Our friends over at The Movie Blog have an interesting news item about a member of SAG in trouble for letting out his screener copy of Million Dollar Baby. The man in question, Ronald Redding, is facing a $250,000 fine and up to six months in prison for his movie sharing.
In case you didn’t know, each year movie studios send out special screeners of their Awards-worthy movies to awards voters, in hopes of getting them to watch and potentially vote for their film. They don’t just send them out to Oscar voters, they send them out to schmucks like me who vote in other major critics awards. In my case, I vote for the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association award, and so I get a lot of screeners.
What apparently Ronald Redding didn’t know, and I do, is that each screener now has a unique watermark on it. If you share it, they’ll know exactly who did it. If Redding actually intentionally shared his copy on the internet, or broadly distributed it in some way, then he deserves exactly what he gets. But, what if he just loaned it to a friend? A friend with no compunction about copying the thing and dropping it on the internet? We don’t know if Ronald actually put it on the net himself (if he’s a SAG member you’d think he’d know better) or if someone else somehow got hold of his copy and did it without his prior knowledge. Because frankly, it’s a little hard to believe he didn’t know about the watermark. No one is that stupid. Often you can see it while you’re watching the movie. A lot of these screener discs even have warnings on them that tell you about the watermark. Almost all of them come with a letter explaining the same, and some studios even require that you sign a waiver before they’ll send them. Ronald Redding had to know about those watermarks, and if he knew there’s no way he’d have put the movie out there on the internet.
So there’s my quandary. What do I do with all these screener copies when I’m done watching them? Stuff like this makes me paranoid about them. If I throw one away, I’m meticulous about scratching it up so badly that no one could ever use it for anything were they to dig it out of the trash. If I keep it, I have to make sure I don’t ever loan it out to friends, because frankly you never know where it might end up when you do. It’s a great big hassle when you’ve got a library of dozens and dozens of screeners for fantastic films like Kinsey just sitting on your shelf practically under lock and key. I understand why Hollywood has taken this stance with them, but my friends don’t. They think I’m a paranoid loon whenever I refuse to loan any of these dust-collecting screener DVDs out. Well guys, take note of this story and quit asking to borrow. If you slip up, I’m the one who’ll pay. So if you don’t mind, I’ll hang on to them myself and keep my ass out of jail.
