The Silent War
In the past month or so, I have started seeing some peculiar behavior coming from the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Television industry. Their collective battle, of course, is copyright infringement. They have made many efforts over the past several years to stop this, and bad publicity has surrounded these efforts. The technical press loves to jump on stories of the RIAA suing grandmothers that don’t own computers, and 12 year old girls. I wish I could see the balance sheets of these efforts. How much money do they put into it, and how much are they successful in recovering?
Much of movie file swapping has moved to BitTorrent networks, with the popular Pirate Bay site run out of Sweden as the home for the torrent trackers. Our set of laws doesn’t fully reach overseas however. As in the US, in Sweden it is illegal to host copyrighted material, however it’s not illegal to point to where the copyrighted information is kept, which is what a torrent tracker file is. Pirate Bay claims that they are squeaky clean because they comply with all of Sweden’s laws. A couple of weeks ago, the long arm of the US law was able to reach into Sweden, arresting and seizing the Pirate Bay creators and all their servers. However that only lasted a few days, and the creators and their website are back in operation. Although they have not directly taken credit for this action, the MPAA was quick to make a press release claiming victory.
Time will tell who exactly pushed for action, and how they were able to convince Swedish authorities to make arrests in what essentially is a civil matter. In any case, this could be looked at as a mission failure that sends a completely different message than what was intended. I suppose the parties wishing to sink the Pirate Bay were hoping that successful intimidation would cause them to take down the site voluntarily, or perhaps that the police action would cause irreparable damage to the site and it’s followers. However poor planning and research has resulted in a huge exposure of the Pirate Bay to a larger audience, and the site diversifying their operations to multiple countries. It also sets the precedent that large sites with torrent trackers are free of prosecution in certain countries. I would say at best, that it was a bold move for the MPAA, that backfired severely.
And now the RIAA has a new battlefront of their own - amateur music videos. Just as MySpace.com has exploded with millions of tweeners posting pictures of themselves, YouTube.com is exploding with amateur videos of crazy kids dancing for their PC’s webcam, with their favorite song in the background. Problem is that some of these kids are creative, and can get hundreds of thousands of views of their video. The RIAA sees that as a copyright infringement case.
To the letter of the law, they are 100% correct. Hundreds of thousands views goes beyond fair use, beyond a simple video message to some friends. And the RIAA can’t choose to not chase these issues down, because that would create a legal precedent and ultimately some infringer’s defense in court. So the logical path in the legal process is to send cease and desist orders to YouTubers that are making their own music videos, and that is exactly what they have started doing. For the legal process and the RIAAs lawyers, this is what they need to do. For the music industry, this is the worst thing they can do. Take the video below for example - a funny girl doing her interpretation of Liam Lynch’s “United States of Whatever”. Liam who?, you might have just said. Same thing I said. I showed the video to my wife. She liked the song, and is going to buy the CD. That is how viral marketing works. Check out the video, before this 20 year old gets a C&D from the lawyers and YouTube has to pull it.
Not to leave out the television industry, they have their own faux pas to report. I’m not a huge Saturday Night Live fan these days, but a clip from the program made it’s way onto YouTube and Google Video and swept the nation. The clip was a rap parody called the “Chonic What? -les of Narnia” where comedian’s Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg do a Beastie Boys style rap on their way to see a movie. It was pretty funny, and as a standalone viral video skit had everything including product placement (Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = Crazy Delicious, apparently). Beyond that it was good promotion for SNL, which has lost a lot of fans in the past couple of years.
But again, the cease and desist letters flowed, and one of the funniest viral videos of the year got yanked. For the new fans of the video and SNL, quite a backlash has occurred. Many are so unhappy with NBC that they have gone so far as to duplicate SNLs efforts in their own parodies of the parody. I spotted at least a dozen. A while later NBC got somewhat of a clue, and posted the video on their own website, if you can actually find it.
The media content owners seem to know their business and their legal options pretty well. However in my opinion they don’t consider the Internet as part of their business. They have their network of distribution setup for their products, in a way that works for them, despite the Internet. So the Internet becomes a battleground for them where they fight to protect the way they do business.
For the movie copyright holders, the last couple of weeks has dealt a serious blow to their efforts. For the music industry, their new push into battle has left the flanks wide open. For Television, it’s as if they are black and white fighting color. If this were a real war, I would have to say the content owners are losing, and there is more fighting to come.