Fresh Propaganda: Watching Streaming Video Now Theft by George Ziemann -- February 6, 2009 Both of these articles were in the New York Times. Neither of them deserved to be. Despite iTunes Accord, Music Labels Still Fret This almost sounds like a story. However, following the New York Times long tradition, the only sources of the story are "several high-level music executives, who spoke on the condition that they not be named to avoid angering Apple." Therefore, nothing they say can be taken seriously. Even less so when you consider what the actual situation is. Apple opened a music store. His vendors are trying to dictate his pricing. Steve Jobs reminded them it was his store, not theirs. If they don't like what he's doing, they are free to take their business elsewhere. The deeper irony is that this is how the labels treat musicians. It's good to see the cruel shoe on the other foot for a while. Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios While the first article was just lame, this one is filled with disinformation and propaganda. It is attributed to both BRIAN STELTER and BRAD STONE, as it took two people to put this much crap together. They start out honest enough... On the day last July when "The Dark Knight" arrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film. The campaign failed miserably. Of course it did. The MPAA is just as clueless as the RIAA. Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment - struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Wasn't that the BetaMax moment? It came before Napster, and we were told sharing videos was perfectly legal. Unless by "Napster moment" they are referring to an event that makes you decide to invent laws. TorrentFreak.com, a Web site based in Germany that tracks which shows are most downloaded, estimates that each episode of "Heroes," a series on NBC, is downloaded five million times, representing a substantial loss for the network. (On TV, "Heroes" averages 10 million American viewers each week). This may sound like one of the stupidest, most outrageous claims you have heard, but we haven't come to the end of the story yet. Okay, so 10 million people watch this show every week. Another 5 million may have opted for what was on CBS or ABC, may not have had access to a TV at the appointed hour, or for whatever reason, did not see it when it aired. But they were curious enough to watch it after the fact. I don't see how the extra five million viewers represents a loss for NBC simply because they couldn't stop their life to watch a television show on the network's schedule. I'll bet most of those five million people work second shift. They never get to see prime time TV. I missed the first two years of Saturday Night Live because if it was Saturday night, we were being "live" somewhere. Now we come to the Napster moment. A wave of streaming sites, which allow people to start watching video immediately without transferring a full copy of the movie or show to their hard drive, are making it easier than ever to watch free Hollywood content online. Many of these sites are located in countries with lackluster piracy enforcement efforts, like China, and are hard to monitor, so media companies do not have a clear sense of how much content is being stolen. Now streaming is theft? In what universe is looking at something the same as stealing it? In the case of movies, I would concede that the person providing the streams probably needs to be licensed and give the studios a cut of profits. But to declare watching a movie is some sort of an offense, well, that's pure bullshit. But many industry experts say the practice is becoming much more prevalent. "Streaming has gotten efficient and cheap enough and it gives users more control than downloads do. This is where piracy is headed," said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Consumers are under the impression that everything they want to watch should be easily streamable." What did he say? "Streaming... gives users more control than downloads do." This makes absolutely no fucking sense at all. If you download a movie you can edit it. If you stream a movie, you just watch it. Streaming gives users a defense, since they never made a copy of anything. "This is where piracy is headed." Another WTF? statement. Everyone in the country seems to have forgotten how the radio works. They stream music into the air. You listen to it. Where the hell does the "piracy" part come in? What are they going to do, search your memories? What are you, our feared pirate, going to do? Sell them? Charge people to hear you give your personal description/review? "Young people, in particular, conclude that if it's so easy, it can't be wrong," said Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal. I get the impression that this guy has never seen Alex Baldwin's Hulu commercials, on NBC. The message is that it's easy, it's not wrong, and, in fact, we encourage you to do it as much as possible. I would think they would have at least run the "so we can suck your brains out" part past the legal team. The important point is that "industry experts" (who are seldom right) cannot declare something to be illegal. The RIAA could never prove downloading, much less approach the issue of whether it was legally equated with theft (to prevent a BetaMax moment). I don't know about you, but it seems like every window I open on the Internet throws some kind of video up these days. Am I expected to analyze each one before I watch it to see if it is "legal"? Is this some kind of end run to public censorship? How does this work? We still have Free Speech, but listening is illegal? Again, neither of these stories deserved to be printed in the New York Times. One is lame whining from the labels, the other is pure propaganda.

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