Warner Bros. Just Keeps Pushing People To Piracy; New Deal Also Delays Queuing

from the are-they-that-clueless? dept

Sometimes you really have to wonder about some legacy entertainment industry execs and their thought process. Warner Bros. is the most aggressively stupid when it comes to willfully going against what consumers want and pushing them to pirate instead. It, among the big Hollywood studios has been the leader in trying to hold back rentals in the bizarre belief that if people can't rent a video legally, they're suddenly more likely to pony up many times the amount to buy the full DVD. This is what we call denial. And economically clueless. The latest detail, which came out last week, is that one of WB's new conditions with its deal with Netflix isn't just that the rentals are delayed by 56 days (up from the previous 28), but that they won't even be able to put the delayed movie in their "wanted" queue until 28 days before it's actually available.

Under the companies' previous agreement, users could add discs to their queues even before they went on sale. Warner executives apparently believed that policy made it easier for consumers to wait, confident that the discs would arrive eventually.

But now when users search for Warner's "A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas," which goes on sale Feb. 7, the Netflix website simply says the movie is not available. Consumers will have wait until March 6 to add the film to their queues and until April 3 to get it in the mail.

What's amazing about this policy is that it seems to provide the exact opposite incentives of what WB should want. At least, when they could put it in their queue as a sort of "pre-release" commitment, they knew they'd be getting it soon, and would have less incentive to go out and get it through unauthorized means. But, now, they won't even have that, making it even more likely they seek the movie out via unauthorized means. WB is in complete denial if it thinks this is suddenly going to make people more interested in buying the physical DVDs.

Filed Under: delays, movies, piracy
Companies: netflix, warner bros.

Did You Embed The Leaked Trailer For Dark Knight Rises On Your Blog? Under SOPA, You May Face Jail Time

from the the-dark-knight-rises,-indeed dept

You may have heard that, over the weekend, the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises was leaked (eventually leading to the official release of the trailer). As tends to happen with these kinds of things, they spread pretty quickly and the video (which, let us remember, is an advertisement for the movie) went pretty viral, and lots of people were sharing it. Now, if you're normal and clueful, this is a good thing. If you're lawyers for Warner Bros., you flip out and start sending out legal notices. Rob Sheridan received one of these notices after he included the embed of one of the videos of the trailer on his Tumblr site. He pointed out how ridiculous it is that he's getting hit for merely embedding a video, since he doesn't host it at all, and it seems like the takedown notice should have gone to the folks actually hosting the video instead. Unfortunately, it's become equally popular to go after those who link to infringing content, usually relying on 512(d)'s requirements that "information location tools" "disable access" to the material once notified. Thus, Warner Bros notifies Tumblr, and there goes the video. Personally, this seems silly. A simple link or embed should never be seen as infringing, especially when it's easy enough to go after those actually hosting the video.

That said, this whole incident should be a damn good reminder of why the felony streaming portions of SOPA in the House and S.978 (the felony streaming bill) in the Senate are pretty scary. Under those bills, Sheridan could have potentially faced many years in jail for his helping to promote this movie. Remember, the point of these bills is to make a willfully infringing "public performance" of such works a potential felony. It has to be for commercial advantage or private financial gain, but those can be broadly interpreted: if the purpose is to get people to your site and advertise yourself and your work.. that can be commercial advantage. It's willful, because everyone knew the video was leaked, and not legit at the time. But is it a public performance? Hell yes.

Courts have determined that links can be public performances, noting that:

the most logical interpretation of the Copyright Act is to hold that a public performance or display includes each step in the process by which a protected work wends its way to its audience.... Using the same approach, the court determines that the unauthorized “link” to the live webcasts that Davis provides on his website qualifies...

So forget about worrying about Justin Bieber going to jail... start worrying about merely embedding the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises.

Is this really the kind of law that America needs right now?

