it’s almost more of a philosophical question than a legal one. sure, maybe they can prevent you from recording the drive-in movie and showing it to other people, but would they have the moral authority to say that you couldn’t repeat the storyline to someone else?

let’s say someone produces some documentary that ends up containing some hideously embarrassing error. something that could really ruin some third party’s life. you pull the documentary from theaters, you pull it from streaming services, anybody who owns a copy owns it illegally. but, anybody who’s seen it, or heard it described, could sit down in front of an audience and act out the entire thing piece by piece, attributing the entire thing to the original producer’s name.

it ties into a line of thinking I had the other day when reading my credit card number to somebody over the phone. me talking to another person, giving them digit by digit, it was like two computers talking but we were people. if we had been computers, using a speaker and a microphone to communicate numbers in that way, we would have laughed at it and called it stone age technology, but that still how humans communicate with each other.