As a writer, I am keenly interested in protecting my ownership rights for my work. It is no small irony that pretty much everything I’ve written in the past several years is freely available on various websites, easily copied by anyone who chooses to do so. And, yes, I have been plagiarized (rather crudely, if you want my opinion). I thank fair use every day for my personal success. Fair use extends the discussion beyond my limited corner of the universe.

Copyright is a Constitutionally-protected right(Article I, Section 8, Clause 8). This means, of course, that the government is entrusted with the responsibility to balance the rights of the content owner with the rights of the public. The fact that copyrights are to be protected for a “limited time” indicates that this balance was considered long before Mickey Mouse edged up to entering the public domain. I still shake my head at the idea that the company that made so much money off the public domain refuses to give back to that community.
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The Writers Strike has been a bit underground in the past month or so, since there is a normal holiday downtime for new original TV shows anyway. This week, however, it took down what might be its biggest casualty yet: The Golden Globes.

With the Screen Actors Guild boycotting the event, The Globes’ massive pointlessness ramped up past the usual level, and so NBC has reduced it from a major telecast to a um, er, press conference.

Ladies and Gents, while the Golden Globes is the first major awards show (I don’t really count the People’s Choice Awards as anything but more money for Dick Clark) that the WGA strike is going to affect, it is by no means the last.

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If I were a consumer who’d invested in the HD DVD format, I’d be fighting, suing mad right now. If I were a studio head who’d placed my company’s future in HD DVD, I’d be panicking right now. And if I were a shareholder in a motion picture company that “chose” the HD DVD format, I’d be starting a management ouster.

As announced on Friday (word spread through the motion picture industry — or at least my little part of it — much faster than the rain we were told was coming), Warner Brothers has decided to go all Blu-Ray all the time. Since only two majors — NBC Universal and Paramount (plus Dreamworks Animation) — remain in the HD DVD camp, industry wisdom has declared that format dead.

[By the way, those of you who truly want to understand why the newspaper industry is dying? When I searched for "dvd format war" on the latimes.com site, the number of search results returned? Zero. The headline of the article is "DVD format war appears to be over". Luckily, Google came through.]
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We admit it freely: sometimes we can’t help the snarkiness. It just comes out. For example, let us return to this gem from ”The Daily Loper - February 7”:

Headline: Wal-Mart entry to video downloads a ‘game changer’
Us: Yeahhhhhh . . . no.

Like most of you, we read the Reuters piece — classic journalism filled with breathless anticipation and so-far-off-base-it’s-funny commentary from media experts — with a dose of skepticism. Despite the fact that Wal-Mart has a strong brand name, we simply could not fathom how the Wal-Mart product could change the game. In fact, our analysis of the service suggested quite the opposite. Still, Memory Lane is a fun place, so let’s look back at a fun comment:
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It’s entirely possible that I’m not the best ‘loper to speak on this topic, but, well, that’s never stopped me. It’s not like my thoughts will stop the best ‘loper from speaking. We’re opinionated that way. And when a major corporation like CBS does something stupid, it requires team coverage.

For a few months there, we here at Medialoper HQ were thinking that maybe — just maybe — CBS might actually get how this whole Internet thing works. That maybe — just maybe — they might understand the importance of brand and discovery.

Luckily, we are not as gullible as the mainstream media, though, frankly, we gnashed our teeth at the latest lame CBS news: in the waning days of 2007, right before, oh, Christmas, CBS has let the entire StarTrek.com editorial team go. Effective immediately. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
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Back when I was just a young thing, an (old) man said to me, “Girl, you got a lot to learn about video on demand.” Or maybe not so much. He, with all seriousness, promised me one thing — there would be no VoD. Ever. He’d been in the industry for well over twenty years and on demand programming was always the golden ring. The rainbow. The dream.

Funny thing is, he’s still right. We don’t have true video on demand. We have a lot of video and a lot of demand, but actual, true video on demand remains elusive. There are several reasons, one of which being the root cause of the current writers strike: money. I will be focusing on the motion picture industry here, because the ownership rules are different in the movie biz.
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Thanks to the magic of TiVo, I caught up with what will probably be the Season Finale of Heroes, which is the latest casualty of the WGA strike. No more episodes have been produced, but as a ever-wavering fan of the show, I actually think that the strike might be a good thing for it, in terms of quality.

Here’s the thing that has always driven me nuts about Heroes: it acts as if it is a much much better show than it actually is, and Monday’s Finale was a microcosm of that.

[WARNING: there are spoilers for the Season Finale after the jump]

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I’m a sucker for serialized content. Since I was kid, I have sought out continuing story lines. Naturally, this lead to a youth wasted watching soap operas — though I never went there, it strikes me that at one point in my history, the ultimate girl youth rebellion was to choose All My Children over your mother’s Days Of Our Lives. Soap operas offered a glimpse into a glamorous, dangerous world that contrasted sharply with daily reality.

There is much to be said for the power of escapism and even the skeptics find themselves entrenched in the lives of the Rachel and Julie and Trish and David and Raven and Cash and all the other characters. The writers of soap operas are masters at creating new scenarios, introducing new drama, while making sure that the casual viewer is able to catch up with the story within moments. If you’re away for years, sure, there will be some disorientation, but not enough to make you throw up your hands and say, “That’s it! I’m never watching Young and the Restless again.”
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Outside the bubble, awareness of the Writer’s Guild of America strike is less than you’d think. For those of us who are living and breathing the strike, it seems that everyone should be talking about what’s going on. It turns out that this is not so. As the two parties sit down today to again try to find common ground, the average American, exhausted from a weekend of shopping, is discovering that TiVo is delivering less in the way of new programming and more in the way of wacky recommendations.

(Side note: how about that TiVo love letter on ”’The Simpsons”’ last night? I’ve long maintained that bad things happen to people who watch commercials…I was right!)

This post isn’t about the strike, per se. It’s more about how Hollywood simply doesn’t get today’s consumer. Or rather, Hollywood doesn’t get how today’s consumer is rejecting the notion of appointment television. A common ‘loper mantra is that we want it when we want it. Seems simple enough to understand.
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Remember a few months ago when NBC announced that they would air 30 half-hours of The Office? Here at ‘Loper HQ, where The Office runs neck-and-neck with Battlestar Galactica as our consensus favorite TV Show, there was much rejoicing at the anticipated bounty of hilarity and pathos that we were going to receive.

Well, not so much, as it turns out. Among the many many ironies created by the Writers strike is this: The Office is the first of the scripted prime-time shows to run out of of episodes, which means that this week’s episode is the last ep for, well — quite possibly, ever.

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