The Counterrevolution Will Not Be Televised
The battle for intellectual property rights online will be playing out for many years to come. The latest news comes in the form of Jorge Romero, a dude from Chicago who had the misfortune of uploading a bunch of episodes of hit TV show 24 (personal note: I dropped off watching Bauer and co. in mid-Season Three and have felt I’ve been missing out on the fun ever since) before they aired on broadcast television and got busted for it.
Just as the RIAA seems to be more interested in laying the hammer down on the kid in a college dorm who gives access to thousands of albums on a server to an entire campus than with individual downloaders, it’s the mass distributors of intellectual property who need to take heed of Johnny Law.
But, really, I think the long term trend will be that the big record companies, the large television networks, will slowly succumb to the reality – out of necessity more than anything else – that more distribution of your product, even when done “illegally,” is better than less.
And the legal front will eventually move from the “you can’t distribute our stuff” argument to more of a “you can’t distribute our stuff without cutting us in on the advertising revenue” one.
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