COPYCENSE

Movie theaters, which have been struggling economically due to lackluster films, home theater systems, and overbuilding; are investigating a new ploy to get people into seats: broadcasting sports events.

A News.com report (via Reuters) notes that as more theater chains convert their projection equipment from film to digital and 3D systems, operators are looking to bolster midweek ticket sales by moving TV events to the big screen. The hope is that the combination of event-based sports programming, larger seats, better sound, bigger screens, and three-dimensional effects (along with roving hot dog vendors) will convince consumers that the theater is the next best thing to being there. (I can only imagine that this would be particularly appealing to NASCAR fans.)

I wonder if the theaters would have to obtain special licenses to broadcast these events. I recall that HBO occasionally cracks down on business establishments that hold special events that are tied to Sunday night broadcasts of The Sopranos. (Perhaps this is because HBO, as part of fee-based cable television, is not owned by the public, as are the network airwaves.) I am not well enough versed in broadcasting and applied copyright to offer a legitimate response to this question. If anyone has an answer to this issue, please e-mail us, and we’ll post the analysis.

Reuters. Movie Theaters Aim For Live 3D Sports. News.com. March 24, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

It seems the lawsuits against Google concerning the legality of its Book Search project are affecting the search company’s digitization efforts outside the United States. ZDNet Australia reported last week that Australian libraries have withheld their collections from Google’s Books Library Project for fear of facing legal action from that country’s publishing industry. A high level official from the National Library of Australia is on record as supporting the project, but concedes that institution likely will not partner with Google while there is “legal uncertainty.”

The article doesn’t address this issue, but a decision on the merits in the American litigation may not affect legal issues over the Books Library Project in countries outside the United States, since copyright law differs in each country. In fact, one could argue that a settlement could have a bigger impact on the Project’s internationalization. Since the large companies that comprise the American publishing industry do business across the globe, these companies would have an incentive to persuade international countries to honor the terms and conditions of such a settlement.

Munir Kotadia. Legal Issues Delay Libraries’ Google Move. ZDNet Australia. March 20, 2006.

See also:

K. Matthew Dames. Google Shouldn’t Punt on Litigation. CopyCense. Oct. 5, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

Correction appended (see below)

The Thomson Corporation, the French conglomerate that owns the Westlaw computer-assisted legal research system, will debut NexGuard at next month’s National Association of Broadcasters trade show. Billed as “content security” (instead of the rather-tainted term “digital rights management”), NexGuard is marketed to the entertainment industry, which often suffers piracy by employees who leak out movies or music prior to their official release date.

DRM Watch is touting NexGuard as “the most comprehensive B2B security technology that we know of for video content.”

Bill Rosenblatt. Thomson Announces B2B Content Security for Video. DRM Watch. March 23, 2006.

Correction: NexGuard is manufactured by Thomson, a French company that “provides technology, systems, and services to help its Media & Entertainment clients.” It is different from The Thomson Corporation, a Canadian company that is the parent company of Westlaw.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

I’m unsure of how or why I missed this news, but I am glad to read (per The Chutry Experiment) that the groundbreaking civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize will begin airing again in Fall 2006. As CopyCense posted in January 2005, the documentary had not been broadcast for more than a decade (nor had it been made available on DVD) because the licensing rights to its massive aggregation of archival film had lapsed in the mid-1990s.

But last summer, Wired News reported that the Ford Foundation and a philanthropist Richard Gilder granted $850,000 to save the project. The money will go toward licensing fees and post-production work. (It also is likely that the footage and the masters tapes will have to undergo some level of professional archival and preservation work, since the 14-part series first aired in 1987.)

According to the Wired News article,

The task of reacquiring rights [to still photos, video footage and music] has fallen on [Blackside lawyer Sandy] Forman and a team of film industry veterans who worked on the Eyes series. They have a formidable job ahead: Blackside used video footage from 82 archives, and approximately 275 still photographs from about 93 archives. About 120 song titles were used as well.

In January, PBS announced that the series would be rebroadcast on the station’s American Experience program.

Perhaps the only sad aspect to this story is that Henry Hampton, the president of Blackside, Inc. (the production company that created Eyes on the Prize) will not see the renewed broadcasts; Hampton died in 1998. He was 58. A 35,000 item collection of Hampton’s work and materials he used to make Blackside’s films is being preserved by the Washington University Library in St. Louis.

The Chutry Experiment. Eyes Back on the Prize. March 25, 2006.

Katie Dean. Cash Rescues Eyes on the Prize.” Wired News. Aug. 30, 2005.

Updates:

Catherine Foster. Rights Renewed, ‘Eyes on the Prize’ Returns. Boston.com. May 26, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.