Copywrong

Vitamin published an interesting article recently entitled “Communitites: Good or Evil?” which raised some interesting points about community website development for corporate gain (and its perceived dangers). What caught my eye, however, was the mention of the BBC’s ‘creative archive‘ in which select resources form BBC’s programming are made available on the web under a series of Creative Commonsesque public licenses. What a fantastic move! [and how the hell did this evade my notice so long?!] I’ve never been able to understand media broadcasters and distributors’ litigious approach to online sharing. Well that’s not entirely true – I understand it, I just think it’s overwhelmingly stupid and uninformed. Take for example two situations of broadcast content being distributed on the internet; Sky One’s ‘real life Simpsons’ clip and NBC’s ‘Lazy Sunday’ sketch from Saturday Night Live.

The former was intended as an on-air advertisement, but was also released onto the Sky One website as an experiment in viral brand-building. Within days of being released, it spread throughout the net – on link exchanges, blogs and video-sites. In a uniquely post-modern spectacle now becoming commonplace with such developments, the mainstream media soon reported on the growing media buzz surrounding the clip, adding to it further [and in doing so literally realising the adage that the media is the message]. Ultimately this seemingly innocuous decision to make the advertisement available online has seen the advertisement mentioned on tens of millions of websites and viewed well over 9 and a half million times on YouTube alone, not to mention being shown or reported on in any number of mainstream media broadcasts and publications. Undoubtedly the quality and appeal of the advertisement itself has helped this viral spread, but even the most clever and appealing of UK ads rarely end up on Australia’s national prime time news!

Now look at the situation of NBC and its treatment of Saturday Night Live sketches, in particular ‘Lazy Sunday’. Up until February of this year short video clips from SNL regularly ended up on YouTube and a host of other video-sharing and comedy websites, recorded by tech-savvy users and shared freely on these sites. On Feburary 16 this changed as YouTube announced they had been hit with a C&D for showing ‘Lazy Sundays’ and a reported 500 other NBC videos. Incidentally it should be noted that this notice was delivered in response to a YouTube marketing director making contact with the company to offer a content-featuring deal with YouTube. In other words you could be entirely forgiven for believing that despite its attesting a “long and careful” view towards copyright protection online, NBC had NO idea that portions of its content was being distributed online by fans in this matter. Indeed, ‘Lazy Sunday’ wasn’t removed from Google Video for a full week after YouTube removed its copies and considering a NBC spokesperson stated that most infringements were removed within 24-36 hours, one could also be forgiven for thinking that perhaps NBC hadn’t heard of Google Video either!

As one can attest from the fact that I’ve [quite deliberately] provided a link to the Lazy Sunday sketch at a non-NBC-affiliated site, this hard-line approach to digital copyright protection has enjoyed as much success as the one employed the RIAA. Similarly, this exercise has cost NBC a great deal of goodwill amongst its fans as it protests to have “taken your viral favourites and gathered them into one convenient location” when in actual fact it has banned the content from the most highly accessible and successful video content viewing websites ever seen, in favour of an appallingly inaccessible and poorly created site of their own making and control; swapping open democratic sharing for a corporately controlled walled garden despite the interests of the user.

Of course I’m not here to say its legally or even morally questionable to do so – it is after all, their content and intellectual property – but I do question the benefit of their actions (both for themselves and their market), and I’m not the only one. As seen in the ‘creative archive’ initiative of the BBC I mentioned earlier, and the way in which other broadcasters have embraced YouTube and similar services as content disseminators and valuable partners (Paramount, Fox, Dimension Films and a host of others all use YouTube to freely feature content online); it’s evident that at least some mainstream media entities are exploring a relaxation of controlling copyright clauses to give themselves and their users the freedom to explore and share content. Sky One’s success with its unguided viral campaign of the Simpsons clip is certainly a clear and obvious example of the great gain which can be reaped from such an approach, and I dare say one which has been noted by any broadcaster not so firmly in the dark as NBC has proven itself to be!

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