I wonder if this is legal, ie transforming creative works to be language learning tools, and inserting themselves into Netflix like this, and also using the Netflix name in their own name.
Not saying it shouldn't be legal, I'm just wondering whether they could get sued by Netflix or the copyright holders and lose.
Trying to predict what a court would find fair use is incredibly difficult in the US, and it's hard to have much better accuracy than a coin flip if the answer is less than completely obvious. In practice, it seems that fair use is pretty much decided on a gut reaction first and then the analysis is motivated to arrive at that gut reaction.
A good example of that effect is Thomas's fair use analysis in Google v Oracle a few months ago, which can be summed up as "Google made buttloads of money from Android, Oracle saw not a dime, how can that be fair?" This kind of analysis I think tends to be the more the common one in courts. However, only one other justice agreed with that analysis; Breyer had 5 other justices sign onto his fair use analysis instead, which argues (in part) that transformativeness is more important than commerciality as a factor.
It remains to be seen how lower courts will apply Google v Oracle to fair use cases; if they will see it as something limited to software and ignore it for everything else. Indeed, I'm not certain that you'd see the same strong majority for a similar fair use ruling if it involved more traditional copyrighted content such as movies.
That said, I'm not sure that this is even distributing Netflix content in a way that violates copyright in the first place, which nullifies any need for fair use analysis period.
I'm working on something similar, so I may be biased but I'd say no. It's something that transforms and integrates with the content in your browser to facilitate learning. I think fair use applies because 1. it's for educational purposes 2. it does not diminish or compete with the value of the original copyright owner since the content is not copied to some separate site, and subscriptions/ads still apply (unless of course they also start a language learning business)
The name "Netflix" though seems troublesome, I agree.
For-profit education does not get a free pass in fair use.
> transforms and integrates with the content in your browser
"Integrates with" and "browser" are irrelevant technical details.
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure, but for example Grand Theft Auto's publisher shut down efforts in the computer vision industry to use their game as a training data generation engine for self-driving car research. That's why I'm also wondering how the law deals with using things you have a license for in different ways, for different purposes than originally intended.
By that logic any Chrome extension that modifies the contents of a copyrighted web page is illegal. Holding up an automatic translation device to translate what is being said on the TV would be illegal etc. There are nuances of course, but I don't think it's a problem here.
> That's why I'm also wondering how the law deals with using things you have a license for in different ways, for different purposes than originally intended.
I really don't know much about law, just trying to apply my common sense here. I think the difference in this case is that there is a single customer that _uses_ the extension to modify their experience, not a large corporation using a product (game engine and content) for unlicensed purposes. I could see why Rockstar would potentially want to keep the right to license the engine for these simulation purposes in the future, in which case they'd have to block this kind of use of the game directly.
> Grand Theft Auto's publisher shut down efforts in the computer vision industry to use their game as a training data generation engine for self-driving car research.
Yes. I know many people still use it and if you're just a small university lab, Take-Two probably won't come after you. They still don't allow it, and researchers literally don't care (to the extent of not even knowing that there may be something to care about), us CS folks don't like to think about legal matters.
It appears that some people were distributing modified copies of the game or selling access to it as a driving simulator. In that case I agree that it's copyright infringement, in the same way that distributing modified copies of Photoshop or selling access to it as a cloud service would infringe on Adobe's copyright.
But that's different from using the game to generate data and only sharing that data (or using Photoshop to draw a picture) since there cannot be copyright infringement without copying.
Since LLwN requires the users themselves to obtain access to the content they want to study, there's no copying happening beyond what the user has the license to do, and hence no copyright infringement.
Not saying it shouldn't be legal, I'm just wondering whether they could get sued by Netflix or the copyright holders and lose.