I think a reasonable person would see that what you describe is an attempt to make an end run around both the spirit and letter of the law. But what VidAngel was doing was "one copy = one view", which is IMO entirely reasonable. There is zero moral difference between mailing someone a Bluray disc (with instructions -- either automated or manual -- of what parts to skip) vs. keeping that disc in a warehouse and streaming the (censored) contents to exactly one person at a time.
But I wonder what would happen if we had some super-fast rocket drone delivery service so it's just a video rental shop on steroids?
Also, how do you feel about libraries rebinding their books to fix/prevent the books from wearing out?
You can backup software[1][2] (allowed by law, not fair use) but not movies.
[1] https://www.southerncaliforniapatents.com/articles/2014/10/0...
Of course this may be abuse of the fair use backup copy, but when talking digital, we are anyways inventing philosophies.
Other way could be the backup could be entitled to "one last rental" to recoup last 4 bucks or so. I think that would be fair use but others may not.
Streaming is making a copy of the contents, which, if done without a license, usually violates the content owner’s copyright.
"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:[8]
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "
My point is just that if you think it's a good idea to extend first sale doctrine to digital files without any restrictions you may first want to consider the logical consequences of that.
I see that what you're saying is that User X could watch the first 10 seconds and then the second 10 seconds while you start you're first 10 seconds but that would be sort of a ridiculous use case for the following reasons:
1. your system would include a bunch of extra work for your solution to make this work, easier and cheaper to buy 10,000 copies of the movie and stream as needed.
2. people pause movies thus your solution becomes even more expensive because it would need to calculate out who has paused their ten seconds at the 5 second mark etc. etc.
Thus it seems likely that any solution being built on the model of we have physical copy we stream you copy will be built with showing complete movie and not any clever cutting up of movie to make the number of physical copies we have stretch further. The way the law works each different use case - cutting up movie, showing complete movie - would probably be challenged and there is no reason to suppose that they would all be allowed to pass, in fact since the showing complete movie was not allowed to pass in the real world it seems unlikely that the weird edge case cutting up movie would be allowed to pass even if law was changed to allow showing complete movie was changed.
I fully understand, but there's got to be a better way to describe this line in the sand given that DVDs contain digital files. "Physical" doesn't work because networks have a physical layer. "Stream" is also problematic because bitstreams are present on any kind of media. Even "network" doesn't quite cut the mustard because a chain of video stores could be described as a trade network. "Tangible" comes damn close, but suppose the baud rate is slow enough and the voltage high enough that I can discern the download by touching the wire? What, then, is the unambiguous word for what we're talking about here?
If it really boils down to letting time elapse between views/customers, shouldn't that be what the law demands?
Just like you can't lend out individual chapters of a book....
You can't? If I buy a physical book, I can't rip a page out of it and sell that to you? That's certainly the first I've heard of any such law.
What you can’t (legally) do is copy a page of your book and sell it/give it away (though maybe one could argue that a mere page would be a small enough excerpt to fall under fair use).
VidAngel (and the hypothetical 10 second streamer) fall under the latter, since streaming inherently makes a copy. As you pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it would be perfectly legal (but completely impractical) to cut up a VHS tape into individual scenes and resell those pieces of tape, since no copy was made.
If we're being pedantic about a few stray electrons, you also make a copy when you stream it from the disc to your CPU, from your CPU back to a monitor, and so on. If VidAngel had a minimum "purchase" time of 1yr the case probably would have swung the other way. The issue isn't the streaming, but rather that the nature of the agreement was more akin to making a copy than not (with "sales" happening substantially faster than they would have in meat space).
Instead, the solution that the USA's current legal system is going with is "You _can_ run an online rental service, as long as you have the copyright owner's permission (e.g., you have a contract with them in which you give them money and they give you their permission)"
It should require no cooperation to build an online version of DVD rental.
> It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.
I don't think transcoding should matter, at least if it's done on the fly, but also it's entirely doable to throw raw DVD bits over the wire. And neither one should count as a copy any more than shining light onto a book makes "copies".
Except for all the pre-digital precedent that informs and agrees with my opinion.
> The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places.
I don't think it reaches hyperbole. The bits only need to exist in two places for milliseconds. It should not count as a copy. It's only a copy in a pedantic technical sense.
> The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.
Except they're supposed to lose a huge amount of control after the first sale. This feature of copyright is broken for digital items.
I mean, Europe's already working on it. I think we'll get there eventually.
And I'm not claiming most of what you seem to think I am.
The only reason rentals worked was because of the physical constraints that limited the distribution of each copy. Take that away, what you're left with is just thinly veiled copyright abolishment.