Sony Execs Freaked Out That Its Marketing People Wanted To Use Torrents For Marketing
from the how-dare-you-embrace-new-technology? dept
The decision of whether or not to embrace or fight innovation is such a weird one at times. It leads to such ridiculous choices. It's no secret that the big movie studios have decided that things like BitTorrent are evil and must be shunned at all costs -- even as plenty of successful creators have learned how to embrace the technology in ways that helps them make money in ways that weren't possible before. But, if you've staked your entire corporate position on the idea that BitTorrent technology is pure evil, then you can never, ever even try to embrace it and see if you can actually use it to your advantage.Witness this bizarre email thread, in which Sony's top execs completely freak out over the idea that some other Sony folks are considering ways to use torrents for promotional purposes. It started with some Sony folks in Europe, who had the idea of putting up fake torrents of the TV show "Hannibal" that would (at first) include a short portion of the show, and then would tell downloaders to watch the show on TV. But Sony bosses in LA put the kibosh on this plan:
Personally, I love this and this it is a great promotion – unfortunately, however, the studio position is that we absolutely cannot post content (even promos) on torrent sites. The studio spends millions of dollars fighting piracy and it doesn’t send a good message if we then start using those same pirate sites to promote our shows.Well, first of all, it's not a "great promotion" because people have tried putting up similar fake torrents for ages, and it tends to just piss people off. There's a reason they're downloading it rather than watching it on TV and telling them to just watch it on TV probably doesn't help anyone. It just pisses them off. But let's leave that aside for a minute.
The folks on the TV side at Sony tried again. They thought, instead of a "promotion" for the TV, how about just a "public service announcement" (PSA) about how unauthorized downloads are bad. This is also a pretty dumb idea that has been tried for over a decade and generally just leads to mockery. So it likely wouldn't be that effective, but Sony top execs got even more worried that even using torrents for PSAs would somehow legitimize BitTorrent, and Sony cannot allow that to happen.
I called Paula and restated that this is simply a long road to “no” because it so severely undercuts our efforts not only in CE, but all we have accomplished elsewhere (and that could be compromised by making the distinction between bad & good sites more gray)… Forget about a site blocking strategy if we start putting legitimate PSAs or promos on sites we’ve flagged to governments as having no legitimate purpose other than theft… PSAs being for public good, etc…Elsewhere in the email thread, Sony Pictures' top lawyer Aimee Wolfson notes that "this is a highly problematic idea":
This is a highly problematic idea. Even with a PSA message, it will be easy for the pirate sites to cite it as (a) lawful activity on their site, and (b) an attempt to promote the show. (Note that the attached script is definitely promotional, and responds to the pirate viewer’s activity with a knowing and conspiratorial “wink” – not the message we would want to send.)Meanwhile, the Sony TV and marketing people keep pushing for this idea, with Sony TV boss Steve Mosko saying "this is really important to me" and others recognizing that this is a "clever" idea, considering that the European team has "no budget."
In some ways, this is so incredibly shortsighted. Here Sony is so committed to the idea that torrents can't be shown to have any legal, non-infringing uses (even though there are plenty), that it won't even allow its own staff to experiment with ways to use the new technology to their own advantage. But just the admission in the email alone shows that Sony's top execs know damn well that there are legitimate, non-infringing, uses for BitTorrent, and they're deliberately trying not to use them just to make BitTorrent look much worse than it is.
Sony's focus is so blinded by "Piracy bad! Piracy bad!" that it can't even consider "Hey, this technology might be helpful." Once again, I'm reminded of how Jack Valenti declared in 1982 that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Except, at least back then Hollywood wasn't so stupid as to not embrace the VCR. Just four years after Valenti claimed that the VCR would kill the American film industry, in 1986, VCR revenue for the movie industry surpassed box office revenue. The Hollywood of the 1980s fought technology, but at least it learned how to use it to its own advantage. Apparently the Hollywood of today is so committed to hating on technology that it will give up the new markets enabled by it.
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Filed Under: bittorrent, hannibal, marketing, promotions, psa, sony emails
Companies: sony
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Stop restating things and it will not be such a long road you asshat.
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Interesting how times change. The "VCR" in question died out long before the advent of the DVD made VHS obsolete, but the original device that caused such a stir among the motion-picture types was... drumroll please... the Sony Betamax.
