Anime News Network. is reporting that Anime Music Videos.org has been issued a cease and desist order from Wind Up Records. The full artical has been posted in the above link.
AMV.org site administrator, Phade, explained the ordeal in a post on the sites forum. He writes...
Quote:
Hey All,
I just wanted to clarify several things about the recent issue with some downloads and the fallout that has affected this site since then. Please read this entire post slowly and carefully.
Here in the United States, we have this thing called copyright. It enables anyone who creates a creative work to have exclusive rights to their own work for a limited time. This applies to anyone and you if you create anything like a poem, painting, novel, sculpture, song, and so forth. If you would like to keep the enforceability of the copyright on your works, you must take measures to defend your copyright if someone infringes upon your copyright according to the law. This is how the laws work.
Lawyers (though some may disagree) are generally regular people just like everyone else. They go to work every day and do their job. The job of a lawyer is to deal with anything that is put on their desk by their clients. If their clients dont put things on their desk, the lawyer would much rather do other things like to go home to their families, go to movies, ski, and do all the normal things that everyone else likes to do.
Here is how all of this relates to us: A fan was confused about some Evanescence AMVs found on this site. For some reason, the fan decided to attempt to contact Evanescence and ask if the band had created the videos. Whoever received the message from the fan placed the question on the desk of the bands lawyer so that they could best answer the fans question. The lawyer then asked the bands licensing department if our site had a license to offer Evanescence AMVs. Since the answer was no and the band would like to maintain the enforceability of the copyright on their songs, the lawyer had no choice but to take some kind of action.
The laws concerning copyright in the United States give the copyright holder a wide variety of tools in order to deal with potential copyright infringement. These tools vary in the amount of the severity of action that can be taken. The severity goes from mildly unpleasant to extremely unpleasant for the potential infringer.
The lawyer in our case took (what I believe to be) the minimum action needed to successfully defend their clients copyright: They asked us nicely to stop. Of all the blows that could have been dealt to this site, this was the nicest one possible under current laws.
During the conversation with the lawyer about the remedy needed, I did ask about the possibility of somehow becoming legitimate by some kind of licensing agreement. Their reply was that there are several large issues for a site like ours to obtain a license due to the nature of our site and the contract with the band. One issue (of many) is that the contract with the band requires the band to approve every use of their songs by third parties. This usually has to deal with movie sound tracks, commercials, and things like that. But in order for our site to receive a license, each and every video would have to be approved by the band themselves. Other issues apply to us by the laws and rules concerning copyright and songs distributed over the internet. (It becomes a big mess really quickly.)
Now let me make this clear: None of the actions taken by the band, label, or their lawyers had anything to do with evil greed, the dis/approval of the artistic value of the fan works available here, publicity the band gains by this site, or anything else along those lines. The entire issue revolves around nothing else but their desire to maintain the enforceability of the copyright on their songs. By having something concerning this site dropped on the desk of the bands lawyer, they had no choice but to act in a way that protects the copyright of the band according to the law. If nothing appeared on their desk about the site, nothing would have happened. End of story.
I have read about possible boycotts and petitions in various follow-up posts to this issue. If all 5 of you boycotters dont buy the next Evanescence album because of the bands desire to keep their copyright strong, you have completely missed the point of all this and will also not have your voices heard.
If a petition or letter of any kind is sent to the band and/or record label, that petition is likely to end up on the desk of the bands lawyer and they will again be forced to take some kind of action because it is on their desk. This will likely cause much more harm to this site and to the AMV community as a whole than intended by the petition. As in my original post, I strongly ask you to please not attempt to contact the band, label, or anyone else in the music industry about AMVs or this site.
So what can you do? This entire issue revolves around one thing: Laws. There are lots of laws that deal with copyright, fair use, and what people can do with them. In the times we live in now, laws are the highest and most contested battleground there is. If you would like to preserve or expand the rights that you as a normal citizen have under the law, please write and petition the persons that make the laws (here in the United States, this means Congress). There are powerful and well-funded groups on both sides of the copyright/fair use issues. Please support the groups that you agree with as well as make your views know directly as an individual to lawmakers.
I hope this clears up any misunderstanding you may have about the purpose and nature of the actions recently taken against this site.
Phade.
Quite frankly I don't know what to think. Was the fan in question completly stupid or just misguided? Is the record company being greedy or resonable? In my opinion this is complete and utter B.S. This isn't some free mp3 site, this is a place where people can show off their love of anime and music. And show off their editing skills, or lack their of. Common people their not all gems but still their are some good ones out their. Anyway I'm not gonna pass judgement on the motivation of the fan in question but I will say the Record company might be over reacting a bit.
The person who wrote that is right on. This is a MAJOR problem with copyright law, not the fault of the band. MST3K had a similar thing. In the early episodes, they encouraged people to trade tapes to promote the show. Later, they took this out and had to start enforcing the copyright, at least when they know about it. U.S. copyright law is screwed up, and they said that they have to practice enforcement in order to keep their rights, or else McHugeCorp could do the same thing. Obviously, selective copyright enforcement should be a fundamental part of copyright. I don't know what idiot amended it otherwise, but it probably had something to do with a specific business.
There might be some merit in calling it a fair use parody though.
The entire concept of copyright (actually all concepts, but especially copyright) needs to be reexamined. I don't think property can easily be applied to a non-physical object, and the word stealing definitely doesn't apply to copying. But we should have some kind of protection of creative works. Some radical new system might work, but I'm not sure what it would be.
Copyright is REALLY going to get interesting with nanotechnology. When anybody can manufacture almost anything for free, what are we going to have? P2P everything sharing? I'd like to think that such technology would force capitalism out in favor of a system (or even better, non-system) that works with it, but based on the RIAA I think that would take a while, and at first you'd have rich obsolete corporations trying to maintain their leeching power by making it illegal. The food industry would try to keep it from feeding the world, and the pharmaceutical industry would try to keep it from providing drugs (oh yeah, that's already happened).
When everything is intellectual property that can be copied for free, I think current systems would not be able to exist without extreme artificial backing from the government, which is a sick parody in the name of and against the concepts of lasseiz-faire capitalism that's already taking shape today. People who betray the spirit of an ideology to protect its superficial routines are truly scary (Stalin who built a classless society by making an elite government class among the worst oppressors in history, Bush who thinks the best way to defend freedom is to infringe on civil rights, and posers who try to rebel in conventional ways are good examples).
A system resembling open source, where intellectual property is created by volunteers truly interested in it and all work is performed for satisfaction might be the best match. Ah, economic anarchy.
As it currently stands, the sheer number of peer-to-peer file sharing sytems springing up and the massive amounts of people downloading them and then everything that costs money from them, there's no way the government can completely track everything about it. Soon there won't be any way to stop it, and the economy for all the things "shared" will be broken entirely.
It doesn't matter how resrictive the government gets about these things; technology cannot and will not advance as fast as the sharers can; it simply can't keep up in the world where almost anyone with the knowledge can create a P2P system and start another network of downloaders until it gets shut down.
If only Communism was possible. Unfortunately it'll never work out.
