Criminal

There is some interesting discussion about whether or not the ‘loveable’ Wall-E robot is a copyright criminal over at SFFaudio [^].  The link does have mild spoilers, but probably nothing that you wouldn’t have guessed at from seeing the trailer. 

The case that Jesse Willis at SFFaudio make centres around the robot’s “jailbreaking” of a copy of the film “Hello Dolly”.  As they point out, in the year 2805 the film would be almost 800 years out of copyright protection and in the public domain.  But under the USA’s DMCA [^] and Canada’s about to be enacted copyright law circumventing copy protection is a crime.  So even though the 1969 film would be in the public domain, if the original media was protected by some form of Digital Rights Management [^], which video tapes and DVDs are, copying it onto another device would be a crime.  Another case of hypocrisy in this film?  Consumerism is bad, but buy our toys [BrizBunny Comments]; and don’t copy our robot, buy an original DVD of this movie. 

Despite this we here in the CannibalRabbit household are still looking forward to the movie.