Show HN: I have built a library of screenplays for movies and TV shows

I'm hoping I won't get into too much trouble, since:

- The intention of this library is to be a free educational resource for screenwriters, it's just a hobby project that I'm not making any money off of.

- I'm simply collecting and organizing the screenplays that are freely available online already (just with a nicer UI/UX, and with more convenient searching/sorting/filtering functionality).

- On the about page I have left an email people can use to submit a takedown request, if they want to remove their screenplay from the library.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm hoping this is enough to qualify for "fair use", or something like that.

The website is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel.

It's so fast because Next and Vercel do a lot of smart optimizations with the code and the images.

Also, because the screenplays are not stored in the database, just one large local json file, so the server doesn't have to make an extra request to the database.

Thanks, I'm really happy you think this is useful!

This is just a small hobby project I have done over a couple of weekends. I don't have huge plans for it, I just want to keep finding more screenplays and adding them to the library, to make it even more useful to people.

Maybe I'll enable users submit their own screenplays and add them to the library (and create a new category for unproduced/spec scripts). Technically, they can do that already by sending me an email, but if there's interest I can make that process more convenient.

Also, I'm thinking that maybe it could help me build a discord community of aspiring screenwriters, where we'd brainstorm ideas together and exchange feedback about our work. Like an online writer's room for exchanging ideas and advice.

I have done that for my other hobby (writing adventures for roleplaying games like DnD), and it worked really well, it's very fun, and people love it:

https://rpgadventures.io/writers-room

It would take a lot of time and energy to run, but it could be helpful and worth doing, so I might do that if there's some interest.

One of the things that sucks about this is that the publishing rights for all of the original, non-ip based scripts and TV scripts are actually controlled by the writers and show creators. So it’s individual writers, not big corporations that you are actually distributing the work of without compensation.

You might say but this is fair use / you aren’t charging or profiting… it’s not fair use and I think actually you are profiting. Posting it to hacker news shows that you do profit if only though building your own notoriety and as for fair use, you can’t distribute a written work in its entirety and say it’s fair use simply because you say it’s for “educational purposes.” If that was true you could do this with any book (which you obviously can’t). The screenplay has its own copyright distinct from the movie and you are distributing the entire work. Also if you go to your local Barnes and Nobel you will see screenplays published and for sale if you need more proof this is not fair use. There is a marketplace that this act undermines.

I know you have a link for people to do takedowns, but you also know the name of all of the writers. You should be proactively reaching out and asking their permission. I bet you would be surprised how many would grant it!

Why not take what Genius did for lyrics and apply it to scripts? Allow users to annotate it.