Filed Under: dark knight rises, dmca, embeds, infringement, rob sheridan, sopa, trailers
Companies: warner bros.

How Do You Promote A Bad DRM Scheme? With A Bad Movie Of Course

from the bad-gets-worse dept

Recently, we were talking about the horrible customer reviews that Warner's Ultraviolet DRM was getting. These customers were having such a hard time trying to justify the headache that came from complying with the requirements to watch their legally purchased movies. Warner seems to be trying to make the service worthwhile and is now bundling free digital movies with video games. If you buy Batman: Arkham City, you will also get a digital Batman movie for free. Which movie will you get? Batman Forever of course. Wait. What? If the goal of these promotions is to get people to start using the service, wouldn't you think they would try giving away a movie people would actually want to watch? As opposed to the worst Batman flick ever?

I guess the people running Warner just don't realize that customers want quality content. Sadly, when you are offering crap to customers there really isn't much you can do to polish it up. Maybe the next deal will actually be worth it. Most likely not though.

Filed Under: batman, batman forever, drm, reviews, ultraviolet, video games
Companies: warner bros.

Warner Bros. Wants You To 'Buy' Movies Instead Of Rent... And By 'Buy' It Means Spend More To Still 'Rent'

from the that's-not-buying dept

We pointed out that the early reviews of Hollywood's new UltraViolet DRM aren't particularly good, but the industry is still pushing forward with the idea. Leading the way is Warner Bros., who is trying to turn the movie-based "social network" it bought a few months ago, Flixster, into the central hub for your movies. The NY Times has an article about it, where it repeatedly claims that the strategy is all about trying to get people to "buy" movies again, rather than just rent them via Netflix of Redbox. Of course, I find this pretty funny, because nothing about UltraViolet is about actually "buying" anything. You're still renting -- and if things ever went to court over, say, your first sale rights to resell a movie you "purchased" using UltraViolet, you can bet that Warner Bros. would be first in line to claim that the license shows you're merely renting the movie, and not buying it. It's just that you're renting it on an open-ended timeline, basically until the studios bail on UltraViolet and shut down the servers.

Rob Pegoraro, in commenting on the article, notes that oddly, the article doesn't even mention DRM in talking about why people don't want to buy from the studios or the fact that it's still much more convenient to get the content by unauthorized means. But that concept still hasn't reached the brain trust at Warner Bros., who seems to insist that as long as you can access the movies you "bought" from anywhere, people will prefer that to file sharing. While it's great that they're at least trying to add benefits, to make it more valuable and worth paying for, the whole thing smacks of someone's father trying to "act cool" for his kids' friends. Warner Bros. still doesn't seem to understand why people like things like Netflix: the convenience. Everything about Ultraviolet sounds inconvenient, and that hardly makes anyone want to "buy."

Filed Under: copyright, dvds, flixster, licenses, movies, purchases, rentals, ultraviolet
Companies: flixster, warner bros.

A Glimpse Of The Future Under SOPA: Warner Bros. Admits It Filed Many False Takedown Notices

from the is-this-what-we-want? dept

While entertainment industry execs still continue to pretend that it's obvious when things are infringing, they continually ignore the very real concerns raised by many of us about SOPA/PROTECT IP/ICE seizures. The concern isn't about taking down the infringing content. It's about the overreach of these efforts, and how it can and will be used to take down other, legal content. This is not some hypothetical scenario. We hear about bogus DMCA notices being issued all the time, and now we have a perfect example of what a future under SOPA would be like, as Warner Bros. has admitted in court that it issued a bunch of takedowns for content it had no copyright over -- including over some software that it just didn't like.

As you may recall, Warner Bros. was among those who sued the cyberlocker Hotfile for infringement. Hotfile hit back, pointing out that it had worked with Warner Bros., and even created a tool to make it easier to issue takedowns. And Warner Bros.'s response was to takedown tons of content that it had no right to. In responding to these countercharges, Warner Bros. flat out admits that it did exactly that. It says that sometimes it just did basic keyword matching, which caught all sorts of other content it had no right to, admitting that it never checked the actual file to make sure it was infringing.

