More than 260 Internet fan sites of television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files will shut down for a day in protest against Twentieth Century Fox, which has been closing fan sites that use material from its shows.
Sites will go offline on May 13 as part of Operation Blackout, a campaign hoping to pressure media companies into allowing still images and short audio and video clips to be used on fan Web sites. A statement on the Operation Blackout site says: "The shutting down of the sites for the day will show Fox what the end result would be: a drab and lifeless Internet."
In the latest clash between fans and media companies, unofficial Buffy site owners have been forced to shut down their Web sites after Twentieth Century Fox threatened legal action. In letters sent to site owners, lawyers acting for Fox said the company had a legal responsibility under contractual arrangements with the writers, actors, directors and TV stations to prevent unauthorised distribution of its material.
One letter told a site owner "you are hereby put on notice that the unauthorised use of Fox's proprietary material ... constitutes copyright infringement and trademark infringement and potentially subjects you to both criminal and civil sanctions".
It is not the first time Fox has taken such action. Fan sites for the TV series The X-Files, The Simpsons and Millennium have also been forced to close.
Paramount took similar action against Star Trek fan sites, as did the management of rock band Oasis which in 1997 demanded the removal of photographs, lyrics and sound clips from unofficial Oasis Internet sites.
The executive director of the Arts Law Centre of Australia, Ms Delia Browne, said the centre was aware of about 10 Australian cases in the past six months where copyright owners had approached site owners or Internet service providers, but none of these involved fan sites.
Recently the Australian Music Publishers Association and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society, representing the interests of musicians, writers and publishers, asked universities to remove music from Web sites that were breaching copyright restrictions. A few months ago an artist asked a company to remove an image of his work from the its site. In both cases the site owners complied immediately, Ms Browne said.
There was no case history of online copyright breaches in Australia, she said, because site owners normally complied with requests to remove material. "If you have got someone really big telling you to take something down from your site, you are going to do it unless you have got lots and lots of money to fight it."
Australian Buffy fan Mr Luke Jennings, 18, of Malabar, said he used to upload episodes of Buffy onto his Web site, while it was not being shown on Australian TV.
"It was the best thing since sliced bread, because I could see my favourite show and I could watch it whenever I wanted to," he said. But he removed the episodes from his Web site after reading a letter from Fox threatening another site owner.
Access for proven fans had not ended, Mr Jennings said, with a group forming a Web ring that secretly circulates material from the show.
Web ring sites have been created at unlikely Internet addresses, without information that search engines would find, so that large media companies will not find them. "It's become secretive," he said. "It's a select group of people who know about it."