Location filming of 007 adventure No Time To Die is ending up online – and takedown notices are being issued, in spite of the filming being in public.
The brand new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, has been openly shooting around the world these past few months. Part and parcel of that has been the location shoot, and was recently in Italy to film scenes for the movie.
Given that the production team chose to film sequences out in the open, bypassers as you might expect were interested. And as you also might expect, they snapped a few images, and took footage on their smartphones.
This, though, appears to have come as a surprise to MGM in the US. For when people legally posted material that had taken in a public place on their social media channels, they found themselves on the receiving end of takedown notices.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, clips were soon deleted from assorted social media platforms, following the filing of Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests. These were submitted on behalf of MGM by a company called MarkMonitor. The social media companies in question, rather than fighting the DCMA takedown requests, meekly complied, and duly pulled the clips.
I’ve been on the end of such requests in the past in my previous job, for crimes such as posting legally released press images of blockbusters, and posting a trailer released by a film company and emailed to me in the first place. Oftentimes, such requests are issued with the assumption that the people receiving them would rather comply than fight a legal action. As was the case with this latest round of Bond clips.
But that’s not the end of the story. For this time, there’s been significant fan pushback against the strongarm tactics. In particular because the people uploading said footage haven’t done anything wrong. The Bond movie chose to film in public, there was no sneaking into a closed set, the members of the public who shot the footage weren’t bound by any NDA. It all stinks of big companies bullying, which isn’t the image that MGM wants to put across (Universal, that’s distributing the film in the UK, has had no part of this action, incidentally).
The full Hollywood Reporter piece is here, and I can put hope that common sense will prevail. And if not common sense, a simple adherence to a law that’s not in existence for big companies to bend to their whims.
No Time To Die is released in April 2020. Don’t expect us to land the exclusive on it.
