Why did I fight? - Taking back the word, "Pirate"!

By MaineMoviePirate

In a nutshell, several factors led me to fight my case from day one to the present. First, I had a different interpretation of criminal copyright law and how it pertains to the fair use of orphan works. Second, even if my interpretation of the law was incorrect, I fundamentally oppose the U.S. government and copyright regime's ever-increasing enhancements to criminal copyright law. Since this case was the first of its kind, I couldn't just give up and allow another enhancement without clarification of the actual law. Third, there were reasons to believe that the entire investigation was a pretextual prosecution, fishing for another case. All of the evidence I have for this is circumstantial, and I am still conducting my own investigation. If I'm right, my copyright conviction was simply a misuse of copyright law, and the public needs to be aware of that. I will explore some of the evidence in future blog posts.

For now, I want to delve deeper into the reasons behind my views on copyright law.

In the early 1990s, I was involved in the creation of a low-budget, cable public TV show called Dark Currents. It was completely derivative of (though I prefer the phrase "inspired by") Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks; in fact, that's how I would describe the show to others. I also threw in the "adventure-type" storylines of daytime afternoon soap operas with the pacing of Looney Tunes cartoons. I told my co-creator, Frank Welch, we would just toss in any storyline, no matter how ridiculous or how much of a "rip-off" of other material it was. The other important aspect of the project, to me, was to keep the project going. No matter what else happens, just keep making episodes. Now, more than 25 years later, my only regret with Dark Currents is that we didn't keep it going.

We got lots of local media attention with Dark Currents. Remember, this was the pre-YouTube, pre-wide-use Internet, pre-everyone-staring-at-their-cell-phone days. Yes, it was a different world. Many other writers sent me story ideas, stories, and full scripts. One in particular was a full-length feature script that mostly revolved around a pool hall. I talked to the writer a lot, mostly through email for years. He really wanted us to make his script into a movie. Finally, I told him I liked his script, but it wasn't really the type of stuff we did, and our plate was kind of full at the moment, as we had just started working on our own full-length feature. But I encouraged him to make his own script into a movie. He said he didn't technically know how to do it, and I thought that was the end of it.

Flash-forward about six months. We happened to be shooting some scenes at Miami North in Bangor, which was, you guessed it, a pool hall. The production was on the local news and radio. It was still pre-Internet, so many people showed up. We shot mostly "cutaways," because with all the people there, shooting actual dialogue was impossible. I noticed this guy among the crowd who was staring at me and appeared to be getting frustrated that we weren't running any dialogue scenes. Finally, this twitchy-acting dude came up to me and introduced himself. It was the same guy who had sent me the pool hall script. I had never met him in person...until now.

He said, "Can I see the script you are shooting from?"

My head was swimming with about 100 other production thoughts/problems, and I said, "I don't know if we have any right now... We're just shooting cutaways—"

He said again, more adamant, "CAN I SEE YOUR SCRIPT!"

Now, I probably should have told him to get bent and flake off. I mean, can you imagine this happening on a big-time movie set? Security would have been hauling his ass out of there. But all-edge productions were about as far from the "big time" as you could get, and I was kind of shocked. I had a hard enough time getting the actors to read the script before the shoots. No stranger had ever walked off the street and demanded to read the working scripts. But I gave him one, and as he was standing there rifling through the pages, I realized what was going on. He thought we were shooting his script!

That's really the end of my story. He tossed the script on a nearby pool table and walked away. I never heard from him again. But I have always wondered: What would he have done, if we were shooting his script? Would he have "taken over" the production, or called the copyright police, shut the show down and have us all arrested, or at least me?

Now, I used to be one of those writers, afraid someone was going to "steal" my fantastic story and go make a million dollars with it. Then I grew up:

If someone takes your idea and turns it into a successful product, it simply demonstrates that the idea was strong. Is it the only good idea you'll ever have? Generate another one, come up with an even better concept, and leverage the insights from how they succeeded with your idea. Emulate their success. You already possess a crucial element that contributed to their achievement: the capacity to craft a compelling narrative. Everything else involves learning. Everything.

In my view, creativity and current copyright law have little in common. While the original purpose of copyright law might have been to inspire creativity, the way Corporate Hollywood has distorted it and used their aggressive enforcement agency, the DOJ, to uphold it, actually hinders innovation and creativity. That topic is for a future blog entry, possibly several.

To be continued...

#fairuse #orphanworks #copyrightreform #darkcurrents #iamapirate