Comment by autoexec
4 days ago
> If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case.
While I'd also argue that this could be covered under a fair use defense, I thought it worth pointing out that buying a copy of a work and having receipts would have no bearing on the right to distribute copies of that work to others.
Obviously, if someone pirated these movies they could get in trouble for that as well, but that'd be an entirely different matter from the use of copyrighted images on their website.
Well, if you're distributing a piece of media, you need to have legal access to the piece that you distribute. You can take a 5 second clip of a movie that hasn't been released to Netflix yet, broadcast it on X or YouTube, meet all the requisites of fair use, and it's not legal speech; you had no legal access to the media you're redistributing. The speech itself is criminal violation of copyright, because of the lack of legal rights to the media in the first place, secondary to any piracy concerns.
If Studio Ghibli were to take them to court, they'd have to show that they had legal access to the media they're redistributing, namely the frames from the various movies. I believe that in this case they're using frames directly from the official Ghibli site, so there's no ambiguity, but if they purchased each and every movie they index, they'd have an extraordinarily strong case for fair use even without linking back to the studio site.