View From the Phlipside Radio - Movie Madness

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

I’ve talked before about the challenges facing artists in the new digital world when it comes to getting paid for their work.  The new paradigms seems to work on the basis that many people will only pay for something if they are absolutely forced to do it.  This creates a real problem for the creative people.  They make their living from the sale of their product, music, books, movies, TV shows and the like.  Because make an infinite number of digital copies is infinitely easy trying to figure out a way to be fair to everyone is a huge issue.  

The recording industry tried the blunt instrument approach by basically suing everyone for as much money as possible.  This created a huge negative reaction and turned out to be a financial flop.  It cost more in court and attorneys fees than they ever made by suing college students who were downloading the latest Eminem tunes through internet sites.  There are also the DRMs, that’s digital rights management which is computer code that restricts your ability to make copies of the product.  That gives much better protection the artist or copyright owner but makes it largely impossible for the buying public to do simple things like loan a book to a friend.  There’s a booming business in circumventing DRM codes.  So the search goes on for some kind of middle way.

Maybe the dumbest attempt is the one by the folks at Warner Brothers, the great movie studio.  According a lawsuit filed against them Warner Brothers went to the online file hosting site Hotfile and complained about people putting pirated materials belong to Warner on the site.  Hotfile responded by giving the WB folks a tool that allowed them remove any illegal content from the site.  The idea was that they would eliminate anything that belonged to them.  It appears that the power went to their head.  They began to eliminate all kinds of files that had nothing to do with Warner Brothers and then went to Hotfile to make a deal where they could offer Warner Brothers materials to folks who had lost files on Hotfile because of Warner Brothers unethical eliminations.  Hotfile repeatedly warned the studio to knock it off and finally went to court claiming, quoting now “...violation of the DMCA, intentional interference with a contractual or business relationship and negligence" driven by economic interest.”

Once again an industry has tried to protect it’s legitimate economic interests in a way that will end up costing them a small fortune.  You’d think these folks could be more creative than that.

Call that the View From the Phlipside