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I'm just wondering what you mean by this, since VHS and Betamax are both formats used by a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). If you're referring specifically to the Philips format, I don't believe that was what Valenti was referring to.
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So, in that context how does "the VCR in question died out long before... the DVD made VHS obsolete" make any sense given that the VCR reference covered VHS? I'm presuming you think that VCR meant Betamax, but it certainly didn't. Valenti was railing against the entire concept of a VCR, not Sony's specific implementation. If Sony had been defeated, VHS manufacturers would have been next on the slab.
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Is this talking about an 80 year old game show host promoting "talk like a pirate day?"
But, y'know, those scare quotes are really scary!
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Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
Humans can't logic. They can, but only in short bursts with lots of training.
And this is why (for instance) we have OReilly rants against government waste (as if waste was a thing that could be unilaterally point-sourced and curbed). You can't explain that.
Sony's execs see BitTorrent as the evil engine of piracy, and not the multi-purpose tool it is. By the same notion, they would probably judge the Sony Walkman or Sony Betamax the same way.
In the case of the Walkman, that helped Sony make its gazillions and buy up Hollywood (Columbia and Tristar... wistful sigh) so now they can generalize anything associated with piracy and try to obstruct its use and development.
New companies inovate. Old companies litigate.
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Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
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Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
One question though. How does it feel to be so bitter and angry towards groups of people that you have to work insults to them into places that don't fit?
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Re: Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
Do you have a persecution complex, or are you posting flamebait for the hell of it? I am inclined to believe the former, though your last statement gives me doubts, so correct me if I'm mistaken.
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Re: Re: Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
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Oh, dew tell.
How, exactly, that is hatred or being a hater you will have to explain to me. Please elaborate.
I will grant you that yes, I do regard biblical creationists the way that (giving you the benefit of the doubt) you do geocentrists or flat-earthers, but that is because my education so far has precluded all the creationist hypotheses that are based on observation and logic. Feel free to enlighten me. (I do hold respect for philosophical creationists such as Last-Tusedayists since they actually take a Socratic approach and apply reason.)
And yes, I tend to disfavor idealogues, but that is because I've seen too many incidents of people clinging to notions of the way things should be without actually considering why, or how.
And yes, I do hope to the Pillars of Creation that you do not mean to suggest Bill O'Reilly is an exemplar Republican, or for that matter, an exemplar conservative.
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Re: Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
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Re: Re: Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
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Re: Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
Humans really have trouble with comprehending simple logical fallacies, and we tend to go down the path of "good man is always right, bad man is always wrong".
For example: someone being a convicted blue-collar criminal doesn't imply they are bad at physics.
Back on topic, this ALWAYS happens to many companies.
Even more on point, Sony has done this every hardware generation since the late 80's. The lawyers are simply getting slower in catching up to technology in their cycle of "good"-"bad"-"good if walled".
We will, eventually, get something like a DRM'd BitTorrent alternative, approved by the studios. And then something else will come along, that is if the economy doesn't implode first.
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Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
Can you post a link or a reference for this? I read creationist materials all the time and I have never seen a statement like this.
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Re: Re: Technology leads to Frankenstein tragedies.
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Creationism and Science
This is not to say that all churches are anti-science though some of the big ones, such as the SBC are, and many churches struggle to fit biblical contradictions with contemporary science and their literalist position. Also, the post-2001 effort by the New-Atheist movement to push for secularism and reason-based culture has provoked some resistance, and that often appears as resistance against science and reason directly.
Even the Roman Catholic Church (a clergyman of whom first proposed the Big Bang) has been experiencing resistance to the Hawking hypothesis that time didn't exist before the big bang, and the (currently conflicting) M-theory notion that this universe is one in a vast foam sea of universes, ergo the origin of existence is beyond the scope of our ability to observe -- which puts into greater relief the hubris behind the notion that humankind or even the Earth figures centrally into some divine plan.
I think between the complexity of evolution and abiogenesis, and the terrifying truths of genesis cosmology, a lot of people find themselves uncomfortable with science, regardless of whether they agree with the idea that reality can be modeled through observation and reason.
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The nuclear bomb card.
