Is it legal to record an episode of a TV series or a movie? Is it legal to record an episode of a TV series or a movie? Isn't it considered as making an illegal copy of the movie?
At least for the US, there's a good overview in The Atlantic of the SCOTUS benchmark case concerning home recording, still applicable in these days of DVDs and streaming content and torrents and thepiratebay.org: ...the Supreme Court's decision to allow home recording in the landmark 1984 case, Universal Studios vs. Sony Corporation of America, went 5-4; one justice flipping and you wouldn't have to imagine that alternate reality because you'd be living it. See http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-court-case-that-almost-made-it-illegal-to-tape-tv-shows/251107/ The case revolved around whether recording a television program was "fair use" under copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. See https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html So yes, you can make yourself a copy, because "that the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. Time shifting as in watching it later, and much later again, as long as you don't distribute that copy, sell admission to watching it, and anything else reasonable when it comes to only you using the copy.
Presumably by &quot;is illegal&quot; you mean &quot;violates copyright law&quot;. Copyright infringement is simply &quot;copying / distributing without authorization&quot;, which refers to the original work and not some other work. The act of originally writing a book is not &quot;copying&quot; (likewise &quot;taking a picture&quot;, etc), so the act of writing a book using pirated software is also not copying and not infringement. Nevertheless, the scope of remedies for the original infringement is not limited to just the cost of the infringed work. Under 17 USC 504(b), The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. This is sufficiently open-ended that profits from the sale of an original work created using infringed software could be attributable to the infringement.
The film you want to base your game on is probably covered by copyright and likely trademarks. For purposes of the question I'll assume it's not in the public domain (if the film was made before 1926 for example). If you used the film to create your game, it would be a derivative work. Derivative works require the consent of the copyright owner. Distributing it without their permission would leave you open to lawsuits for copyright infringement, unjust enrichment, and possibly others. Fair use/fair dealing likely doesn't apply here. This isn't criticism, parody, or a transformative use. You may be able to get away with this by flying under the radar if you don't distribute it for profit or on any large scale. Some studios are more litigious than others and some accept that leaving fan works alone is better than the bad publicity that comes with shutting them down. However, this is entirely reliant on the goodwill of the studio. The legal way to do this is to get in touch with the copyright holder and ask permission. This may be in return for something else- usually money, royalties, and/or some creative control over your work. This may not be feasible though as a large company may simply ignore such requests from random people. Note that a lack of a response in this case is not permission.
if I directly purchase this custom content... As a general rule, &quot;intellectual property&quot; is very different from tangible property - arguably, &quot;intellectual property&quot; is a misnomer. Trying to apply concepts from property law (such as &quot;a thing has a single owner, who can do anything not illegal with it as they please&quot;) is fraught with danger. You would generally not &quot;purchase content&quot;, but rather purchase a license for the content, allowing you to do various things. One of those things might be to &quot;curate/edit this collection of recordings and present it publicly as an art project (probably just online)&quot;. Another might be to &quot;to sell or otherwise profit from this&quot;. All that depends on what your contract says. In an ideal world(?), contracts would all be detailed enough to leave no uncertainty about what is allowed and what is not. In the real world, a bunch of SMS can form a contract. For instance, the following is a contract: A (version 1): Hey B, could you send me a clip of you waving at the camera? I will pay $10 for it. B: sure ...but it’s not clear what A and B agreed as to what the clip would be used for. Saving and viewing on A’s device, probably yes; putting it in fullscreen in the next blockbuster movie, probably no. Showing it to A’s friends, putting it in an art project? That’s getting dicey. You might have heard about &quot;work for hire&quot; granting full copyright control to whoever pays for the work to be created. In the united-states, the above exchange does not explicitly designate the content as work-for-hire, as would be required by 17 U.S.C. § 101 (&quot;...if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire&quot;). Here’s a better SMS contract: A (version 2): Hey B, could you send me a clip of you waving at the camera? I will use it to make an art project, collating many such clips, and publishing that on the internet. I will pay $10 for it. B: sure Here there’s no question that B agreed with the proposed use. On the other hand, it’s likely than a different use would be deemed a copyright violation - the contract was proposed by A and should be understood as limiting A’s right to use the clip to exactly what they said they would do. If they wanted it to say something else, they could have sent a different SMS (see contra proferentem).
Because of the nature of online distribution, &quot;watching&quot; a show involves copying, so you need permission from the copyright holder to make those copies. You get permission indirectly, when you access a show via a legal licensee who has permission to distribute. A pirate site has no permission, therefore you cannot legally sub-license the show, and in so doing, you infringe copyright. The issue is not whether you &quot;paid for it&quot;, it is whether you have obtained proper permission. Under copyright law, a rights holder can simply arbitrarily deny you permission to copy the work.
In ABC v Aereo 573 U. S. ____ (2014), the US Supreme Court held that activity almost identical to what you describe is copyright infringement. Respondent Aereo, Inc., sells a service that allows its subscribers to watch television programs over the Internet at about the same time as the programs are broadcast over the air. When a subscriber wants to watch a show that is currently airing, he selects the show from a menu on Aereo’s website. Aereo’s system, which consists of thousands of small antennas and other equipment housed in a centralized warehouse, responds roughly as follows: A server tunes an antenna, which is dedicated to the use of one subscriber alone, to the broadcast carrying the selected show. A transcoder translates the signals received by the antenna into data that can be transmitted over the Internet. A server saves the data in a subscriber-specific folder on Aereo’s hard drive and begins streaming the show to the subscriber’s screen once several seconds of programming have been saved. The streaming continues, a few seconds behind the over-the-air broadcast, until the subscriber has received the entire show. We must decide whether respondent Aereo, Inc., infringes [copyright] by selling its subscribers a technologically complex service that allows them to watch television programs over the Internet at about the same time as the programs are broadcast over the air. We conclude that it does. A nicer summary, oral argument transcript and audio are available from the Oyez Project. In my opinion, your example is more clearly an infringement of copyright than Aereo's. Aereo dedicated separate antennae to receive a signals for each subscriber at the subscriber's direction, and rebroadcast the signal over the internet in near real-time. This let them argue two things: 1) that they were not performing the work, only letting other people perform it, and 2) that the performance was not &quot;to the public&quot;. In your example, the server is receiving and saving the broadcast, and then later, that single copy is being reproduced and transmitted to whomever requests it. That would certainly be considered both reproduction and performance to the public.
You may have issues if you take their content wholesale. Even if they freely distribute them, they still retain copyright. As such, they absolutely can claim copyright. Whether they will or not is another question. Your best bet around this is Fair Use doctrine. You can take a part of their work (e.g: a single question) and do your video based on how you work out your answer, with your video mainly focusing on the 'working out' part (thus satisfying the 'educational purposes' part)
It doesn't make a difference if the product is free or commercial use, if it's initiated by a company or an individual. What you are considering would be a &quot;derivative work&quot; and without explicit permission from the copyright holder, it is considered a violation.