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Deal Reached in iCraveTV Case
Anonymous Coward writes "According to the Associated Press and Altavista News, iCraveTV agreed yesterday not to rebroadcast American TV programming. See the full story here. Of particular interest is that 'The plaintiffs -- including Disney, MGM, Paramount and ABC, CBS and Fox -- accused iCraveTV of copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition.'"
Unfortunately for them they did not bother to understand every nuance of the law and did not make a lawsuit proof site. (According to the lawyers I talked to.) To the execs here however the idea behind iCrave is deplorable and seeks to destroy the corporations they have built. They view this as an afront to their life's work. I however have enough stored up, and the credentials to work elsewhere in industry so I don't care what happens to the TV networks. I hope iCrave can help increase the demand for bigger pipes and help make my DSL cheaper.
Just take a look at http://www.tvfromhome.com
As much as we like to criticize big media corporations for thier evil acts, they had every reason to beat some ass on this one. At the end of the football game when the play by play guy rattles off that statement, "This broadcast is property of the NFL and cannot be replayed, rebroadcast, or used in any way without the expressed written consent of the NFL.", this is exactly what he's talking about. Those sports contracts cost BILLIONS. They cost so much because the networks get exclusive rights to those sporting events. Corporate America does plenty of other things for us to get upset about. Let this one go.
-B
Is the ruling that they cannot show US content, or that they cannot rebroadcast US channels? For example, a number of Canadian channels show some ammount of US shows, but also a lot of Canadian shows. Will iCrave have to censor these channels when they are showing US-originated shows?
This brings up an interesting point, as some shows are "US shows", but are produced in Canada. How would Highlander repeats fare in this?
...some other company creating the same thing in a different country that doesn't have US restrictions?
Advertising isn't their only source of revenue. They make money reselling the content into other markets that don't necessarily carry the same advertising as the original, if for no other reason, then simply because the advertisers may not be doing business in those markets. Those secondary broadcasts of the same material pay for content that they can sell, generally by selling advertising time themselves. Putting their content on the net undermines part of their market.
While I definitely don't like the bully-with-a-big-stick impression that they are making, they are right about what copyright law gives them control over. Copyright has always been a thorny issue because it is a government-sanctioned monopoly intended (at least originally) to encourage production of creative works. It is always legitimate to ask the question of whether a particular application of it achieves that goal.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
The attitude these networks have is really annoying. Okay, iCraveTV is backing off because its threatened by the network's big financial muscles. And maybe, just maybe, the networks have a bit of a point - at the very least they believe they do.
But iCraveTV has indicated it wants to negotiate broadcasting rights from these networks and their intentions have never been to steal anything from the big network guys. Yet, the article quotes one of the Lawyers say that such a deal would not be possible, that "We've had a pretty hard-fought battle.". So is that how it works? Small company gave us grief so we refuse to deal with them regardless of potential gain?
It seems that many people support iCraveTV and the networks should realize this - that their viewers want it. It would also help them to expand - imagine how many more places will be able to view what their networks have to offer if they support iCraveTV.
- My Two Cents.
-My Two Cents
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
How much are such laws actually promoting the progress of the "useful art" of television programming?
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
if someone else tapes its and sends it out again, with more ads, even if they don't put the ads in the actualy tv picture, i expect compensation above and beyond what i already got for the orginal ads. Why should i expect it? because I created the content. Period. I own it, i have allowed it to be publicly distributed in a manner that i chose.
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing.
First, no one owns publicly distributed content. That's an absurd idea. I distinctly remember Star Wars. Does this mean that my brain is owned by George Lucas? (note that after seeing TPM I may be willing to donate some brains to Lucas, he needs 'em) Of course not. Copyright confers a temporary monopoly on distribution - not ownership. No one owns intangible things. If you have the only copy of something you may de facto own it, but when someone else has a copy they can do as much as you, sometimes excepting redistributing copies.
Second, there are severe practical problems with what you propose. When is an ad considered to be so intimately associated with a particular block of ad-bearing content that it infringes on those ads?
- Can I sell a videotape where the tape is your content but the jacket has my ads on it?
- Can I even mention that my company made this particular tape which contains your content?