A noteable example was in Cardinal Paul Poupard's pronouncement in 2005 where, citing the atomic bombhe pronouncement that science needs the guiding hand of faith (implicitly the Vatican's guiding hand) lest science's full power be unleashed upon humanity like Gojira upon Tokyo (metaphor is mine).
The fallacious notion is that science can be treated like a big singular thing (Also that nuclear science has anything to say about ethics. Even those sciences that are applicable to ethics -- say human psychology, sociology or anthropology -- still focus on models that explain specific outcomes as the result of specific circumstances. Consequentialism requires deciding what consequences you desire.)
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Re: The nuclear bomb card.
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Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been war crimes, just as Nazi and Allied bombing of civilians in London or Dresden were war crimes. But theatre nukes used on a battlefield? What could possibly be wrong with that?
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Re: Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
I can think of a few things. But then, I consider the current use of biological and chemical weapons on the battlefield to be immoral. I also consider the current use of depleted uranium to be immoral.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
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The immorality of weapons.
I think they're immoral not intrinsically but because reasons. For example, depleted uranium has a effects on the battlefield and its inhabitants long after the war. In a sense, it's the same problem as unexploded munitions.
But, I think, a biological agent that gives the enemy army dysentery and allows them to be defeated with less than 10% casualties (rather than the higher rates of a stand-up fight) might have some justification, just as the atom bombs were dropped to avoid an all out invasion of Japan, and the firebombing of all the major cities of Japan as we did Tokyo.
On the other hand, you could argue that war itself is unethical, though that raises the questions about when it is the lesser evil, such as when war can be used to end a pro-slavery regime or one with a systematic genocide program.
Or... a regime with a mass-surveillance program, a failed justice system and an extrajudicial detainment program. We're already sometimes pondering at what point does war become the lesser evil.
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Re: The immorality of weapons.
No, no, a thousand times no. Civilians ("women, children, and the elderly") are not valid targets. They're not even armed, and children don't even know what's going on. It's evil! Hitler and Churchill both knew and worried about this before the war, yet they let it happen anyway. It was a war crime. My own dad was made complicit in that crime.
There may have been munitions factories in those cities, but you don't shoot if you might hit an innocent (!!!) bystander. It's evil to even contemplate. War between combattants is ugly enough.
Again, no. That's their problem to solve, not anyone else's. We learn by our mistakes if we have to. You don't want to end up living in Nazi Germany? Think before you vote assholes like that into power. Tough love.
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Re: Re: The immorality of weapons.
And the 2000 election that got Bush into the oval office wasn't determined by either majority rule or even a fair election.
And no, we live in the society we have. We don't all just accept our suffering just because someone should have done different some time in the past.. To Hell with your tough love. And to Hell with your delusions of a just world. But the more that we suffer at the bottom, the more likely it is that those at the top will perish in fire.
And the ones who replace them will not be considerate to those outside who just watched it all happen. Dark ages of warlords and failed regimes usually follow the collapse of empires.
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Re: Re: Re: The immorality of weapons.
The US (as well as many other countries, including my own in many ways) has been broken for a *long* time, and the usurpers should have been checked long ago! It got that way through citizens' apathy. The founders warned about this; even Churchill conceded that. Fix the system, and don't let it get out of control. It's our responsibility to keep that ravenous beast in line if we insist on using it.
If we're invited in to help (ie. Rwanda), sure, lets go. I support humanitarian efforts.
But, mount an invasion of the USSR to bring down the Soviets, or supply the mujaheddin with stingers to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan? Fuck no. Cut all ties, don't trade with them, encourage dissidents and escapees, but not our fight! Caveat emptor.
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All-out war
Both of them depended for their own well being on waging war on their neighbors. The retaliation had to be proportional (lest the attacked nations fall like France), and the end result was massive bomber runs on alleged ball-bearing factories, and a sub-warfare campaign on Japanese oil freight.
One of Hitler's junkers dropped a single bomb in a commonwealth neighborhood and that set off the spark of using civilian targets.
Not that it's the first time. Rail guns (that is mammoth guns on railroad tracks) were used in WWII to shell Paris, and was not accurate enough to shell a smaller target. The notion of attacking civilians is regarded as poor sportsmanship, but any war that lasts long enough escalates to attacks on civilian targets, and then we firebomb Dresden and Tokyo.