Warner admits that, as one component of its takedown process, Warner utilizes automated software to assist in locating files on the Internet believed to contain unauthorized Warner content. Warner admits that it scans and issues takedowns for The Box (2009), a movie in which Warner owns the copyrights. Warner admits that its records indicate that URLs containing the phrases “The Box That Changed Britain” and “Cancer Step Outsider of the Box” were requested for takedown through use of the SRA tool.

It also issued a takedown over some open source software, simply because a Warner Bros. employee didn't like it (the software was a download manager that the WB employee thought could be used to infringe.) It also admits that it took down some software that it distributed, but over which it had no copyrights and no rights to issue a takedown.

Even more hilarious, is that Warner Bros., in its response to the Hotfile countercharges, seems to suggest that it's preposterous to think that it should have to actually check to make sure files are actually infringing... even as it appears to be making the argument that service providers should do exactly that:

Warner further admits that, given the volume and pace of new infringements on Hotfile, Warner could not practically download and view the contents of each file prior to requesting that it be taken down through use of the SRA tool.

And yet, we're regularly told that YouTube should be responsible for checking the content of every video uploaded. Among the other mistaken downloads were the text of a Harry Potter book, which may be infringing, but Warner only has the copyright on the movies, not the books.

After all of this, Warner Bros. tries to brush this off by saying it doesn't really matter, since most (though not all) of the content it took down was infringing anyway, so I guess it thinks it was doing other copyright holders a favor. Of course, that's not how the law works. The fact is, some copyright holders want to give their works away for free, and don't need or want some Hollywood giant taking it down for them.

Either way, this once again undermines so many of the arguments of the copyright players:

1. That it's "easy" or "obvious" to determine what is and what is not infringing. Since Warner Bros., (like Viacom before it) can't seem to get this right themselves, why do they continue to insist that it's so easy.
2. That it's "easy" or "obvious" for service providers to monitor and stop infringement directly. If even the copyright holders themselves -- who have less content to review and more knowledge of what's actually infringing -- can't get it right, why do they claim that service providers can do this?
3. That laws like SOPA won't be used to take down non-infringing speech. Once again, the evidence shows that they did exactly that. It's just that under SOPA, Warner Bros. would have been able to completely kill off Hotfile prior to its ability to make its case in court.

Think of this as a preview of what we'd get under SOPA, with companies like Warner Bros. and Viacom, with their history of bogus takedowns, continuing to do so, but rather than just blocking content they have no rights over, they'd actively shut down sites and companies. In what world does that make sense?

Filed Under: copyright, false takedowns, sopa, takedowns
Companies: hotfile, warner bros.

Warner Bros., Right After Announcing Record Profits, Pleads Poverty In Asking People To Support 'Grassroots' Campaign For E-PARASITE Act

from the that's-chutzpah dept

It appears that the big Hollywood studios/MPAA have absolutely no shame. Thankfully, employees at some of those companies recognize just how ridiculous their employers look and have been passing along some details. On Wednesday, Warner Bros. announced third quarter profits (not revenue) of $822 million, representing a 57% increase on last year. Revenues were $7.07 billion, 11% higher than last year. The company sent out an email to employees talking about how it was "another record" quarter for the company. Then, very soon after that email went out, another email went out, telling employees about how difficult life was at Warner Bros. these days due to the scourge of "content theft," and urging people to support the astroturfing group CreativeAmerica.

In July, we informed you about the creation of and Warner Bros.’ involvement with Creative America, a grassroots coalition uniting the entertainment community and others against one of the biggest threats we face as an industry: content theft. Thank you to those of you who have already joined and supported Creative America. This is an important first step, but there’s still more we can do.

