The artistic collective MSCHF is once again causing trouble on the Internet. For his latest project, ASCII Theater, the group will release a new popular movie daily in ASCII format that everyone can watch for free. Just paste the command on your Mac or PC terminal, and you can watch movies like barbie exactly like, well, almost no one predicted.
ASCII art films are not new and date back to the early days of the Internet. They are made by converting a film, frame by frame, into lines of text characters. Instead of pixels, you will see text. One of the most famous examples is the artistic ASCII version of the 1977 original. Star Wars film, which was made by a New Zealand-based programmer Simon Jansen in 1997 and is still available online. You can also find extracts from ASCII movies such as The matrix scattered on YouTube.
But feature-length ASCII films are rare, and MSCHF’s ASCII Theater promises to show a new title every day. Following barbiethe cinema will screen an ASCII version of the 2018 horror film Hereditary. A look at site trailer reveals ASCII versions of several popular films, including Shrek, pulp Fiction, The shiny, The Lion King, Star Warsand others.
MSCHF Chief Marketing Officer Matt Steiner said The edge that the collective plans to keep the ASCII Theater alive “until it is shut down.” As for the legality of such an enterprise, Steiner himself seemed uncertain: “Maybe? I don’t know?” Steiner admitted in an email when contacted by The edge earlier this month.
The legal vagueness around ASCII theater is part of the MSCHF’s appeal. The Internet Collective has received cease and desist letters from several companies and has even been sued by companies like Vans And Nike to get Also lots of fun with copyright law.
“Copyright has always been conceptually productive for us. This is one of the most personally impactful legal gray areas. It is also a place where people experience the overthrow of restrictive systems in daily life,” Steiner wrote in an email Monday afternoon.
Productive or not, ASCII theater is probably in violation of copyright law. “This latest project would appear to violate a copyright owner’s derivative works right, which gives a copyright owner the right to prevent unauthorized adaptations of a copyrighted work. ‘author, like a film’, Xiyin Tangassistant professor of law at UCLA, wrote to The edge.
But Tang isn’t convinced the studios will bother to sue. The actual damage to each movie studio will be “minimal,” since MSCHF does not charge viewers and only shows each film for 24 hours. According to Tang, there is also a (very slim) chance that MSCHF will succeed in arguing that ASCII films fall under fair use.
Under the Copyright Act, if the art collective loses in court, the copyright owner may be entitled to statutory damages — a maximum of $150,000. “Since the going rate for hiring a firm and filing a lawsuit will likely exceed this amount, it is unclear what monetary benefit will accrue to a studio for filing a lawsuit, particularly given the length and of the limited exhibition (24 hours) of each film,” Tang noted.