Fan edits: praise or piracy?

With the advent of entry level video-editing applications, fans can now make their own ‘director’s cut’ of a movie. To an increasing extent movie fans take movies, cut out the scenes they dislike and insert their favorite deleted scenes. The end result is a fan edit: the fans interpretation of how the movie should have been cut.

Though the idea of creative and enthousiastic fans might be alluring for the movie industry, the fact that fan edits closely resemble the original could also pose a threat to them. A fan edit  of Star Wars (called Star Wars: Revisited ) for instance, was posted online in a fan forum and subsequently copied by Asian bootleggers, printed, and subsequently distributed as an ‘extended version’ in Asia.

When one of the biggest fan edit sites, fanedit.org, started supplying links to Rapidshare and Bittorrent so people could download the fan edit (and in some cases the original), the movie industry stepped in and sent fanedit.org a takedown request.

The legal question fan edits raise, is whether the fan edit should be seen as a new, transformed work (for instance a parody), or merely as derivative of the original (in other words a copy).

Fan editors argue that their work is an artform and a hommage to the original. They feel their work makes the movie a new work, not protected by copyright. The movie industry on the other hand argues that the edits are copies since they do not qualify as original works. It seems that based on current case law (for instance Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music) the movie industry has a strong case: merely editing a movie will indeed lead to a derivitave work, still protected by the original copyright. Moreover, it does seem that while the fan editors may be sincere, their enthusiam does facilitate piracy to a great degree.

What do you think? Is this sincere praise or piracy in disguise?