MTV Europe Has Things To Say About Piracy And/Or Loading Bars Being Bad For Musicians

from the there's-a-'soylent-green'-joke-in-there-and-i'm-going-to-go-get dept

I don't know what a good anti-piracy ad looks like. I don't think I've ever seen one. Most of these promos come across with all the subtlety of a stereotypical Jewish grandmother bearing a sledgehammer, continually bashing the observer over the head with guilt and terrible physical theft metaphors. This new ad is different. Not better, but at least not more of the same. Hat tip to Dave Awesome Allen for pointing this out via his blog post entitled "Yeah, this will really work." (Yes. His middle name is actually "Awesome" and it's because of things like this. Also because of Gang of Four, Shriekback and the Elastic Purejoy. )

It's not much to look at from a distance:



But, fortunately, Huh Magazine has a selection of closeup shots to better show how piracy is swiftly turning musicians blue.

In the following two closeups, a few details stand out, which we decided to highlight for discussion purposes:



[1] A man who looks suspiciously like Kim Dotcom as portrayed by Rex Ryan gestures wildly at the cowering musicians while unwittingly providing user names and passwords to the onlooking Anonymous member. 

[2] Fanservice.

[3] Lyle Lovett is menaced by an eyeless worlock who uses his magicks to unsettle Lovett's hairpiece.



[1] A Hindu techie delivers a new monitor.

[2] A man requests a refund for his defective power strip, gesturing at the distinct lack of sockets.

[3] H8trs gonna h8.

A set of striking images to be sure, reminding each and every one of us John Q. Downloaders that your computer's hard drive is made out of people, and each download is slowly (depending on ISP) drowning them. Which is bad, because most of them own expensive electronic devices.

Filed Under: advertising, huh?, piracy
Companies: mtv, viacom

Washed Up On The 'Jersey Shore': The 'Original DJ Paulie' Sues DJ Pauly D

from the forty-three-years-and-still-stuck-in-connecticut dept

Via Overlawyered comes the news that a battle royale between two DJ Paulies is coming to a head. Unfortunately for those of us who sat through such seminal DJ-centric films as Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogalo, this battle will be taking place in an uptight courtroom rather than in a grafitti-ridden subway stop or something.

The trademark infringement claim centers on one Paul Lis, who until recently, was the premier DJ Paulie/Pauly in the state of Connecticut:

Paul Lis of South Windsor, Conn., said he spent 40 years building up a reputation as the region’s "DJ Paulie" before DelVecchio began calling himself "DJ Pauly D" on television. . . .

"He formally trademarked the name ‘DJ Paulie’ and then came the ‘Jersey Shore’ which basically wiped him off the face of the map," attorney Jose M. Rojas told NewsCore.

Lis' lawsuit alleges that MTV "flooded the internet" with Jersey Shore content, wiping almost any trace of the "Original One and Only DJ Paulie® since 1973" (according to his website) right off the search engine map. Now, it would seem obvious that MTV hasn't actually done any "flooding" as popular TV shows generate their own heat, via "news" items, forum discussions, Facebook fan pages, etc., not to mention that the cast members have never shied away from any self-promotional activity.

I'm sure it's disheartening for the "original" DJ Paulie to search his own name only to have Google inform him that he's misspelled it and show him results for the infinitely more popular DJ Pauly D, but anyone looking for a mild-mannered DJ who's been in business "since 1973" (mainly in the greater Connecticut area) is not going to mistake a gel-topped, Cadillac-tattooed Jersey boy for the person in question. (Or so you would think. In his cease-and-desist letter to Viacom, Lis points out that in three months he received "112 emails and 5 phone inquiries regarding whether or not he was DJ Pauly D from MTV's Jersey Shore." 117 fast-moving morons is a lot of morons.)

In response to this"redirection" of DJ Paulie's fame and fortune, he's asking for $4 million in damages, applying not only to "loss of revenue" due to search engine results, but also the damage done to DJ Paulie's "G-rated" reputation by DJ Pauly D's actions, including allegedly physically assaulting a male hairdresser. (This is on top of the "debauched lifestyle suggestive of loose morals, violence, intoxication and liberal profanity" listed in the filing.)

The "Original DJ Paulie" has several things going for him in this suit. First of all, he's been using the name "DJ Paulie" continuously since 1971. Not only that, but he filed for a trademark on "DJ Paulie" in 2008, roughly a year before Jersey Shore debuted. Add to this the fact that Jersey Shore's DJ Pauly D has applied for a trademark and been rejected three times for "likelihood of confusion," and it looks as if DJ Paulie may have a legitimate claim after all. And as for the "moron in a hurry" litmus test? As noted above, he's run into a few of those as well. (Presumably, most of them warning him to stay away from their sisters.)

Unfortunately, despite these positives, Lis and his lawyer have also dragged in a lot of extras which muddle the relatively clear waters of trademark infringement and send it saling into "spray and pray" territory. First off, Lis claims that MTV "placed content on the internet with metatags and/or other internet searchable indicia intentionally utilizing the spelling of 'DJ Paulie'" to draw traffic to the Jersey Shore star. Unfortunately, this claim heads down a path paved by other failed lawsuits as Google has shown that it does not use metatags to provide search results. 

