavy-handed, neigh-indefinite, broad copyrights, so of course those making a living through maneuvering the law would lean toward the corporate rights-holders – they have all the cash.

This only slightly invalidates thick copyright arguments, but at the least it should make people take pause before buying into legal rhetoric in favor of thick copyright. I’m not talking about industry propaganda. I mean purportedly objective views on IP law. When big media likes copyright, and waves the most bills in front of otherwise non-bias faces, it becomes hard not to view anti-piracy rhetoric as industry brown-nosing. Funded sophistry.

Sure, Dodd didn’t seem to be a film industry brown-noser, but now his opinions will magically align with the MPAA’s historically uber-conservative views against fair use and radical evils like the VCR or the cable companies.

But when any authority on IP favors the industry stance while the industry has the money to hire the most lawyers, buy-off the most politicians, and produce and spread the most effective propaganda, where is the surprise? This is like the military contractor who favors a large defense budget, or the American auto worker who favors higher import taxes on foreign cars. What proves far more surprising, and thus, convincing, is when people act counter to their economic incentives.

An IP lawyer working independent of the industry can certainly hold a thick copyright stance without bearing a black mark simply because he favors tighter controls. It would just hold more weight, regardless of argument, if he scrutinized thick copyright despite their fat wallets. Alas, it looks like Dodd was unable to resist, and now his ostensibly respected, informed, and professional opinion will just happen to mimic his new employer’s stance entirely. Funny thing that.

Check out the Tech Dirt story on Dodd’s pending appointment here.

I am not a fan of the length and breadth of our current copyright system. My other posts are surely testament to that. The time line is so unrealistic that music and movies that have long lost any substantial or even noteworthy marketability are now disintegrating in cans on archive shelves. That facet of our culture is literally dissolving because of copyright.

Groups in the past, concerned about these potential losses, have come forth to volunteer to digitize the media, to which they were told “Not without permission from the copyright holder”. Alas, the copyright holder for literally the majority of the media in the 20th century is either too numerous or too difficult to find for getting permission. Well, at least for a small not-for-profit group.

So, what about a company that can make money from the media? I’m not talking about a lot of money; if these media could make a lot of money, it would already be doing so. I’m taking about pennies. But get enough pennies, and you have a business.

Perhaps we can hope that some company – perhaps Google, Inc or the like – will form enough interest in our culture to clear or even buy rights to, say, old, obscure jazz from the ’30s, and then put all that onto a site that charges based solely on market demand. A song that no one’s even heard for a decade likely has no economic value at first, but as it heard, featured, referenced, on such a site, perhaps it will be worth a dime to one person, and then a quarter to the next, and finally the acceptable ceiling price-per-track of a dollar.

To assume that all of the media rotting in canisters holds no cultural value because it holds no current market value is entirely erroneous of course. A piece of art repackaged and re-introduced to society, or – more importantly – to those who already have a indelible interest in like media, is a piece of art that can form commercial value, and the value to society is that it has not dissolved and disappeared forever.

One would hope that if a company were to take up this mantle, it would not simply drop a song or movie or book from the site because it fell into the public domain (which works will begin to do again in 2018), but would let it slide into the digital archives for public usage while – naturally – still featuring and trying to market those works still covered under copyright, but formerly unknown to most.

Perhaps there’s even room beyond selling copies to listen to or watch, but also to employ in user-generated media. As a filmmaker, I would be especially interested in cheap, underused footage to use as b-roll. I’m sure that a remix artist would feel the same way about unknown or unremembered music, as well. Indeed, only if such a service actually owned the copyright could they allow for use (as opposed to only consumption), but it’s not far-fetched. Tracking down copyright holders and buying rights is impractical for individuals, but to a company with the long-game in mind, why not?

And by all means, if anyone reading this is suddenly struck by the desire to make a service like this come to life, I’m happy to have been the one to inspire it.

It seems that some lawyers want intellectual property law to operate in only one direction. Everyone’s favorite sue-happy trade organization – the US Copyright Group (USCG) – is now going after the lawyer who provided collated legal documents and instructions (his own intellectual property) for use to defendants being sued for downloading Far Cry and The Hurt Locker.

Graham Syfert put together a packet of legal paperwork that would act as a leg-up when defending against settlement-seeking USCG. These can result in a dismissal, but – at the very least – mean more time and energy needed on USCG’s part. Not something that firms merely phishing for settlements appreciate.

But let’s step back and look at the absurdity of this for a moment. If defendants have the legal right to file motions that might save them from emptying their bank account solely so that we can fund more law firms, then this sort of action should be universal. Instead, legalese remains a threatening, intimidating force that compels many people to settle out of fear of greater reprisal.

But what the accused should be aware of is that if they made the legal process more difficult (and filing the motions included in Syfert’s packet would do just that) then it wouldn’t be so efficient a model of making money any longer. I just hope there’s no one out there who thinks that trade organizations suing individuals means that the content creators (let alone the artists) are the ones seeing the money. It’s only the lawyers, under the auspice that the reward to the copyright holder is that such lawsuits act as a deterrent (which there’s no empirical evidence to suggest, mind you).

