Memo to Mr. Weinstein:
That constricting feeling around your neck? Yeah, that’s your sphincter. Remove your head from your anus, Harvey. Trust us, it’s for your own good …
What’s ol’ Harv done this time? Well, seems he was none too pleased about MonkeyPeaches offering copies of the newly released extended edition of Hero for sale on their website so he had his lawyers write to the site’s ISP and threaten to shut down their business if the ISP didn’t stop Monkey Peaches from selling said DVDs. The ISP, understandably, freaked and shut MonkeyPeaches – one of the best sites for Chinese film news, by the way – down without warning until they agreed to remove the DVDs from their site.
What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty. First, the ISP should not have been a player in this at all as they weren’t buying or selling anything. Second, since MonkeyPeaches is based in China, and Miramax is not a rights holder in China, Miramax has NO LEGAL SAY WHATSOEVER in what MonkeyPeaches does there. They’ll say that MonkeyPeaches infringed on their rights by selling to US consumers but the fact is that US buyers have the very clear legal right to buy personal-use copies of whatever they want from whoever they want and Miramax has NO RIGHT to stop them. Miramax does not have the right to stop foreign companies from selling foreign goods to whoever wants to buy them; MonkeyPeaches knows this and wouldn’t have bitten on the threatened lawsuit, hence Miramax took a run at the ISP instead hoping they wouldn’t know any better and it worked.
Yeah, Harv, we know that people buying Chinese or Korean or Japanese or Thai or any of the other numerous international releases of Hero that are out there – I recommend the three disc Korean set, by the way – bites into your potential box office. We get it. But that doesn’t give you the right to trample on the legal rights of the overseas stakeholders in the film or of US consumers who have the perfect legal right to import from overseas. And there’s a much easier way to get around this whole DVD importation business, seeing as you’re so concerned about it all: don’t sit on films for two years after you buy them. If you’d put the thing into theaters when you bought it you would’ve made all your money back well before any of the foreign DVDs were issued.
You may have noticed that there wasn’t much support coming your way when it was announced that Miramax had to lay off 65 workers last week, no “Oh, poor Miramax” commentary. Know why? Stuff like this is why. People just plain don’t like you. And I don’t blame them.
Recently I bought the DVD “Dirty Dancing, Havana Nights” at the Amherst, New York, Barnes & Noble. I had made quite a few purchases and was happy to see a $5 mail-in rebate. Unfortunately the price sticker had been practically glued onto the coupon and, when I finally got the coupon open and mended it, I found that the price tag conveniently covered up the words “with purchase of “Dirty Dancing.” I called B&N and told them this was misleading the public, but the manager insisted that they had nothing to do with the pricing labels. Five Dollars may not seem like much, but when you’re a Senior on limited income, you don’t buy a lot of DVDs no matter how much you may want to. Not “crying,” just angry to be made a fool of and not sure how to let Miramax know–if they’re the culprits.
Nice. Someone posting from Amsterdam to tell me about North American copyright law. Do your research, Andy.
When someone – Miramax or otherwise – buys the North American rights to a film, book, record or any other form of copyrighted merchandise what they’re buying is the right to be the only commercial source of the film within that region. If I were to go out and buy bulk copies of one of their properties overseas for purposes of resale within their region, that would be a violation of their rights. However, I can (and do) go and buy myself a single copy for my own use from a foreign source if I choose to do so.
This is why Miramax / Disney was perfectly within their rights – and 100% successful – when they went after HK Flix, Aznfilms, Yesasia, Poker Industries and other North American retailers and stopped them from selling Asian copies of films that they hold North American rights for. This is also why there’s no chance in hell that they will ever be able to stop Layoyo, DDD House, CD Japan, Mr Kwang, Sensasian, Amazon UK or Amazon Japan from selling whatever goods they want to to people such as myself who want to buy them. They can’t legally do it. As long as it’s not a bulk purchase for resale the location of the BUYER doesn’t matter at all from a legal standpoint, only the location of the SELLER.
This is going to seem very annoying, because I’ve come here, read what you said, and I’m going to contradict you without giving any supporting evidence.
Your statement, “the fact is that US buyers have the very clear legal right to buy personal-use copies of whatever they want from whoever they want”, is incorrect. Just because people would like to think something’s not illegal; it doesn’t mean it’s true.
P.S. It’s “whomever” not “whoever” for your context.
What, there are parts of Canada other than Toronto? Heh … sorry, my bad …
Hey…. Im in Saskatoon.
But still.. we are all Canadians.
someone needs to do something about miramax before foreign countries are intimidated into NEVER including english subtitles…
Juan: regardless of where monkeypeaches is registered they are physically in China and operate exclusively out of China. All the discs they sell are official mainland Chinese issues and are shipped from mainland China. I’ve bought from them in the past and can vouch for this from the post marks. If you go by where the host server is virtually everybody’s american. By that criteria we’re american and every one of us lives in the Toronto area and we do all of our work from here. We may contract with an american company to host our site, but we’re still a Canadian outfit.
Excuse me while I go somewhere quiet to vomit.
While I do agree with you about Harvey The Satan, monkeypeaches.com is registered to an address in the U.S., and hosted by an U.S. based ISP. So your argument that it’s a foreign site doesn’t quite hold up. Oh hell, Miramax is still evil anyways.
one more reason to hate the facist dictator that mr. harvey weinstein has become. there’s a great article from last year’s new yorker on him and he comes off as a total ass. man, I dislike this guy a lot.
I’m going to go throw up more. yeah!
Well said, Bubba.