And sometimes people get charged for war crimes. Sometimes they don't.
It's not right. It's not what necessarily should happen. It's just what does happen.
It's a reason to not go to war in the first place. And it's a reason to not do the kind of things that drive people to go to war.
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ugh. correction...
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Re: ugh. correction...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
I see nothing terribly immoral about biological or chemical weapons (other than the fact that they can't really be controlled and their effects last far beyond the end of the war). If they make war too ugly, great! Maybe that would stop the next one from happening.
[I wonder what Mike must think when "Sony execs freak out" devolves into ethical discussions like this. Thanks Mike.]
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The nuclear bomb card.
That's what Nobel thought about his invention of dynamite: this is something too horrible to ever use in combat, therefore it will never be used. Instead, military folks gleefully adopted it and invented the bland-sounding notion of "collateral damage" to gloss over the attendant horrors.
It's what a lot of people thought about World War I, with its insanely pointless trench warfare. They called it "the war to end all wars." We all know how that turned out.
It's what a lot of people thought about the atomic bomb. Here, finally, is something so horrible that no one will ever try to use it again. And no one did... right up until the next war broke out, and General McArthur advocated using The Bomb on North Korea so aggressively that President Truman had to fire him. We've just barely managed to dodge this one so far, but don't think for a second there aren't people out there who would love to get their hands on a nuke and then set it off in a major population center, if they could!
There's never been such a thing as a weapon so ugly that no one wants to use it, and I don't think there ever will be. Heck, just look at Star Wars. Build a weapon literally millions of times more destructive than a nuclear warhead, and someone will use it, and then rebuild it as a bigger and better 2.0 version when the first one gets destroyed! Those movies were so phenomenally successful because they had a ring of truth to them.
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Thankfully, Star Wars is fiction
I tend to point out the conflict between India and Pakistan, both armies of which have high ranking fanatics who hate the enemy, and none of the safeguards that the US and USSR adopted to prevent a madman first-strike scenario. And nukes in the hands of mid-ranking officers.
Not one has been launched in aggression.
So, while I agree with you it is possible to find wackos who would use a nuke, I can say with some confidence that they aren't commonplace. That holding the ability to kill a million people -- even a million of the most despicable enemy -- seems to have enough of a palpable gravity to give most of us pause.
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Re: Thankfully, Star Wars is fiction
Damn, there's a lot of wiggle room in there. We're doomed. All it takes is one MacArthur, or Curtis LeMay, or that shithead now running NATO currently attacking Eastern Ukraine, to convince the next GWB or the next Hirohito that "It'll be okay, trust me. This'll work."
I'm glad I won't live long enough to see it, or at least I hope I won't.
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The question this raises is why in sixty years it hasn't happened already.
I tend to speak with wiggle room because I tend to like to stick to stick to the realm of certainty. (I won't even commit to denying Russell's teapot, generally.)
But I do know that since the WWII endgame, particularly since Castle Bravo, when things went from atomic to nuclear, not a single device has been used in hostility. Yet, granted, but that's been seventy years. So either we've been very lucky, or we have had a dearth of madmen actually willing to nuke someone.
This is one case where I hope we haven't just been really lucky, because pure luck always runs out.
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The applicability of weapons technologies to ethics.
Large-output power-sources typically are used for destructive purposes before they are harnessed to supply civilian energy -- which in turn can provide for computers or food sources to feed scholars who focus on the contemplation of ethics.
Explosives have plenty of ethical civilian applications. Nukes continue to have the problem of radioactive fallout, which limits their applicability for mining or construction (Project Chariot was an early example that never went through), but this isn't to say we won't have civilian cause for big kabooms in the future in situations where the fallout would be less of an issue.
Technology doesn't speak to ethics. It speaks to applicability, what can be done with it. Ethics discusses what should or should not be done, and the conversation of ethics expands with our capabilities, as scenarios go from supposition to the consideration of real action.
So, to my best ability to parse your question, technology can be applicable with or without ethical considerations.
My observation so far is that when a technology is new, someone will try to use it unethically, such as when Dolly, the cloned sheep was announced, some gazillionaires wanted to clone heirs despite dolly's health problems, and despite the ethical considerations of self cloning.