Thieves in the U.S. and abroad continue to make millions of dollars off our work, talents and creativity. For instance, “The Big Bang Theory” is one of the most popular targets of digital content thieves, with more than 600,000 illegal digital downloads thus far in 2011. Meanwhile, “The Hangover Part II” was illegally downloaded some 700,000 times in the first five months since its theatrical release.

Content theft doesn’t just affect a single show or film or even studio. It affects residual benefits, pension funds and health plans as well as jobs that our industry supports—whether directly or in ancillary markets and businesses. Therefore, it’s in all of our interests to stand behind Creative America.

I dunno. WB, if you've just made $822 million in profits alone, perhaps you could donate some of that to residuals? Ha Ha, who am I kidding? Movie studios never pay residuals. Remember, this is Warner Bros. And part of the reason it was so profitable this quarter was the latest Harry Potter movie. But last year, we got to analyze the accounting on an earlier Harry Potter movie, showing how Warner Bros. played with the numbers to take a movie that brought in $938 million and still let Warner Bros. claim a $167 million "loss," through highly questionable accounting, designed almost entirely to avoid paying royalties. The trick, of course, is to set up each movie as its own "corporation" that has to pay the parent studio "fees" for certain "services." You keep ratcheting up those fees, and the studio makes a ton, but the "company" that is the movie can always claim a loss to avoid paying royalties.

Honestly, if you know anything about the numbers, you'd know that Warner Bros. is a much larger threat to residuals and other things like health plans and jobs, than any file sharing by some kids who'd never pay to see the movie anyway. SOPA/E-PARASITE isn't going to help people in the business get paid. Execs, sure. But not everyone else. Not by a long shot.

Filed Under: astroturf, creative america, grassroots, hollywood, protect ip, studios
Companies: warner bros.

Warner Bros. Hates Libraries, Wants To Embargo DVD Sales To Libraries For A Month

from the oh-come-on dept

The movie studios' short-sightedness knows no bounds, apparently. Warner Bros., which has been the most aggressive of the big movie studios in getting companies like Netflix and Redbox not to rent its movies until 28-days after they go on sale, has now decided to do the same thing for libraries, putting in place a 28-day embargo on all DVD sales to libraries, from the time of the DVD release. To make it even more obnoxious, they're removing bonus features and extras from movies sold to libraries.

Here's the thing, though. What's to stop a library from just buying an official version and lending it out? The whole thing is pretty silly anyway. Is Warner Bros. really thinking that if someone can't take out one of its movies from the library, that they'll really go buy the DVD from WB? Also, doesn't this seem like a form of price fixing?

In the end, though, it's unlikely to actually help. Slightly more enlightened studios, such as Paramount, actually tested such 28-delays and looked at the data, which said Netflix and Redbox don't cannibalize sales, and appear to "expand" the movie business. Too bad Warner Bros. hasn't seen that movie yet. Perhaps they're still waiting for the 28-day delay to pass.

Filed Under: delays, dvds, libraries, rentals, windows
Companies: warner bros.

Warner Bros. Buys Story That Was Written In The Reddit Comments; Then Tells Author To Stop Redditing

from the wb,-you're-doing-it-wrong dept

Here's a story that starts out great... but then gets annoying towards the end.

I know we've got many Redditors here, but for those who don't spend time there, they might find this story interesting. We keep hearing stories these days about how the big movie studios are afraid to try anything particularly original when it comes to greenlighting movies -- preferring these days to do remakes, adaptations or sequels, knowing that they all bring in a guaranteed audience of some kind. So it's interesting to see (as sent in by Aaron DeOliveira) that Warner Bros. "aggressively" went after and bought the rights to a story that was written in the comments of Reddit. It started when a Reddit user asked if a modern US Marine infantry battalion could wipe out the entire Roman Empire given the modern technology they would have.

