Memo to Mr. Weinstein:
That constricting feeling around your neck? Yeah, that’s your sphincter. Remove your head from your anus, Harvey. Trust us, it’s for your own good …
What’s ol’ Harv done this time? Well, seems he was none too pleased about MonkeyPeaches offering copies of the newly released extended edition of Hero for sale on their website so he had his lawyers write to the site’s ISP and threaten to shut down their business if the ISP didn’t stop Monkey Peaches from selling said DVDs. The ISP, understandably, freaked and shut MonkeyPeaches – one of the best sites for Chinese film news, by the way – down without warning until they agreed to remove the DVDs from their site.
What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty. First, the ISP should not have been a player in this at all as they weren’t buying or selling anything. Second, since MonkeyPeaches is based in China, and Miramax is not a rights holder in China, Miramax has NO LEGAL SAY WHATSOEVER in what MonkeyPeaches does there. They’ll say that MonkeyPeaches infringed on their rights by selling to US consumers but the fact is that US buyers have the very clear legal right to buy personal-use copies of whatever they want from whoever they want and Miramax has NO RIGHT to stop them. Miramax does not have the right to stop foreign companies from selling foreign goods to whoever wants to buy them; MonkeyPeaches knows this and wouldn’t have bitten on the threatened lawsuit, hence Miramax took a run at the ISP instead hoping they wouldn’t know any better and it worked.
Yeah, Harv, we know that people buying Chinese or Korean or Japanese or Thai or any of the other numerous international releases of Hero that are out there – I recommend the three disc Korean set, by the way – bites into your potential box office. We get it. But that doesn’t give you the right to trample on the legal rights of the overseas stakeholders in the film or of US consumers who have the perfect legal right to import from overseas. And there’s a much easier way to get around this whole DVD importation business, seeing as you’re so concerned about it all: don’t sit on films for two years after you buy them. If you’d put the thing into theaters when you bought it you would’ve made all your money back well before any of the foreign DVDs were issued.
You may have noticed that there wasn’t much support coming your way when it was announced that Miramax had to lay off 65 workers last week, no “Oh, poor Miramax” commentary. Know why? Stuff like this is why. People just plain don’t like you. And I don’t blame them.