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Why even put fake torrents up?
Studios can see pretty easily how many people are watching their shows illicitly, why aren't they using that audience to deliver ads?
Guys, you can talk directly to people you KNOW are seeking out your content! It's going to get out there within minutes of airing anyway, why not control the message?
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Re: Why even put fake torrents up?
Finally, paying people that are in the shows and commercials residuals once you have lost control over a file to determine how many times it gets watched becomes impossible.
I agree that including the commercials in the files and allowing downloads is probably a good plan, but the business models they currently have really do need to change pretty significantly to make it work - and change is hard and people don't like it so they are going to fight it kicking and screaming for as long as they can.
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Re: Re: Why even put fake torrents up?
As things stand now torrent software is being used for legitimate reasons more and more as more and more startups realise it is a very good way to spread their updates and even full software packages for absolutely zero cost to them. in fact the cost is spread through those that download any torrent by uploading a few copies, and the fact that torrents are the fastest way to download a file , especially a large file is opening the internet for many startups who would not be able to cover the costs of hardware and maintenance and bandwidth to share their content with customers.
Sony has been a failing company for many years with their tv's not even coming close to competing with the competition, with their phones and tablets almost ignored by consumers, the only thing they have real sales of are games consoles and we all know how they have lost many customers by no one else's fault but their greed and crazy illegal DRM.
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Several things
BitTorrent was created specifically for a legitimate purpose. How can Sony claim that it has no legitimate purpose. A legitimate purpose was the reason for its very creation. Ditto crowbars, and screwdrivers -- even though these can be used to commit crimes. Oh, and computers can be used to commit crimes -- just ask anyone who has been hit over the head with a computer.
Sony, aren't they the ones who have been hacked multiple times? Until they can demonstrate knowing something about technology, maybe they should not be taken too seriously.
Is CE the new euphemism for Censorship Enablement? Or what exactly does Sony's "CE" efforts refer to?
Sony adapting to the reality of BitTorrent as a superior way to distribute files, after taking such a public stance against it will be like watching Microsoft try awkwardly to embrace Open Source after having burned all bridges and then some.
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Re: Several things
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Re: Several things
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Re: Re: Several things
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Re: Re: Several things
Erm, I doubt that.
The "innovative proposal" to upload fake torrents came from some hack
in their Central European office.
CE = Central Europe.
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Re: Re: Several things
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If they wanted to...
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Re: If they wanted to...
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It wasn't an asteroid or comet
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Re: It wasn't an asteroid or comet
Pity poor Hodor, lost in a hall of mirrors, enraged at all the
unauthorised representations of the likeness of Hodor.
Smashy smashy.
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Re:
Initially, on reading the email thread in question, those were my
thoughts exactly.
But, on a second pass, notice how that particular (very obvious)
argument is totally absent from their discussion.
Just goes to show what utterly clueless dinosaur gangsters they are.
It's like they're the mafia as depicted in Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, but
without the cool one who digs Flavor Flav.
(And, as for the youtube clip linked above, speaking of clueless
dinosaurs, right on cue: "This video contains content from Lionsgate,
who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.")
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Er, this one.
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Sony elites couldn't careless about any of us
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Re: Sony elites couldn't careless about any of us
Obviously the long-term end result will probably be mass-unemployment, followed by a collapse in economy and then we can all start all over again (that is if the Earth doesn't go F.U. on us in the mean time).
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How Sony could use peer-to-peer smartly.
I remember the amazingly-well-produced-yet-grossly-manipulative Chipotle ad The Scarecrow which exemplified the content=advertising point. How awesome would it be to be able to download 1080p version of that? But for the demonization of peer-to-peer.
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Maybe they did not wanna end up like Viacom ;)
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The studio spends millions of dollars fighting piracy and it doesn’t send a good message if we then start using those same videotapes to promote our shows.
Merely replace a single word, and you see an obvious fallacy and a situation where the studios made a crapton of money once they stopped being afraid of the "pirate format". This is why their "message" doesn't get across - they're literally repeating mistakes they should have learned from 3 decades ago. The rest of us are waiting for them to catch up with this century.
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Awesome content by Alex Bashinsky co-founder of Picreel @ Alex Bashinsky
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