The art group MSCHF is causing trouble online again. For its latest project, ASCII Theater, the organization will show a popular new movie every day in ASCII format, free for anyone to watch.You can watch movies like this by simply pasting the command into the terminal on your Mac or PC Barbie Indeed, the truth is, no one wants to do that.
ASCII art films are nothing new, dating back to the early days of the web. They are created by converting film frames into lines of text characters. You will see text instead of pixels.One of the most famous examples is the original 1977 ASCII art version Star Wars The film was completed in 1997 by New Zealand programmer Simon Jansen and is still available online.You can also find clips from ASCII videos, e.g. matrix Scattered across YouTube.
But full-length ASCII movies are rare, and MSCHF’s ASCII Theater promises to show new titles every day.The following Barbietheaters will screen ASCII versions of 2018 horror movies genetics.Check out the site’s trailers to find ASCII versions of several popular movies, including Shrek, pulp Fiction, The Shining, lion king, Star Warsand others.
Matt Steiner, Director of Marketing at MSCHF tells us edge The collective plans to keep the ASCII Theater open “until it is closed.”As for the legality of such a venture, Steiner himself seemed unsure: “Maybe? I don’t know?” When contacted, Steiner admitted in an email edge earlier this month.
The legal chaos surrounding ASCII Theater is part of MSCHF’s appeal. The online collective has received cease-and-desist letters from multiple companies and has even been sued by the likes of Vans and Nike. also Copyright law is interesting.
“Copyright has always been conceptually fruitful for us. It’s one of the legal gray areas that has the greatest personal impact. It’s also where people experience subversion of restrictive institutions in their leisure lives,” Steiner said Monday afternoon. the email read.
Whether productive or not, ASCII theater may violate copyright laws. “This latest scheme appears to infringe upon a copyright holder’s derivative works rights, which gives copyright holders the right to prevent unauthorized adaptations of copyrighted works such as movies,” Tang Xiyin, an assistant professor of law at UCLA, wrote in the letter road. edge.
But Tang doesn’t believe the studio will go through the trouble of suing. Since MSCHF does not charge viewers and each film will only be shown for 24 hours, the actual damage to each studio will be “minimal.” Tang said the likelihood that MSCHF would successfully argue that the ASCII video was fair use was also slim.
Under the Copyright Act, if an arts collective loses in court, the copyright owner may be entitled to statutory damages—up to $150,000. “Considering that the going rate for hiring a firm and filing a lawsuit would likely exceed this amount, it is unclear how much monetary benefit a studio would gain from filing a lawsuit, especially given the limited screening and exposure (24 hours) of each film. ” Tang pointed out.
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