My name is Douglas Gordon and in 2019, I was charged by the Department of Justice and convicted of Criminal Copyright Infringement. I received 60 months in prison and this is my story.
From day one of the investigation which I became aware of in 2015, I did not deny copying and distributing the movies that I sold from various websites. The reasons I did not cooperate with investigators and took the case to trial were really simple:
I was advised by my longtime attorney not to cooperate in any way.
I disagreed with the United States Government’s interpretation of the copyright law and how it applied to the circumstances of my case.
And even if I was wrong, the prosecution would be the first of its kind in US history.
The federal case, United States v Gordon involved the Fair Use of Orphan Works, and I could not, with good conscience, not fight for something I believed in. So additionally with an interpretive disagreement I had fundamental disagreement. I could not be the first person to basically assist the government in expanding the already too constrictive and draconian in criminal copyright law. The expanding law was already stifling the very purpose of what copyright law is supposed to be doing.
I was going to fight the case no matter what negative effects it had on me personally.
To explain how I got here, we have to go back several decades.
When I was ten years old, I saw a motion picture you may have heard of, “Star Wars”. I had probably seen 10 movies in my whole life up until that summer. I bet I watched “Star Wars: A New Hope” 20 times in theaters. It was 1977 and decades before movies were at your fingertips on multiple devices.
Growing up with a physical disability in rural Maine in the 1970s, I was a bully magnet and initially dealt with it by simply smacking the bully in the face. While that usually stopped the bullying, I learned quickly it wasn’t the right answer to the problem. Society, sort of, frowns on it, more so back then. So, I had to find other ways to beat them and one way to escape the reality of bullying was by losing myself in movies. “Star Wars” changed my life in many ways. I had never seen anything like it. The story was pure Good versus Evil. The little guy, a nobody farm boy, beats the odds and takes down the oppressive, cruel Empire.
My obsession with the SCI-FI/Fantasy adventure ran deep, I had to have every toy, ship, action figure I could get my hands on, but the books are what really changed my life.
Many of the books were the scripts/storyboards or the details of how the movie was made. And at 10 years, I had a life-altering epiphany: People MAKE movies? My ten old mind had finally grasped the concept that some people in the world did that for a job. Like they got every day and made movies and got paid for it! I knew then and there what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I was going to make movies and be involved in that business however I could. So eventually, I went to business school, then Video Production school, eventually Film School. While at film school, I did what most students do: I made Student films and when I left college, I never stopped making films. The student projects became independent projects. Low budget and sometimes, very rough. But I kept going, hopefully getting better with each attempt.
For about a decade I worked on many small TV and film projects, so some were completed, some were not. All the time working ‘regular’ jobs, I pursue employment that somehow involves 'the business’. TV Stations, Movie Theatres, video stores, media distributors. I was trying to learn every aspect of the filmed entertainment industry.
One of the struggles in Indy film production that we constantly faced was not having enough capital to do the productions right. This is a typical problem with independent film. Occasionally I meet with outside investors, but I was never willing to give the control that they required to loosen the purse strings.
After 2000, several things happened. Our production company had just finished a big year-long project, we had personality clashes in our small group, and I was getting a divorce. And 9/11 happened. The event had a profound effect on me, that maybe I was wasting my time doing these small film projects. I wanted to have a bigger impact with a larger audience. Around this same time, I also discovered ecommerce and started reselling items on all the popular platforms. Mostly I sold, you guessed it, movies and movie-related items.
Since it was very successful and grew quite quickly, I put a pause on filmmaking and decided to pursue the all-mighty dollar. My thinking was, make enough money to finance a decent size film and then get back into the business of making movies.
That day never came, I made plenty of money. Plenty of money to me anyway, for I came from a lower middle-class family in rural Maine. My on-line sales were the most money I had ever made in my life. But instead of going back into filmmaking, I opened store fronts to go along with the Internet business. Trying to build a little retail empire. And EDGE Video was born.
I wanted to create a different kind of video chain. I wanted to compete with the then big boys, Blockbuster, Movie Gallery, Hollywood Video. The ones who have successfully taken down many mom-and-pop stores over the years. Again, I went back to my Star Wars roots and had to take on the big guys. But I also wanted EDGE to be a movie lover’s store, so while we had multiple copies of the latest Superhero and summer blockbuster, we also had copies of Eraser head, El Topo and many smaller Indy films.
Ok, so this 2004, and the general public, at least in Northern Maine, was not real excited about putting their credit card number online to order something over the Internet. So as part of our service in the store, we started to do special orders for people. And sometimes they would be looking for obscure and hard to find movies. Our motto became: “If a movie has been made, we can find it!”
For example, let’s say there was a movie you saw when you were younger, like the 1986 Christmas movie, Babes in Toyland on television. Then it appeared on VHS in 1991 and then disappeared like a forgotten Christmas present thrown in your bedroom closet. By 2008, DVD was the dominant format, and Babes wasn’t available anywhere. If you were an EDGE customer, you would come into one of our stores and we would order you a copy on DVD. Occasionally, a disc would arrive with a handwritten title, like black marker. A magic marker. A felt pen! A fuckin' black magic marker!
The customer would look at this, look at me and say, “Is this legal?” TO BE CONTINUED...