And USCG is already in hot water for filing thousands of suits against people who’ve downloaded Hurt Locker who are not only not in the court’s jurisdiction, but when they didn’t have anything more to ID the defendants than an IP address. All that need happen to stop vampires like USCG from profiting off piracy is to make it more difficult and time-consuming to operate in this fashion.

If you receive a cease and desist letter or anything of the like, do yourself a favor and spend some time doing legal research on how to dismiss or otherwise protract the process before looking to settle up with scumbags like USCG.

I would normally be writing a review of the film Skyline right now, which opened last night. Alas – we never made it to our seats. After finding out that the local theater no longer respects student discounts on the weekends, I also encountered a mandatory bag search while getting our tickets torn. “We’re just checking for recording equipment,” she tells me. But when she sees that we have brought in snacks, she says “We can’t allow any outside food or drinks.” I quipped that she wasn’t searching for food, but recording equipment, and she found none. But she still wouldn’t allow us in with our goodies.

So, I got a refund, noting the reason on the refund form and to the completely unconcerned manager.

But there’s something important going on here. This theater clearly created a draconian policy on concession under the guise of fighting piracy. The theater certainly could not have posted a sign outside reading “Your bags will be searched for food” and not suffered irate customers who decided to go elsewhere.

And yet, as a nation, we seem willing and even eager to accept tighter controls, greater restrictions, and a whittling away of our liberties if it comes under the banner of criminal enforcement. The Patriot Act could only have passed after 9/11 as a part of our new War on Terror. All of the arbitrary prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses are suddenly okay when done as a part of the War on Drugs. Now that there’s a War on Piracy, are we to allow similar erosion of our liberties to protect us from – what? – camcorded films and bootleg video games?

I understand that the rules of illegal search and seizure do not operate the same way in private establishments, but think about what acquiescing to a search means.

The threat of someone sneaking in a camcorder is extremely low, but the possibility of patrons sneaking in candy and soda is rather high. Nearly ever dime a theater makes is from concession, hence the rise of popcorn prices coinciding with the rise of ticket prices: fewer customers because of high prices means they have to extract more profit from fewer people. So are theaters willing to “fight piracy” for movie studios only because it gives them carte blanche to eradicate outside concession? Likely. And this probably means a higher profit margin per head in the short term, since those who wouldn’t buy $7 popcorn or $4 Twizzlers can’t then bring in their own goodies from home. But the penalty for this sort of heavy-handed tactic can only end with fewer customers.

So while Hollywood has theaters checking for camcorders, several will be turned away for outside concession, and several others will decide they’re fed up with theaters altogether. No one likes being tacitly criminalized via a search after being raped on tickets 30 seconds earlier. Thus, this anti-piracy measure – like so many others – will fail miserably, blowing up in the faces of theaters who’ll lose customers (like me), and movie studios who’ll suffer from smaller ticket sales.

I can wait to rent Skyline for $1 from Redbox, and in the process, Hollywood and Regal Cinemas just lost $21 fighting the War on Piracy.

I can live with that.

After backing dead-in-the-water Blockbuster via an exclusive deal on new releases, Warner Bros proved that their idiocy holds no bounds by delaying 28 days any releases to RedBox or Netflix. In exchange, I can only imagine Netflix agreed not to point and laugh at them when the idea surfaces as cosmically dumb.

Warner Bros, however, overwhelmed with a supposed spike in DVD sales that suggests that data analysis means more than knowing how to use Excel, now wants to extend the delay on Redbox and Netflix releases. After all, if a 28 day delay happened to coincide with an increase in DVD sales, a longer delay will REALLY rake in the cash, right? Well, it rained once right after I sneezed, but that doesn’t mean I pack an umbrella when I have a cold.

No one can blame WB for trying to get more money for their stuff – that’s what capitalism is all about. But let’s hope they don’t act all shocked to find that people who were willing to pay a buck to see Jonah Hex aren’t so naive as to pay $20 to buy it. Or – assuming you can even find a Blockbuster nowadays – paying $4 for the same privilege.

Just as likely, someone who would pay a buck or gladly watch a stinker like Hex streaming via Netflix will now feel much more compelled to find a pirated copy online than hit up Best Buy. If WB were smart enough to realize that such customers are still fewer than the price insensitive hyper-consumers who buy flicks like Hex on BluRay without so much as a cursory glance at IMDb ratings, and therefore let the inevitable increase in downloads be, it would be one thing.

Alas, surely to couple the supposed increase in DVD sales will be an increase in infringement notices to those customers who used to enjoy WB movies from Redbox or Netflix. A greater window between release to the DVD market and to these innovative distributors may well broaden the pool of pirates even further. Perhaps Netflix can stifle a giggle while WB figures this out.

