Break a leg, not the law
Kotaku is currently featuring a video walkthrough of The Movies: Stunts and Effects, due for release this week. I was interested to learn that, within the context of the game, actors can incur injury while performing stunts, and as such the expansion pack contains a hospital structure you can add to your studio. I’m happy to see the game include a new way for actors to “break a leg”… the de facto method being to fall down drunk, of course.
Mu Nansen’s blog features an insightful write-up on roles for women in cinema / machinima, and on the challenges of writing characters of the opposite sex (for either gender). Good stuff as usual from Mu.
And Paul Marino has a very interesting blog post regarding this story and the likely copyright headaches that may be on the way from our friends at the RIAA regarding music videos which use copyrighted material. Record companies have recently discovered a fairly major revenue stream with sales of music videos, and as we all know, when money is at stake, that’s when action gets taken on matters of this sort. I believe it will become increasingly difficult to stay off the radar when “borrowing” copyrighted music for machinima purposes, which is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of filmmakers at, for example, Sims99, where every day new music videos are released. There seems to be a widely accepted myth amongst machinima makers that, if my exploitation doesn’t make me any money, then I am not violating the spirit of the copyright laws. Those who think so might want to reread the laws, which make no such allowance for “freeware” usage. There IS a mention of commercial vs. non-commercial use, but that is only one of four criteria used to determine “fair use.” The rest of the law and court precedents are fairly straightforward. To quote: “There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.” International copyright laws do not have substantial differences from U.S. Copyright Law in this area.
Fortunately, a few smart directors have already been moving in the direction of Creative Commons source music, and they will be very very glad they did so before too long.
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Each filmmaker enters the fray with such little know how, and less know of. I remember dropping the first track into a movie with not the slightest care. As you become a more serious ‘artist’ you begin to consider the rights of other artists. You learn to respect copyrights. But, there will always retain a certain liberty to this most populist form of filmmaking. The real mud, I think, will hit the hosting sites, M.com, for there distribution of such ripped and burned material.
Comment by todnyc28 — June 6, 2006 @ 11:42 am
I agree with you both. Excellent blog, Phil. The rights issue is going to become increasingly more important to machinima. As Paul pointed out in a blog last year (connected to a legal article on fair use and machinima), the only way to own your own machinima is to create completely new, custom content. And even then, it’s still somewhat touchy from the legal perspective. For those of us who are above board, I think blogs like yours and energetic debate in machinima forums will make it plain that machinima filmmakers need to consider the rights issue. There will always be an “underground” group of people who don’t give a rats ass for all of this fair use and will do what they want to do. I sympathize, but can’t be a part of that group.
Comment by gToon — June 6, 2006 @ 1:23 pm
One can certainly feel the wagons of the music industry circling. But there might more than just music on the horizon.
I often make iClone facial models by using famous people faces as my original model source. Though my models get further edited, shifting away from the orginal source, it is very easy to make a likeness with this technology and I can only imagine that this type of technology will expand in use.
For example, Sir Alec Guiness (not my model)
http://www.allrobotradio.com/images/sir%20alec.jpg
Comment by hathead — June 10, 2006 @ 11:35 pm