Reddit user Prufrock451, who is more commonly known as James Erwin (and is apparently an author and a "two-time Jeopardy winner") jumped at the opportunity to dash off a bit of fiction describing "day 1" of such a modern military unit being transported to the Roman Empire. And the Redditors liked it. Big time. They encouraged, nay demanded, that he write more. So he wrote some more, and an entire Subreddit was created, called Rome Sweet Rome, with plenty of people contributing additional ideas, including graphics and a hypothetical movie poster.

And late last week, the news came out that Warner Bros. had purchased the movie rights. Of course, there's a long way from buying the rights to actually having a movie made. I know folks who have sold movie rights only to see them languish for ages with nothing ever happening. Still, whole thing from comment to movie deal? A little over a month. When I read all that, I thought about how cool a move this was, and how it was nice to see Warner Bros. apparently being progressive on such a deal and realizing the value not just of the story but the wider Reddit community.

But then I read a little more. In an interview with Erwin on ScreenRant, Erwin admits that now that a deal has been signed he has to stop participating in the subreddit because everyone's "lawyered-up" and worried about "locked-down IP rights."

Unfortunately, I have not been able to spend time on Reddit. This is not because I think I’m too big for my britches now. The Internet is a chaotic, give-and-take place – and that creates nightmares for a lawyered-up industry based on locked-down IP rights. In a perfect world, I would be in that subreddit every day – but that’s not what’s best for the project. I want this to succeed, and that unfortunately meant going dark for a while. I hope the folks in the RomeSweetRome subreddit see this little mash note. I miss em.

Ah, what a shame. What could have been a fun, collaborative process that really involved and built on the community -- who would have loved it -- instead becomes a lame "lawyered-up" situation with "locked-down IP rights." Sorry, WB, but you missed the whole point.

Filed Under: comments, james erwin, movie, reddit, rome sweet rome
Companies: warner bros.

Hotfile Responds To Lawsuit Filed By Studios, Countersues Warner Bros. For Copyright Misuse

from the now-this-starts-to-get-interesting dept

There was a bit of a fuss in the ongoing Hotfile vs. Hollywood lawsuit a few weeks ago when the judge made a minor ruling on discovery about what Hotfile had to hand over. However, now that Hotfile has officially responded to the complaint and added some counterclaims, the lawsuit is finally starting to get interesting. The MPAA/Hollywood studios' case took a big hit earlier this year, when the judge dismissed the claim of direct infringement by Hotfile. Without that, the MPAA has a much tougher case to prove, since it no longer becomes a straight copyright infringement case, but becomes more focused on whether or not Hotfile is protected by the DMCA's safe harbors. Where the counterclaims get interesting is that, as alleged earlier this year by Hotfile, one of the plaintiffs, Warner Bros., regularly abused its takedown tool to issue takedowns on content for which it did not hold the copyright. As in the situation in which Viacom got into some trouble for issuing takedowns on content it had uploaded itself in the YouTube case, this may serve to undermine much of the studio's arguments.

Most of the response from Hotfile seems focused on proving that it's protected by the DMCA's safe harbors, but there are a few other interesting tidbits, including this one:

On information and belief, Plaintiffs have been investigating Hotfile for over a year in which time they were aware of particular URLs of files that they believed to be infringing and had decided to contend that Hotfile’s content protection policies were inadequate. Rather than diligently and promptly bringing suit, however, Plaintiffs and their content protection agents delayed in seeking any remedy. Not only did Plaintiffs inexplicably fail to bring suit or otherwise give Hotfile notice of their allegations during this period, to the contrary, they repeatedly complimented Hotfile’s content protection efforts, offered for Hotfile to become a business affiliate, and refrained from using their Special Rightsholder Accounts to takedown the files they believed were infringing. Plaintiffs thereby perpetuated the very infringement they now allege in this case. Plaintiffs’ unreasonable delay resulted in prejudice by causing Hotfile to leave up the files that are now alleged to infringe, inducing Hotfile to maintain the very content protection policies Plaintiffs now impugn, and causing potentially helpful evidence to be lost....

