Larry Lessig and the AMV kids
An “AMV” or “anime music video” is a fan-produced recording made by overlaying a soundtrack with spliced-together clips from Japanese animated films. Needless to say, a good deal of the source material (both audio and visual) in the “AMV scene” is used without permission, which has raised the ire of some of the copyright holders.
Larry Lessig posted today about music-industry opposition to the kids who make AMVs, lamenting it as the latest effort by Big Media to hammer the Internet into a “consume-only” medium.
While I’m generally sympathetic to Prof. Lessig’s arguments about copyright, the AMV scene strikes me as a particularly misleading example. An typical AMV contains several minutes worth of a movie or movies and the entirety of a recorded song. The defense in a copyright-infringement suit would face an uphill battle. But there’s no reason AMVs have to be distributed that way – it’s an issue of technology, not a legal issue.
There is nothing about modern computers that prevents AMVs from being distributed not as an audiovisual recording, but as a set of instructions a computer program could follow to assemble the AMV from the source material. If you (the viewer) have all of the source materials on your computer, the program will reassemble and play the AMV. Some media owners might sue, but their chances would be considerably less likely (Galoob v. Nintendo, for instance, confirmed a user’s right to apply patch-files to media they own.) As a bonus, the AMV files would be much smaller – a few kilobytes, instead of several megabytes.
If the AMV scene wants to avoid copyright problems, technological solutions are well within reach.