alt Hacker NewsThe site doesn't stream the movies, references still frames and the original works, and links directly back to the official site - there's no exploitation or arbitrage taking anything away from the studio.
Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (2003) and Perfect 10 v. Amazon (2007) are precedents for image search engines displaying thumbnails - they were found to be fair use. The function is transformative, the site is for a completely different use case than watching media, and doesn't harm the market.
If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case. Because it's beneficial to Studio Ghibli, I'd say they are best served by allowing it and not trying to exploit DMCA mechanisms to get them taken down.
This is one of those areas where copyright holders can be assholes and abuse the system for petty wins, but the big tech companies have fought and won explicit precedent demonstrating the legitimacy of fair use cases for tools exactly like this.
Awesome tool!
> If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case.
While I'd also argue that this could be covered under a fair use defense, I thought it worth pointing out that buying a copy of a work and having receipts would have no bearing on the right to distribute copies of that work to others.
Obviously, if someone pirated these movies they could get in trouble for that as well, but that'd be an entirely different matter from the use of copyrighted images on their website.