Entertainment industry considers its customers criminals
Hopefully this isn’t reflective of the music industry as a whole, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.
A lawyer for Sony BMG, Jennifer Pariser has views that I believe are endemic of movements within the larger entertainment industry:
Pariser has a very broad definition of “stealing.” When questioned by Richard Gabriel, lead counsel for the record labels, Pariser suggested that what millions of music fans do is actually theft. The dirty deed? Ripping your own CDs or downloading songs you already own.
Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.
With the recent decision by NBC to pull their TV shows from the iTunes music store, I was hoping this type of thinking wasn’t growing in the entertainment industry, but this statement seems to indicate otherwise.
One of the motivations claimed by NBC for removing their shows was that iPods could be used to play illegal media and they wanted Apple to take stronger measures to prevent that. This seems to indicated that they might’ve wanted only protected music to be playable on iPods, a ridiculous request. Most of my music comes from CDs I rip to my computer. I’m on my computer all the time, so it just makes sense. I should also mention that I buy CDs in lieu of buying straight from iTunes so that I can get a hard copy of the music as well as the packaging. This at a premium over iTunes albums.
Apparently, to rip these CDs to my computer is equivalent to ’stealing’. I suppose their solution would be to buy another copy of the same album from iTunes, which is bullshit.
In addition to the movie industry putting insulting “don’t steal our movies” ads in front of DVDs that you’ve already purchased, this is indicative of a larger attitude within the entertainment industry of treating their own customers as thieves and criminals, and it’s not a good way to do business. This type of attitude makes me much more reluctant to buy TV shows, movies and music from NBC/Universal and Sony.
Of course, NBC is the maker of Heroes, Lost, The Office, 30 Rock, and other shows I enjoy, so I don’t know how effective my self-imposed boycott might be. Also, their Amazon based TV service doesn’t work on Macs anyway, so it’s not like I have much of a choice there…
(via Daring Fireball)
