THE UNLAWFUL OBJECTIVE IS UNMISTAKABLE: Believing itself to be delivering unto the world a Dharma Drop worth of awesomeness, one of the Gawker Media sites this afternoon posted the full video of the twelve-minute epilogue to Lost which constitutes the most anticipated addition to the Season 6 DVD set.
Shame on Gawker Media for doing so.
[They have since reduced it to a three-plus minute clip from the end of the video which contains perhaps the more shocking elements of the full epilogue. It is yet unclear whether this was a voluntary action or was prompted by legal threats.]
We here at ALOTT5MA HQ take seriously the notion that the people who generate good content have the right to seek payment for it, and those who attempt to circumvent their efforts to get paid are stealing. Period. And, obviously, a good way to encourage people to buy a DVD set of a tv series folks have already seen -- especially when it comes to a series for which folks were frustrated by inadequate answers and closure -- is to provide them with answers, closure and content they haven't already seen.
But when you set up a system in which writers get paid based on their hit counts, as Gawker Media has done, all you're doing is encouraging its writers to locate potentially popular content which one cannot find elsewhere. (HT: Matt.) Otherwise-protected intellectual property is obviously one such area -- steal the content, ring up the hits, take (some of) it down when you receive a cease and desist letter, pay a settlement if you have to, repeat -- ritualized intellectual property theft as business model, a Napster of text and video.
[Heck, you may recall they even grabbed Isaac's Tiger Woods parody without initially crediting our site (see #8 here), not that we were asking for money. Just a link. Of course, there's also the athlete "dong shots" and rumors regarding too-much-fun-loving gunslingers and their texting habits which no other media will touch. Whatever draws a crowd.]
But the latter stuff is mostly rude and privacy-violating; stealing intellectual property directly takes potential money from content creators. That's bullshit. I'm glad they cut it down from twelve minutes to three minutes, but, really, it ought to be none minutes. Let ABC, Damon and Carlton decide how much free content with which to entice fans. Namaste.
For what it's worth, adopting the Tiger thing that I posted was both an innocent mistake and also something involving a derivative work that was entitled to no protection at all under copyright law.
ReplyDelete1. Yet another different clip is now up at the Gawker Media site. Seems that even the shortened version resulted in a letter from Disney, and Disney agreed to give them an official clip.
ReplyDelete2. As Disney well knows, derivative works are entitled to separate protection under copyright law to the extent they add additional elements/creativity to the original work. I'm free to make a movie about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but they'd better not be named Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, Sleepy, and Doc, or that violates Disney's copyright.
Mine was just Nike's copyrighted video of Tiger with Alec Baldwin's (common-law) copyrighted rant to his daughter. No creativity!
ReplyDeleteAs somebody who has written for the Gawker Media Empire, and have friends in the organization, let me just make this point: The majority of the people working for Gawker have little-to-no working knowledge of copyright law. A lot of the writers are interns, and even more of them are just bloggers who have risen through the ranks. Not all of us have the advantage of being constitutional lawyers in our extra-blogicular lives.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm sure that's true, I don't think anyone needs a legal background to understand that there are laws that prevent the wholesale copying of other people's material (as with the Lost video), and certainly after the first time a cease and desist letter is received, the ignorance defense, such as it is, becomes even less tenable. Furthermore, one would imagine that the GME has at least one lawyer at their disposal who could give the bloggers (even the interns) a basic list of practices to avoid if the GME actually wanted to avoid it.
ReplyDeleteI'm pleased to see that someone else feels the same way about this that I do. In addition to being pretty ethically sketchy to post that copyrighted material, I also wouldn't want to rob myself of the joy of watching it in context on the DVD. It was a big selling point of purchasing the complete series, and it seems crappy to me to undercut that. Legally sketchy, but also douchey, I guess is my point.
ReplyDeleteI second everything CH said, and would add that Gawker sites also have editors and associate editors who presumably know from experience (repeated C+Ds) that some things are unlawful, but also know from experience that they'll probably be okay if they adopt an act-illegally-until-the-C+D policy.
ReplyDeleteBingo. I missed most of last season, so I am waiting to pick up the season set, at which time I will watch it all through, then the epilogue, rewarding myself avoiding spoilers for SIX MONTHS.
ReplyDeleteDouchey. And if you're not even the least bit aware that creative content is legally protected and that the people who generate it should be paid for it, then you shouldn't be writing for a media website. (And assuming you do and don't care - illegal and douchey.) Not to mention that not only do the writers get paid for their views, but Gawker is making ad revenue off those views.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a copyright lawyer (or a lawyer of any kind) but I do get paid make a creative product that people pay for . . . and, most importantly, my authors get paid to generate that creative product (including royalties for every copy sold). It's exhausting to even think about summarizing all of the issues we're facing as an industry these days, so I'll leave it by simply saying that making sure creative content is paid for (and making sure the worth of that creative content is not systematically devalued) is a topic of daily conversation.