BY NELSON PAVLOSKY

In print | April 28, 2005

It’s a well-known fact that college campuses are hotbeds of copyright infringement. However, most students are not aware of how frequently they may be technically violating copyright law and how far into their personal lives copyright law extends. Sometimes it extends into the realm of the absurd, or even the sinister.

Was the last movie showing that you attended an act of copyright infringement? The Copyright Act grants a copyright holder the exclusive right “to perform or display a work publicly,” which means “to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered.” This means that you can clearly rent a movie and watch it at home on your couch with your family and friends. However, if you show the movie in a place with unrestricted access, and people whom you do not know are in the audience, it is probably a public performance, and technically you need to ask the permission of the copyright holder before you can show the movie.

I suspect that many movie showings on campus occur without the permission of the copyright holder; I know that Free Culture Swarthmore has done multiple movie showings for the benefit of the campus community without asking permission, in public spaces such as Science Center 101. The Copyright Act doesn’t simply apply to movies, however: It obviously applies to music (did you clear the rights to the music you played at your last party?), and it also applies to video games. At the Free Culture LAN party in Science Center 199, we played Halo on the projection screen, in a room that had over 40 people in it at the height of the party. Depending on how you read the law, this could be an infringing use.

The good news is that so long as we are not charging admission, lawsuits are unlikely (although I’ve heard of people getting in trouble for showing a movie for free and charging for popcorn). You tend to see suits over commercial use because commercial actors tend to have money, and copyright owners want their cut. The bad news is that there’s nothing preventing the copyright holders from suing you if they want to, and the statutory damages for copyright infringement are out of this world: They can range from as “low” as $750, for a single infringement, to as much as $150,000 per infringement, all depending on the judge’s discretion. To quote GigaLaw.com, “While damages at the highest end of the spectrum are rare, damages that far exceed the actual loss to the plaintiff are not.” There are defenses against copyright infringement, known as “fair use,” situations in which it is legal to use a copyrighted work without permission, but if you do not fall under one of the clear statutory exceptions, a fair use defense can mean a long legal battle, which college students can’t afford.

This is not where the bad news ends, however. Even though your use might be “fair,” if the entertainment industry had their way, they would extend their control over their content beyond their lawful rights. You can see this in the movement towards digital rights management, with DVDs which do not allow you to take screenshots or fast-forward through the “coming attractions.” Fast-forwarding is a legal, legitimate use of a DVD, but the entertainment industry uses technology to prevent it.

Where the law does not satisfy the entertainment industry and technology cannot help them, they are all too willing to simply change the law. A bill was recently introduced in Congress which would have made it actually illegal to fast-forward through commercials, under its original language. Senator John McCain tried to block it, warning that the provisions of the Family Movie Act “may actually harm consumers while appearing to help them.” It’s all too easy to imagine a bill requiring projectors to have built-in technology which refuses to show movies that do not come with permission from the copyright holder. Absurd? Nothing is too absurd for the entertainment industry, and that’s more frightening than entertaining.

Neslon Pavlosky is a junior. You can reach him at npavlos1@swarthmore.edu.

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