- Can I play your content on one TV and play my ads, simultaneously on a TV right next to the first?
I submit that as long as the ads associated with the original content are intact, and are not obscured then it's okay. Otherwise you are proposing that advertisments are not allowed to overshadow other advertisements. Just for starters you'd be wanting to demolish Times Square then, where people constantly fight to attract the eye away from the other guy.People can buy descramblers to try to get past any protections i have set up. i don't like that, but air is air and if i'm sending a signal thru that cable that comes into your house then thats my problem.
At this point you reveal that you are not in the TV industry. It is actually illegal to decode a scrambled signal that enters your property (at least in the US). Why? Because of people who are greedy and overprotective of their monopoly and who are unscrupulous enough to twist the government around to their way of thinking, even though there's an argument to be made that this is unconstitutional.
Personally, I agree with you. If someone's signal invades my property then I have every right to listen in, if I can. They can make it difficult for me (encryption), and I am iffy on whether or not I should be able to interfere with their transmission. Sadly though, the law doesn't agree. (You can't power your house off of induction from nearby high-tension wires either, more's the pity)
But what you can't do it record MY programming and then send it out in another medium. especialy if you are making money from it.
Oh ho! But Canadian law (remember iCrave is in Canada) clearly does not grant copyright (which doesn't exist unless it is explicitly granted) on the matter of rebroadcasting unaltered broadcast tv transmissions. This means that you have no redistribution monopoly in this situation, which is typically limited to cable tv.
Cable, you'll recall, started out when people erected jumugous antannas and wired many people up to them. They've grown quite a bit, but that's the basic idea. iCrave doesn't differ in any significant way, and while I have not looked at the specific law, nor am I a lawyer, or even a Canadian, you could probably rebroadcast the signal in any way you liked as long as you didn't alter it. I would be prone to rebroadcast it as modern dance, myself.
That is what iCave is trying to do. Make money from someone else's work.
Precisely. Which is not only legal, but is the natural order of things. Public Domain content is someone else's work, and people make money off of it all the time. I don't see Shakespeare or Homer (the Greek poet, not the yellow clod) cashing any big checks lately. The light bulb, the radio and the telephone were all patented, yet I don't see GE sending money to Tom Edison, Bose paying royalties to Nikola Tesla, or Nokia giving Alexander Bell big sacks of money.
Copyrights, trademarks and patents are *artificial*. They don't exist unless the government says they do. Nor are they forever. Copyrights expire (this is being unconstitutionally sabotaged by big corporations), trademarks require constant use, and patents also expire.
So yeah, it's a grand old tradition to make money from someone else's work. Authors and inventors only get a monopoly for a while to compensate them for the effort of having come up with something to begin with. But then it's free, so as to help everyone out.
Now, I totally believe that you can't claim credit for things that aren't yours, but I'm perfectly willing to build something from an expired patent, or type up a copy of some public domain work, stick the original creator's name on it (I get credit for some particular implementation, but not the source) and be happy with it. And I'd love nothing more than to extend these same rights to other people regarding my own work.
iCrave found a neat law that worked for them. It doesn't impair the creator one whit. (you are still allowed to watch TV on a TV, you know) So I say, yay iCrave.
Then I complain because too much bandwidth is taken up by crappy tv shows. ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I think one of the arguments used by the networks was that iCraveTV's security (authentication, really) was insufficient at restricting the viewership to Canadians only. But what could they have done?
There is no certain way to reliably determine the general (let alone precise) geographic area of a given computer connected to the Internet. Reverse DNS lookups can give you some idea as to where the person is coming from, but it's pretty much useless when RDNS resolves to AOL.com or some other such monolithic ISP. Proxy servers, dial-up lines, etc. also cloud the picture.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing - a degree of anonymity is a very nice thing to have - but, since I don't have cable (I'm in rural Canada - cable is expensive, don't get many channels, not worth it usually) it sure would have been nice to be able to watch iCraveTV... damn, and I'm not even getting enough of a tax refund this year to buy a dish...
