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While a post containing rumors about the film’s plot mario has been removed from Reddit, the spoiler issue takes a legal turn. Does revealing potentially key elements of a movie based on rumors constitute copyright infringement?
The film mario is at the heart of a copyright dispute on Reddit. © Matt Winkelmeyer-Getty Images
Since 2018 we know that a movie mario is in development at Nintendo in partnership with the Illumination studio (Me, ugly and mean). The release was scheduled for the end of 2022, but it has just been postponed to spring 2023. While waiting to discover the feature film in theaters, some fans are lost in conjectures concerning its content, while others are going even further by relaying hallway noises and other more or less sourced rumours.
Reddit post deleted for copyright infringement
It is precisely on this point that a curious event occurred a few weeks ago. As the specialized site explains TorrentFreak, it all started with a post on Reddit relaying all the rumors about the film’s plot, based mainly on comments from people claiming to have attended test screenings. The user behind the post warned in advance that the information should be taken with a grain of salt, and that it could very well have been simply made up and copied from all over the Internet. In short, a rather wise and altogether quite classic scenario on Reddit.
Shortly after posting, however, the post was removed by the site’s legal team following a third-party copyright claim. Presumably, it is on the side of Nintendo, Universal or Illumination that we must look for the author of this complaint, often called DMCA, from the name of the American law thought to fight against copyright violations, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We are therefore talking about a post eliminated for its content, however purely theoretical and absolutely not validated by any official synopsis.
The famous post deleted on Reddit. © Screenshot by TorrentFreak
As reminded TorrentFreak, the message did not contain any screenshots or stolen video extracts from the film, which confirms that it is indeed the text that is in the viewfinder of this complaint. However, more or less reliable theories and reports about upcoming films are far from unusual on the Internet. With such a precedent, the spoiler could it become grounds for a DMCA complaint? If so, many bloggers and youtubers have cause for concern.
Not a first
It wouldn’t be the first time a studio has seen red due to spoilers, however. the network American AMC had for example attacked an online community, The Spoiling Deadwho had fun sharing sensitive information about the plot of new seasons of the zombie series The Walking Dead. As explained TorrentFreakforum officials were accused of receiving “copyrighted trade secret information on the most critical plot information“with a plan for”distribute this alleged highly confidential information“, while knowing that such disclosure would be detrimental to AMC.
Similarly, HBO had filed DMCA notices against a YouTuber who posted very specific predictions about how the series would unfold. Game Of Thrones. YouTube eventually reinstated the videos in question, but the case provided evidence of the studios’ power over the voices of fans of their programs, if the latter do not bother to defend themselves. So, will we still be able to invent more or less credible theories about our favorite works tomorrow? In any case, it does not seem to be in the interest of the giants of global entertainment.