It also notes that due to the compliments from studios and the questions about business relationships, Hotfile "relied on these representations believing that the Studios found Hotfile’s content protection policies to be more than adequate." The specifics here seem to be that Warner Bros. asked for and received a specific tool made by Hotfile to make deletions easier, and then regularly thanked Hotfile for its actions taking down content. Again, that looks bad for WB.

Other than that, the part that's getting attention is the claim that Warner Bros. issued takedowns on content for which it did not hold the copyright. That certainly looks bad for Warner Bros., and at the very least raises significant questions about how Hotfile could be expected to know who held which copyrights when even one of the plaintiffs appears not to know.

Warner has acted unscrupulously and dishonestly. Not only has Warner (along with four other major motion picture studios) filed this unfounded and contrived litigation against Hotfile employing overly aggressive tactics, Warner has made repeated, reckless and irresponsible misrepresentations to Hotfile falsely claiming to own copyrights in (or to have the owners’ authorization to delete) material from Hotfile.com. Worse, Warner continued to make these misrepresentations even after Hotfile explicitly brought this rampant abuse to Warner’s attention, ruling out any possibility that its wrongful actions were accidental or unknowing. Thus, Warner has knowingly made misrepresentations and it has engaged in DMCA abuse on an unprecedented scale by grossly misusing the powerful anti-piracy software tool that Hotfile specially created at Warner’s request.

The details suggest that Warner started taking down more and more content, even taking down some very popular freeware software that had been purposely uploaded to Hotfile for distribution by its creators. It also appears to have used very questionable simple phrase matching, such as deleting all files that had "the box" in the file name, even if they were totally unrelated to the WB movie "The Box." So that, too, doesn't look good for Warner Bros.

The only thing I'm not sure about here, though, is whether or not Hotfile actually has standing to bring such a claim. I would have thought that it had to be done by the actual copyright holder of the content taken down (or someone else injured by such a takedown). I'm not sure that Hotfile can make such a claim.

Separately, some of these defense and counterclaims are really just directed at Warner Bros., which is only one of the five studios suing -- so Hotfile may still have some issues with the other four. Separately, I just noticed that Paramount is missing from the suing studios. There are six major studios, and all of them except Paramount are involved. That's a bit surprising, since Paramount execs have been some of the most vocal execs speaking out against cyberlockers. Anyone know why they chose not to join in on this one?

Filed Under: copyright, copyright misuse, cyberlocker, dmca
Companies: hotfile, warner bros.

Roscoe P. Coltrane Claims Warner Bros. Stiffed Him On Millions In Merch

from the but-he's-in-hot-pursuit dept

There have been a number of lawsuits filed recently by former TV show stars claiming that the studios are cheating them out of downstream revenue as promised by their contracts. Perhaps the most high profile one involved members from the cast of Happy Days suing for not getting a cut of home video and merch sales. In that case, it appears CBS tried to buy off the actors with a few thousand dollars, rather than the millions they claim they're owed. In another such lawsuit, James Best, the actor behind the famed Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, is similarly claiming that Warner Bros. is stiffing him for millions on merchandise:

Best says his original contract with Warners entitled him to 5% of merchandising revenue from products that featured his identity, or 2.5% of total revenue for merchandise when other cast members were incorporated. The agreement purportedly covers not only the initial run on television, but also is said to give him "financial participation in spinoffs."

Best claims he's been asking Warner for an accounting of merch sales for 22 years, and finally got it in 2009. However, he notes that the numbers provided to him do not match, at all, with the numbers that Warner Bros. has bragged about publicly concerning merch sales. With all of these disputes, it's not entirely clear who's really right, though it does sound like contracts weren't always clearly written and, even worse, the studios have been dreadful at actually properly accounting for things.

Filed Under: dukes of hazzard, james best, merchandise, roscoe p. coltrane, royalties
Companies: warner bros.