Free speech, ASCII art, and the MPAA

[soccerballtux]

I don't know how to deal with audio, but I believe that since ASCII art is covered under "free speech", and we can convert movies to quickly displayed, sucessive ASCII mozaics, and these ASCII snapshots can be colored (and as high res as we want); then because of all these things, we can pirate as many movies as we want?

Of course we can't get audio, however say we had a compression scheme that encoded each frame visually as an incredibly high res ASCII art page...with such high resolution that a square of 3x3 ASCII characters functioned as one pixel on the screen. This would still be free speech, would it not?

I'd love to see the MPAA combat this one. Somehow I think they'd manage to throw out free speech from our dwindling list of rights.

Of course this doesn't explain why we would want to pirate any of their movies anyhow, but this is purely speculation.

 

[quakefiend420]

interesting idea i suppose

but why would you want only video and no audio?

besides, all you would be doing is changing media, really

so i don't think it would work out very well

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

:laugh:

Sad. Creative, but sad.

 

[cirthix]

so you propose to view this huge matrix and scroll down one "page" each frame... lol.

 

[yhelothar]

So ascii art is covered under free speech but pixel mosaic art isn't?

 

[Chaotic42]

So in other words, you want a quantification of how much you have to change something for it not to be covered by IP laws?

 

[Injury]

The flaw with that problem is that the law isn't as white and black as your propose it is.

While it may not *exactly* be the movie, if the source of what you created was from the movie, it is still covered under copyright. Not only that, but the characters, storyline, etc. etc. is covered under the copyright.
Just because you are viewing the movie in a different manner, does not mean that a judge would look at it and say that it's clearly not the product that hollywood produced. It has nothing to do with free speech, whether ASCII art is covered under it, or anything.

Copyright infringement, despite the fact that it has been at the top of legal battles for years now, is still very grey area within the legal system. But I can tell you that if you are using another person's work without their permission, it is against copyright, no matter how you display it or how you alter it. I can also tell you that no judge in the United States would even consider it legal to do such a thing unless the movie is unrecognizable as the original.

Bonus points for having big ideas... but you lose them for being too cheap to buy the movie.

 

[Colt45]

The mpaa doesnt own pixels neither.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: Injury
The flaw with that problem is that the law isn't as white and black as your propose it is.

While it may not *exactly* be the movie, if the source of what you created was from the movie, it is still covered under copyright. Not only that, but the characters, storyline, etc. etc. is covered under the copyright.
Just because you are viewing the movie in a different manner, does not mean that a judge would look at it and say that it's clearly not the product that hollywood produced. It has nothing to do with free speech, whether ASCII art is covered under it, or anything.

Copyright infringement, despite the fact that it has been at the top of legal battles for years now, is still very grey area within the legal system. But I can tell you that if you are using another person's work without their permission, it is against copyright, no matter how you display it or how you alter it. I can also tell you that no judge in the United States would even consider it legal to do such a thing unless the movie is unrecognizable as the original.

Bonus points for having big ideas... but you lose them for being too cheap to buy the movie.

What if the ASCII text you used was in a super tiny font so as to be a pixel per letter, and the text was also ripped from an out of copyright book?

 

[Injury]

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Originally posted by: Injury
The flaw with that problem is that the law isn't as white and black as your propose it is.

While it may not *exactly* be the movie, if the source of what you created was from the movie, it is still covered under copyright. Not only that, but the characters, storyline, etc. etc. is covered under the copyright.
Just because you are viewing the movie in a different manner, does not mean that a judge would look at it and say that it's clearly not the product that hollywood produced. It has nothing to do with free speech, whether ASCII art is covered under it, or anything.

Copyright infringement, despite the fact that it has been at the top of legal battles for years now, is still very grey area within the legal system. But I can tell you that if you are using another person's work without their permission, it is against copyright, no matter how you display it or how you alter it. I can also tell you that no judge in the United States would even consider it legal to do such a thing unless the movie is unrecognizable as the original.

Bonus points for having big ideas... but you lose them for being too cheap to buy the movie.

What if the ASCII text you used was in a super tiny font so as to be a pixel per letter, and the text was also ripped from an out of copyright book?

You don't get it. It's not about the ASCII text at all. It's about the fact that you are taking someone else's work... even though you aren't using the actual original work, the SOURCE of the work can still be credited to the original copyright holder.

 

[KingofCamelot]

Its not the format that matters, its the reproduction of copyrighted material that matters. Your argument is akin to translating a book into another language and claiming you don't have to pay royalties to publish it since you changed it. When you rip a DVD to DivX you are changing the format, just like changing it to a format based on ASCII art. I don't understand how you got that ASCII art is covered under free speech. ASCII art is a medium, so claiming that it is protected under free speech is like claiming that copying a book onto the wall of a public building is protected under free speech since the wall is public property.

 

Why would we want to do that?