4 ms·

How is this legal?

• ekianjo 4y ago
  It's not: > No portion of this script may be performed, or reproduced by any means, or quoted, or published in any medium without prior written consent of SONY PICTURES TELEVISION INC. * 10202 West Washington Boulevard * Culver City, CA 90232 Cease & Desist Notice coming in 3...2...1
  • wanderingmind 4y ago
    Just can be used to refine training of GPT3 model /s
  • jakzurr 4y ago
    I suppose all those subtitle sites aren't exactly legal either, but I don't see them going anywhere.
    • ekianjo 4y ago
      Subtitles can be auto-generated. Screenplays, not really.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > Subtitles can be auto-generated. Is that legally any different from OCRing a copyrighted book? Or maybe running an audiobook through speech-to-text..
        • VanTheBrand 4y ago
          Well OCRing books (for book search) was found to be fair use because “book search” and “books” are in different markets. So to the extent it is like book search that could be in its favor. Your other example (text to speech and audio books) is significantly less transformative as audio books and books are basically the same or very related markets. (For example they are both sold in the same specialty stores)
    • VanTheBrand 4y ago
      Subtitle files are arguably transformative and have a more benign character and purpose. They would have a significantly better fair use argument vs this. The purpose tends to either be to help the disabled or to assist non-native speakers in understanding the spoken dialogue track of the film. They also don’t directly compete with the underlying piece of copyrighted material (the screenplay) in the same market (publishing). A subtitle site could still easily end up on the losing end of a copyright suit but my point is this is far from an apples to apples comparison just because they both deal with text and audio/visual media.
  • grimgrin 4y ago
    Though the collection will live on in infamy, on archive.org, or a tracker near you
    • hombre_fatal 4y ago
      archive.org isn’t an illegal operation. You can even get other people’s websites scrubbed from it by pressuring them.
• coolandsmartrr 4y ago
  It's probably posted without permission, but I don't think there's a strong incentive for rights holders to pursue copyright enforcement. Screenplays are often meant for circulation, albeit in smaller circles within Hollywood and film industry personnel (producer and director mainly). The money is recouped when the finished film screens. Of course, you can always buy the screenplay for personal reading to support their creators. It's often on Amazon. I used to read some at my library.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  It's not technically, but movie and TV pilot screenplays circulate a lot before they get produced, because the creators want people to read them in order to fund/produce them. They're often rather different from the final shooting script. On the other hand, scripts for TV episodes after the first generally have to be "leaked", which doesn't happen very often. But again, once it's out on the internet, the cat's out of the bag. So production companies try to prevent scripts getting leaked, but don't really go after anyone once they're already out. Plus acting studios use all of these in classrooms for training actors. So even if you did get the episodes "taken down" from websites, they're still circulating in classrooms in NYC and LA. Of course, if you leak a non-pilot episode before the episode airs... let's just say don't ever expect to work in Hollywood ever again. ;)