It’s a sad day indeed for fans of experimental Twitter accounts and homoerotic action thrillers alike: The genius who was screening Top Gun frame by frame via the handle @555uhz has been silenced by a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice from Paramount Pictures.
“No one is authorized to copy, reproduce, distribute, or otherwise use Top Gun without the express written permission of Paramount,” the filing states.
Our reaction:
We were not even halfway through the Tom Cruise blockbuster’s running time when Twitter judged this copyright complaint legitimate and grounded the offending account. Paramount either believed that chronological JPG screengrabs from their movie (posted at half-hour intervals) were more entertaining than the movie itself, or they just don’t want anyone without a Netflix account to find out that Goose dies.
Meanwhile, as with every relatively well-known film released in the last 40 years, you can still watch Top Gun illegally online (as a simple search on TubePlus.me shows). But, as we’re all aware, Internet gimmicks that repurpose your intellectual property and cast it in a surprising light—introducing it to potential new fans in the process—are infinitely more competitive and damaging to one’s bottom line than direct piracy. Every single time.
To @555uhz, whoever you were: goodnight, sweet pilot. And squadrons of F-16s sing thee to thy rest.
H/T TorrentFreak | Photo by Max Slowik/Flickr
