Oh, we piss people off.

The schedule for the next few months is posted on flyers outside the theater, and on December 15, we’re doing It’s a Wonderful Life. There was already some internal conflict about it, and some anonymous wag wrote on one of the flyers: “It’s not a bad movie, you S.O.B.s!!!” With three lines under S.O.B.s, so we’ll know they mean business.

Yeah, some people don’t like Bad Movie Night so much.

Me, I do. It’s my baby. I didn’t create the show—that honor goes to Jim Fourniadis and Ty McKenzie—but I was there on the first night: Red Dawn, March 27, 2005. Coincidentally, I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years earlier that afternoon. As a result I almost didn’t go to the show at all, but I was looking forward to it, and the point of the breakup had been (among other things) so I could go do the stuff I wanted, and Bad Movie Night was very much the stuff I wanted to do. I became a frequent co-host, eventually weaseling working my up to de facto curator. It’s still the most fun thing I do on a regular basis.

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Can you really be sued by Major League Baseball for telling a friend about that game you watched on TV last night? If you believe the warning that announcers read during every broadcast, you’re violating MLB’s rights when you talk about a game.

“This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated without express written consent.”

Read the warning closely and it’s not clear what is allowed. MLB doesn’t want me uploading video clips to YouTube — fair enough. But what about “accounts and descriptions” of the game? Do I really need the express written consent of Bud Selig in order to legally tell you that Barry Bonds walked on four pitches in the fifth inning?

On one hand, MLB’s warning is so broad and all-inclusive that it’s become something of a cultural joke. On the other hand, similar over-reaching warnings have become standard on most forms of content protected by copyright. Copyright holders may not actually have all of the rights they claim when they issue these warnings, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to scare consumers with unenforceable threats.

The cumulative impact of these warnings has been to confuse consumers about the nature and balance of rights associated with copyright. Copyright law is complicated enough without entertainment companies intentionally misleading the public.

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I admit to being a bit old-fashioned, but in my mind, good customer service rarely involves suing your customers. But, for the past several years, that’s just what the RIAA has done. Nothing creates a warm and fuzzy feeling about an industry faster than threats. Makes you feel wanted.

Illegal downloads are a problem. I maintain — because frankly, the RIAA has offered nothing in the way of hard evidence — that the amount of money being lost is quite a bit less than what the press releases suggest. I believe this simply because every download does not represent a lost sale. In many cases, the songs would have gone unsold, unheard, unnoticed.
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Hollywood, March 26/ MR Newswire

Steve Samwell, the creator of the concept of filing frivolous lawsuits against the producers of hit TV Shows, Films and Records, has today announced that he will file a lawsuit against “everyone in the past 40 years who has filed a lawsuit claiming that their idea was stolen.” Mr. Samwell is asserting that these people have stolen his intellectual property and are profiting from that theft.

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Last year we told you about Captain Copyright, the cartoon character who was created to teach the children of Canada about the value of intellectual property and the dangers of piracy. While we support teaching children about the real world, Captain Copyright’s lesson plans seemed more more like propaganda than fair and balanced representations of the complex issues surrounding copyright and intellectual property.

This morning we’ve learned that Captain Copyright has been asked to turn in his tights and cape. The Captain’s creators, a group called Access Copyright, have decided to pull the plug on the program. While today’s announcement came as a surprise, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. In his short time fighting crime Captain Copyright managed to make a lot of enemies.

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If you had any doubt about America’s national priorities, consider this: Yesterday’s bomb scare has become today’s copyright violation.

Earlier this week Boston authorities were busy calling in the Department Homeland Security over some mysterious looking circuit boards. Everyone involved was certain they were bombs that would be detonated as part of some evil plot to prevent the Red Sox from winning another World Series. Just days later someone (we’re still not quite sure who) is apparently claiming that eBay auctions offering those very same circuit boards are a copyright violation. The path from terrorism to piracy is a surprisingly short one.

Given the fact that hundreds of signs were hidden in at least 10 major cities, it should come as no surprise to anyone that they’re starting to turn up on eBay. What is surprising is that anyone would consider their sale a violation of copyright. Copyright protects the right to copy (hence the name). By all accounts, the signs that are being auctioned are authentic.

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One of the great, sort-of-under the mainstream media’s radar stories of this past year was/is Google Book Search. If you hang around publishing circles (which, well, I do), it’s been a blip on the screen, but if you’re looking at big media stories, this one just seems to escape the big press.

Maybe it’s just that books aren’t as glamorous as movies, I don’t know. But while the major studios and music labels try — and I use the word very deliberately — to wrap their minds around the concept of digitizing and distributing content, Google (and, to be fair, Microsoft and Amazon) has pushed forward with its plan. As I type, I can access digitized books and make decisions about their usefulness in my current research. As more product gets added to the search engine, I find myself using this feature of Google more and more. I have actually made one purchase based on this feature. Not a bad return on investment, considering I never would have found this book on Amazon. I tried; Amazon’s search functionality denied me, time and again. Google, however, was more than happy to offer the book up right away.
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Dear Lopy:

Signed,
Confused By iTunes

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So, we received a question this morning, and it’s one that every member of the ‘loper team will probably want to address in different ways: who does piracy really hurt? You know the arguments, how some people believe that stealing music doesn’t hurt anything because, well, those corporations are so big, nobody will notice a few bucks here, a few bucks there.

Let’s be honest here. Piracy hurts every single person and business in the chain. It hurts the artist, it hurts the labels, it hurts the retailers. If you’re talking in terms of physical media, it hurts the people who drive trucks and work in warehouses. It hurts artists who haven’t yet been signed to labels. You might not think there’s an impact, but you’re wrong.
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Unversal Music, the mega-major record label that thinks so little of its fans that their CEO, Doug Morris, recently said that iPods were: “just repositories for stolen music,” has evidentally hit upon a new business model: lawsuits and extortion.

Apparently making money by putting good music out there with a price point that might entice people just isn’t good enough. Because, of course, we are all thieves. So instead of that, they’ve decided to go a different route. Instead of using their artists to make money, they’ve decided to fall back upon the lawyers. Hopefully, the lawyers will get a better royalty rate.

Let’s review, shall we?

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