Here’s an interesting set of facts: A filmmaker named Melinda Hunt made a documentary about Hart Island, “a small potter’s field island in New York City where prison laborers bury the region’s unclaimed mass dead in mass graves.” As she states in her recently-filed complaint, it took a lot of effort to be allowed to shoot the film:
Filming on Hart Island is generally forbidden, and exceptions are rarely granted. Plaintiff negotiated with the [New York City] Department of Correction for three years before receiving permission to film on Hart Island. (Emphasis in original)
Hunt shot her film, spent another two years editing the footage, and owns the copyright to the resulting film, ‘Hart Island: An American Cemetery’. After that, a reporter for the Associated Press contacted Hunt while researching a story about Hart Island. Some negotiations to use Hunt’s footage in the AP story took place, but per the complaint, “the parties never memorialized a definitive agreement.” Next,
Without a license, AP Reporter Bonny Ghosh downloaded the Copyrighted Film and spliced its footage into the Defendant’s report, “Identifying Remains in New York’s Potter’s Field.”
The complaint identifies a handful of shots in the AP’s video report, which are said to be directly lifted from Plaintiff’s film, as well as accusing the AP of “freely cop[ying] Plaintiff’s expressive directorial and editorial decisions.” The AP story was then distributed to various news organizations, and affiliates nationwide.
The complaint makes several claims: In additional to straight-up copyright infringement and secondary copyright liability (because of affiliates rebroadcasting the piece), there are some interesting tech-specific allegations. One of them is “Removal of Copyright Information,” and another is “Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems”, and they accuse the AP reporter of “downloading and editing the Copyrighted Film, and then removing or altering copyright management information, knowing that it will enable,facilitate or conceal copyright infringement”, and bypassing Quicktime features that are in place to prevent editing.
Hunt seeks the maximum possible statutory damages and injunctions. It looks like, right now at least, there’s no video accompanying the article on the AP’s website, though it can be seen on other sites.
• Email • Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • RSS
