Paramount Pictures has suspended a Twitter account for tweeting frame-by-frame stills of their 1986 film Top Gun, claiming that the account violated the film’s copyright. In unrelated news, I would like to welcome Paramount Pictures to the Internet.
According to BBC, Paramount took offense at the free advertising of a film they made before I was born that everybody’s seen at least twice by Twitter user @55uhz, sending a letter to the social media giant that the user was “distributing the Top Gun film, frame by frame,” without the express permission of the studio. They then demanded that Twitter remove all Top Gun images from the account, or face the wrath of a copyright lawsuit (or a gentleman’s duel; I’m assuming), and the account was suspended. The notice was published on Chilling Effects, a site that documents legal complaints concerning online activity.
A couple of points about this kerfuffle: one, Paramount is certainly within its rights to demand the images be taken down, as according to the law even a still image of a film falls under that film’s copyright. Two, Paramount actually getting angry enough about this to make Twitter suspend the account is short-sighed. Hilarious, but short-sighted.
Firstly, and I cannot stress this enough, they’re complaining about unapproved images of Top Gun.
TOP GUN .
There were unapproved images of Top Gun circling around 28 years ago, when the film first came out! Why would a film studio waste so much time taking down images that everybody’s already seen like eight thousand times? Top Gun’s a classic film, sure, but still a classic that was made in 1986 —which doesn’t invalidate the copyright, but makes breaching said copyright maybe less pertinent than, say, the leaked photos or spoilers of current Paramount films you could probably find on literally any social media site this very second with a bit of amateur Googling.
Secondly, even if we pretend for argument’s sake that Top Gun is a current film, Paramount is still getting upset about free advertising. The Internet has done the entertainment industry a huge favor: it’s created fandoms. People in fandoms create gifsets, movie posters, original artwork, stories, headcanons, costumes, and fandom merchandise for fellow fans, all without studio support. Is it copyright infringement? Some of it is, definitely. But if Marvel shut down everybody who made a gifset about their movies, they wouldn’t be making nearly as much money as they are now.
Why is that good for the entertainment industry? Because if just one person in a fandom finds out new information, the rest of the fandom, which normally numbers in the millions, is going to know within two to five minutes depending on how good the Wifi is. The fandom will literally advertise your thing for you free of any charge whatsoever, and they'll do it happily.
Look, a rare unapproved image of Top Gun. It's more extraodinary to see a picture of sane Tom Cruise
All of this makes what Paramount has just done very bad for their business: their heavy-handed approach to a single Twitter account gives the impression that they do not welcome fan participation, and in today’s world, that is a lethal mistake.
It’s too late, Paramount. By the time you started fighting us, we had already won.
SourceBBC
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