This article first appeared in the Indy on 14 Feb, 2006
by Adam Jones and William Barker

On December 21 of last year, William Barker, director of the ISU Cinema Society, received an email from the ISU Legal Department, asking him to call their office. He did so to learn that New Yorker Films, a national film distribution company, had complained in an e-mail dated November 11, 2005 that the Cinema Society had infringed on their copyright by exhibiting approximately twenty films without paying for public performance rights. ISU Legal had made no attempt to contact the Cinema Society for six weeks, and had already referred the matter to the outside legal firm of Livingston, Barger, Brandt & Shroeder. That firm and ISU Legal are currently working on a settlement regarding the print rental costs, an initial sum of over $8,000.

After speaking with ISU Legal, William received a copy of the bill sent to ISU from New Yorker, along with a copy of the original contact letter. New Yorker complains in the letter that the Cinema Society “has not obtained or paid for performance rights for these films, and they [New Yorker Films] are seeking payment for past usage [...].” Attached to this email was a spreadsheet of New Yorker films that the Cinema Society showed between Decembers 2000 and 2004, along with rental prices and play dates.

Several errors immediately stood out. Two of the films, “The Apple” and “Kikujuro”, had in fact screened at the Normal Theater as part of ISU’s 2001 Foreign Language Film Festival; the Cinema Society had only helped advertise those screenings. However, the mere mention of these titles at the Cinema Society’s website prompted New Yorker to assume that the Cinema Society had shown them without paying royalties. In addition, the last five films New Yorker Films claimed fees for had screened in John McHale’s fall 2004 course on documentary films; again, the Cinema Society had simply aided with the screening of those films. While we at the Cinema Society contend that all of our screenings are protected under fair use laws, these last five charges gall because they already qualify for New Yorker Film’s narrow allowance of fair use, “a face-to-face teaching exemption.” This teaching exemption misapplies U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 106, “Exclusive rights in copyrighted works,” for the purpose of making money where there is none to be made.

New Yorker’s billing errors are only fine points of a larger issue. The company claims on its website (in a piece that merges mission statement and marketing goals under a friendly “About Us” header) that “[i]n a time when the term ‘independent’ has been loosely applied to subsidiaries of giant conglomerates, New Yorker stands as [...] beholden to no other company.”

Yet New Yorker Film’s response to this so-called copyright infringement has been uniformly corporate in style and effort: draw up a list of charges without doing any investigation (which might have eliminated the billing errors), send a letter from a lawyer, and demand payment, all without attempting any communication with the group supposedly responsible for the violations.

During the past week the story rippled through the local media. After the Daily Vidette published a story on February 3rd, the Pantagraph picked up the story on February 8th. TV-10 aired an interview with William on Thursday, and the Chicago SunTimes will soon publish a story. At long last, the Cinema Society has managed to get some attention, though for the wrong reasons. According to Associate Dean Linda Jill Benson, this situation may result in the suspension of the Cinema Society’s RSO status. We haven’t shown a film on campus since December 8, when a snowstorm cancelled our final meeting of the semester. The group’s web pages have also been taken offline to prevent other distributors from making similarly frivolous damage claims.

We created and ran the ISU Cinema Society to promote underground, foreign, avant-garde, and independent films, providing an alternative to the movies shown at the GKC theaters and even at the Normal and Castle Theaters. We never charged admission or made any money. Indeed, we often bought videos in order to screen them, donating the copies afterwards to the Movie Fan; we also worked with Milner Library to purchase videos for their collection. We worked steadily to call attention to unknown films and directors, championing little-known videos sitting in the collections at the Movie Fan and Milner, bringing them an attention they otherwise wouldn’t have received.

Despite New Yorker Film’s boasts of offering an alternative to the dominant corporate culture, what we have here is a case of a company trying to shake down students who promoted their films, who never lost them any money, and who never violated their copyrights.