#745 Insidious Copy, Right?

It doesn’t take much to set me off. To detect the insidious strangeness hiding beneath the ordinary.
The other night I was watching a DVD. It was a compilation of television show episodes. The disclaimer at the opening said, “Warning, the motion picture contained in this videodisc is protected under the...”
I better stop. In case the text of the copyright warning is copyrighted.
Anyhow, the strangeness feelers in my brain first twitched at the term motion picture. I’ve always seen “motion picture” as being synonymous with “movie.” Not a series of TV shows.
But when you stop to think about it, TV shows are pictures in motion as well. And when you stop to think about it even further, “motion picture” is a pretty primitive way of describing the process.
It’s like calling today’s movies “talkies.” Or moving pictures “movies.” It’s a throwback to the time when the norm vis-à-vis pictures was that they weren’t moving.
Look Ma, those pictures up on that there shiny flat thing is a-movin’!
My next twitch came when I saw the word contained—“the motion picture contained in this videodisc.” As if the videodisc was a bag and we pulled the moving pictures out of it. I suppose it’s true that the components of the movie are on the videodisc in the form of digitized pieces of information, which are then extracted to reconstitute moving pictures or images on a screen.
So in a sense the videodisc does contain the picture. As a CD contains a song.
But I would rather say it contains a record of the song or the record of the movie which can be read or decoded.
Still, you are copyrighting the motion picture and not the record. Like you copyright stories. A book definitely contains a story, which is separate from the book in some sense. A copyright of a story doesn’t change if the publisher prints it using a different font.
I just wish we had a more modern name than motion picture...
America, ya gotta love it.