Getting any letter from a law firm can prove scary for your average citizen. In litigious societies, this is tantamount to having the string cut on the ever-present Sword of Damocles hanging above the law-abiding citizens. Now with already-shady law firm ACS:Law sending out tens of thousands of “copyright infringement” letters to scare people into settlements, one result is certain: this will make all infringement letters seem a bigger joke than they already are.

ACS:Law is now concerned with such notices involving supposedly pilfered porn, though with many such notices going out for classics such as Debbie Does Dallas, it’s unlikely that much – if any – will make it back to the copyright owner.

With myriad claims nowadays that a resident has an unpaid bill for which he can settle, it would be foolish to actually believe the claims. And why bother spending time investigating their validity? Instead, the smart money is on ignoring them altogether; there are simply too many scams out there, or companies who bought your debt for pennies on the dollar, jacked up an $83 old bill to $300 with rollover fees, and now claim they’ll take legal action unless settled. But they have little if any real legal power, nor are they inclined to enforce it, since there’s always someone else scared enough to settle.

This will be the fate of infringement suit letters if firms such as ACS: Law continue on their avarice crusade. This is doubtless why the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has denounced such blanket claims as scams: they don’t want their own infringement scare-letters to be viewed as more watered-down phishing junk mail to line the birdcage.

Of course, as with so many anti-piracy measures, this really only hurts those who are not seasoned pirates. A pirate would view such a letter as a warning to mind his downloading for a little while, to flag a certain file or site as “having a tracker”, or to move on to another host. But feeling scared enough to settle: not likely. The only ones who would settle would be the most innocent, ironically – those who read about outlier cases where teachers and mothers and grandmothers are sued for millions of dollars. These are the same types of people who would likewise wish to settle a supposed debt, certain that they are somehow in the wrong, and that anything written in legal-ese must bear some legal weight.

The result might eventually be that firms who wish to sue en masse might actually have to provide evidence, see the inside of a courtroom, and actually make a case before siphoning funds from wary and consternated consumers.

It seems The Terminator franchise is up for grabs, with some thinking it could sell for as much as $200 million. Halycon – the current owners – are filing chapter 11 after some bad investments. Still, having bought the franchise just two years ago for $25 million, selling it for $200 million isn’t exactly a poor return on their investment.

So some Terminator fans are wondering who is going to buy it and whether they can turn out anything on film that matches or even comes close to James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Others hope that the appreciated but ultimately canceled show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will enjoy a reappearance. Of course, for Hollywood, some things are simply too logical to occur, like making a sequel to insanely loved and successful film Serenity.

However, it’s far more likely that the same thing will happen to the Terminator franchise as happens to virtual all franchises where audiences are guaranteed: it will run even further downhill in a stream of campy, half-ass projects meant only to glean as much money from the success of the first two films as possible. In short, Cameron’s amazing success on T2 will mean that subsequent films only have to be half as good to make money. It’s hard to pinpoint what made the most recent iteration – Terminator: Salvation – fall short of the mark. But even with Christian Bale, excellent effects, and an interesting story, the film indeed lacks something special – whatever ingredient the first two films were able to tap into.

While no company – even one going through chapter 11 – is every going to risk a certain $200 million, I propose another path for the Terminator saga. Like a future ruled by Skynet and the machines, this path is also only a possibility, and not even one that we’re likely to see anytime soon.

How about if instead of selling off a storyline that has become an iconic imagine of our tech-obsessed world to the highest bidder, they give it to the fans. That means lifting all restrictions of copyright on future products. If anyone wants to write a story, make a movie, create an action figure, or code a game based on the Terminator series, then let them without any injunctions. But add one stipulation: that the company that owns the franchise can monetize those creations.

Imagine it: instead of a $250 million dollar piece of garbage being the next film to bear the Terminator name, it’s a series of fan-made shorts airing in theaters. Maybe live-action, maybe CGI, maybe animated. I have zero doubts that whatever fans produced would be far superior to what Hollywood would (not could) make in terms of story, content, and that all-too-allusive heart. Sure, major studies can pull big names, so blockbusters can (but often don’t) have solid acting and amazing effects.

But consider the difference between fan-made The Hunt for Gollum and billion-dollar Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson, et al. Indeed, Jackson’s work is finer in terms of effects and the overall hotty factor of his elves, but these differences are in no way proportional to the difference in cost. In other words, the maker of The Hunt for Gollum came eerily close to Lord of the Rings without being in the same solar system so far as costs go. The same would indeed happen with Terminator.

Of course it would prove a huge gamble, but since so few fan-made projects have enjoyed big-budget advertising and buzz-making, it’s hard to tell how much money they would make. Then again, there simply wouldn’t be that much money you would have to make. When some 60% of films don’t make it into the black at theaterical release, you have to wonder how much money is too much when it comes to the production. You may create an amazing film in terms of set, effects, and cast, but if it cost you $300 million and the film itself lacks any real heart, then you’ve got a long way to go to realize gain. Distribute a shoestring budget production for fans by fans, and you’re only risking the cost of advertising.

Like I said, this is about as likely to happen as is the Skynet holocaust, but what a beautiful possibility.