Why no money for AMVs?

[Zagatto]

This question may have been answered elsewhere but I haven't seen it in the short time I've been active on this forum.

After reading the Distro and DVD thread that's going on, Phade (the guy in charge of this whole thing) made it pretty clear that any financial transactions for AMVs are not welcomed by this community.

I'm not saying this policy is right or wrong. I'm just asking for help in understanding it. I love the whole AMV experience and would love to see it spread further.

Now I understand the basic copyright laws and protection of intellectual property. I also understand the fear of the RIAA in this day of rampant law suits and piracy.

What I don't understand is why is it acceptable to make copies of your own work and give them away but not ok to ask people to reimburse you for materials? They are both ways of making unauthorised copies of copywritten material and distributing them. Neither one is any more legal than the other.

The RIAA is busy with thousands of lawsuits stemming from file sharing via progams like Limewire, Kazaa, and Bittorrent where no money was ever made from a single file transfer.

Then there are the web sites that sell bootleg DVDs from Hong Kong. I've chatted with some of the people who run them and the worst any of them have run into has been a cease and desist request from the North American copyright holder. All that request does is politely ask them to stop distributing bootlegs of copywritten material. There hasn't been a single law suit to date even though people have turned them in for "rewards" and these web sites are clearly making a profit selling bootlegs.

So why is it ok to make a copy of an AMV for someone if they provide the blank disc but not if they want to provide the cash to reimburse for materials?

I've got other questions regarding money and art but this is the biggest one that comes to mind.

With my current understanding of laws and enforcement of those laws I find it hypocritical to say that copying one way is ok but copying another is not ok. Both of them are copying. Both of them infringe on some creators rights.

I want to finish by saying that I love AMVs and would love to see them grow outside of this relatively small community to the point where they may be featured as extras on DVDs that you can buy in the store or even see volumes of AMV DVDs available with legally secured rights for all material. Until that happens, I'm happy getting my AMVs by whatever means are available.

[paizuri]

I think the point is that no one should be making a profit off of someone else's work, unless the owners or licensed holders of said work give them permission.

Reimbursement is a touchy issue because you can't really be sure the distributor is making a profit or not. Sending in blank media is fine because it's already been paid for and you know (or can find out) exactly how much postage costs. That seems pretty cut and dry.

But sometimes a creator might decide to charge for extra things. A piece of hardware might break down while they're making copies, like say a CD-burner or a hard disk and they might feel that they should be reimbursed for them and raise their fees accordingly. Or they might buy cheaper media than the kind you would normally use or expected them to buy. Or they might feel that time = money, and that the time spent copying their AMVs to the CDs/DVDs is time that they should be compensated for also. Or they might include extra things like fancy labels and cases and expect to be reimbursed for those too. Paying for wear-and-tear and packaging smack more of a formal product rather than something produced from a hobby.

So it's not really that one way of copying is a-okay and the other isn't, it's more like one is worse than the other.

If you're truly making AMVs as a hobby, you shouldn't be receiving any money for it, or even breaking even. If you play guitar for a hobby and you're playing in front of some friends and break a string, do you expect them to buy you a new set of strings? Do you make money collecting baseball cards? Maybe if you sold them, but selling baseball cards is not the hobby, collecting them is.

And if you are making money on your AMVs, well you should then be held to the same hurdles as anyone else using those materials. So you should have to obtain the rights for the use of the footage and songs used just like any anime or music company does. If not, well then you ARE profiting off of someone else's work which is legally AND ethically wrong. Although ethics are a relative term, which is why reimbursement is a touchy issue.

Also, I have seen AMVs featured as extras on anime DVDs. The R1 Saber Marionette J DVDs have AMVs as part of their extras and one of the R1 Noir DVDs from ADV has AMVs done by some people from the AMV community as easter eggs.

[Zagatto]

Thanks for that quick feedback.

I really like the hobby angle and comparison to strings for a guitar. I don't see it as much for the baseball card thing though.

I just deleted a whole page of more questions and thoughts on this subject. I'm sure the whole creative aspect has been gone over a million times so far.

I'm mostly trying to complete my own thoughts more than anything and see how other people feel about the same things.

Is this a good forum or would it be better to have an IRC type chat some time?

Or are there some old threads that I should be hunting down to see what other people have written in the past?

[kmv]

Or are there some old threads that I should be hunting down to see what other people have written in the past?

Yes, this has been discussed a lot.

I recommend you search the forms for the other threads on this topic (link at top of page) – you will get a pretty good idea of where everyone stands.