He's also naming Baskin-Robbins as a defendant based on its marketing of "disc jockey software incorporating the mark 'DJ PAULY D'" and Hearst Communications for its Cosmo app, which was promoted by DelVecchio. Also listed are the mysterious John Does, all 999 of them, each of which is potentially "liable to the plaintiff for trademark infringement and other related civil wrongs," which I would take to mean that he and his lawyer are hoping to find more defendants through the discovery process.

Of course, all this attendant publicity has gotten his name back to the top of the search engine results. Unfortunately, it does mean he has to share the headlines with his ultra-tanned nemesis.

Filed Under: dj paulie d, dj pauly, the jersey shore, trademark
Companies: baskin-robbins, mtv

Weird Al File Sharing Censorship Was To Mock MTV

from the it's-all-explained dept

Last week we broke the story of Weird Al Yankovic's "Don't Download This Song" video being bleeped on MTV when the names of file sharing apps were mentioned. The NY Times thankfully got to the bottom of the story after a conversation with Weird Al himself. Apparently, MTV had told him two years ago (when the video was released) that they would not play it on TV without the file sharing names taken out. Yankovic himself added the beeps and tried to make them as extreme as possible to highlight the ridiculousness of it all:

Instead of subtly removing or obscuring the words in the track, I made the creative decision to bleep them out as obnoxiously as possible, so that there would be no mistake I was being censored.

He doesn't know if the video ever actually aired on TV, so it's likely no one even saw the bleeped video until MTV launched their online video site. He points out, as we noted, that the uncensored version is available on YouTube, but doesn't explain why embedding that video is forbidden as well.

Filed Under: bleeps, music, videos, weird al
Companies: mtv

MySpace And MTV Catch Up To YouTube On Ad Spamming Uploaded Videos

from the this-is-revolutionary? dept

For quite some time, YouTube has allowed copyright holders to "claim" videos that contain their content. Rather than demanding a takedown, these claims allow Google to place ads on the videos and share some of the revenue with the copyright holder. That seems a lot better than random takedowns, and in fact Google's program has been very successful. So it should come as no surprise that others, including MySpace and MTV are about to offer the same deal. What's unclear, though, is why some are claiming that this is revolutionary. Seeing as YouTube has been doing it for a year, it's difficult to see how there's much to get excited about here.

Filed Under: ads, copyright, uploads, videos
Companies: mtv, myspace

South Park Comes Full Circle, Though Viacom Doesn't Seem To Realize It

from the history-lessons-needed dept

Kevin Stapp writes in to let us know that Viacom has decided to put every episode of South Park online. The article quotes MTV Networks Chairman and Chief Executive Judy McGrath talking about having TV shows online doesn't hurt their viewership and could actually help: "One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination." This is something that plenty of folks have noticed before, but perhaps something McGrath shouldn't be saying it as her parent company is trying to convince a court that YouTube is costing it money. McGrath's quote probably won't play very well in court.

However, what's even odder is that no one (in the article, at least) seems to recognize that this is simply a case of South Park coming full circle. The only reason that South Park even is a TV show is because of the video short created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone got passed widely around the internet back in 1995 and 1996. Also, once the show launched, it was one of the first TV shows that fans quickly put online and shared, helping promote the popularity of the show. I still remember people passing around links to the first few episodes in order to round up people to get together to watch the newest episodes on TV. And, what happened? You guessed it... Comedy Central flipped out and started threatening all of the sites that were hosting the episodes. Yet here we are, a decade later and its big news that the company has finally (partially) come to its senses?

Filed Under: online, south park
Companies: mtv, viacom

Was MTV's Rhapsody Decision Really Punishment For Microsoft Abandoning PlaysForSure?

from the playsforsure,-huh? dept

We chalked up MTV's decision to drop Microsoft for RealNetworks in its online music store efforts to MTV's typical internet bumbling. However, there is another interesting possibility. MTV dumped Microsoft to punish the company for pulling the rug out from under them when it killed off "PlaysForSure" DRM. You may recall that Microsoft used to have its own DRM that it tried to get pushed as an industry standard. The company called it "PlaysForSure" in a bit of marketing hubris to try to make sure people felt comfortable with it. There was just one teensy problem. When Microsoft decided to get into the business of selling its own digital music players, it wouldn't support PlaysForSure, making the name that much more ironic. When your own digital music players won't play your own PlaysForSure DRM files, you have a problem. Not only did it screw over all the users who had been buying PlaysForSure files, it hurt all the different music stores, including MTV's, that had bet on PlaysForSure. So, with that in mind, it's no wonder that MTV decided to find someone else to partner with. Of course, you can still point out that MTV should have known better than to trust in Microsoft's DRM, but that's an issue for another day.

Filed Under: drm, playsforsure
Companies: microsoft, mtv

MTV Still Learning That Things Don't Come So Easy On The Internet

from the you-actually-have-to-offer-something-useful dept

MTV has had an awful lot of trouble over the years trying to become the MTV of the internet. It seems that the company rested on its TV laurels for way too long, and then totally misunderstood what the online world wanted, originally insisting that its archive of video would make it a player in the space. More recently, it tried to get into the music download business, but offered a me-too package that wasn't even remotely compelling. Almost no one used it. So, it should come as no surprise that MTV is now killing off its Urge music offering, that was launched together with Microsoft, and instead focusing on a new joint venture with RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service. Of course, once again, it's going to face the same questions as before about what differentiates this from anything else out there, and once again, it seems likely that MTV won't have a very good answer.

Filed Under: downloads, music
Companies: mtv, realnetworks