<DireStraits>I want my... I want my... I want iCraveTV...</DireStraits>
________________________
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
By rebroadcasting programming, advertising compaines were loosing money that they had paid to put up adervtisement that would be watched on regular TV. When the advertisiment comapines figure this out, they're less willing to pay for advertisement. Result, TV companies lose $$.
This makes no sense. The ad guys are selling eyeballs. Who cares whether those eyballs see "regular TV" or "Internet TV" or what ever. As long as some one sees the ad, who cares? If I understand the iCrave thing correctly, they re-broadcast the TV signal, commericals and all. The companies should be happy they are getting more eyeballs per buck than they normally would have.
But they're not, so this must be about control. And that's what sucks. Everything being controlled by companies, instead of our dollars.
Just watch this get moderated down. =)
It just might be. Maybe 'cause it doen't make much sense. (At least to me...)
Realize this is an issue of conflict between jurisdictions, and not purely one of copyright law.
Under Canadian law, on our Canadian soil, what iCrave is doing is legal. There is some questionability about whether or not they are 'altering' the things they are rebroadcasting, but that was not an issue in this case.
Under U.S. Law, what they are doing is NOT legal.
So, please understand that they were not out to blatantly do something illegal or break the law.. they had every reason to believe they were allowed to do what they did.
The agreement they came to was
a) they would not intercept radio TV broadcast from the US and
b) They would take more thorough measures to ensure that those watching the shows on iCrave were from Canada *ONLY*, and NOT the U.S.
Realize they can still rebroadcast any radio-TV broadcast that originates on Canadian soil.
If those broadcasts happen to include American programming, that's okay... iCrave simply promises not to intercept radio that was BROADCAST FROM the U.S. (which they were doing before, and was somewhat beyond the scope of canadian law.)
It was the entire, unfiltered TV signal.
Here is why commercials exist:
TV was originally broadcast over the air (via UHF and VHF - in fact, it still is), and anybody with a receiver could pick up the broadcast. Because there wasn't any way for the broadcaster to know who picked up the signal, they couldn't charge the owners of the receivers to watch the signal. They had to find a different revenue model, and since radio is where many of the original broadcasters started from, radio ads became TV commercials. These commercials were paid for by advertisers to the broadcaster, to pay for the TV transmission, mostly. Thus, everyone got TV for "free" - they just had to watch the commercials.
Fast forward to the 1960's - commercials and TV are pretty much common items, and everyone has an antenna on their house. But people want more channels, and they want higher quality. Neighbors band together and buy large "neighborhood" TV antennas, centralize the antenna, then split/amplify the signal off of it to feeds that run to each house, allowing these people to see more channels at a better quality. Appliance sellers in the area see this, and think "Hey! I sell TV's - maybe I can set up an attenna for the neighborhood, and charge people $5.00 bucks a month to use it if they buy one of my TVs!". People go for it, because it is cheaper and easier than convincing all the neighbors (notice that there is a laziness factor here - most shit in history that we hate is cause by many people being lazy) to buy a central antenna, the quality is just as good (maybe better!) and thus, the first distributed, monthly-charge "cable" service begins.
Now, what about the advertisers? Well, they don't really care (or they don't notice), because more "eyeballs" are still seeing their advertisements, which is all they want. And the broadcasters? They don't care, either, because they are still being paid by the advertisers to broadcast. Everybody is happy...
Let's move to the 1970's - things are still pretty much the same, except most of the "mom & pop" cable systems are gone, either bought out by other companies, or for other reasons. But the cable system still exists, except for one change: There isn't a central "antenna" anymore, not in the everyday sense. What the cable companies are now doing is using microwave feeds and some are using satellite feeds (ala HBO). These microwave feeds are still "free" - in fact, you could buy microwave "dishes" and get signals out of the air of a very high quality, for a few hundred bucks. Other "free" sources could be gotten via home sattellite dishes - HBO could be picked up, as well as many other stations.
One thing about HBO, though - HBO was a "premium" channel - you were supposed to pay the cable company a fee to see it, and part of that fee went back to HBO to pay for the rebroadcast license the cable company had with HBO. Those with microwave dishes and sattelite dishes, however, didn't pay this fee. HBO got upset (rightly, for HBO's broadcast contained no commercials, so something had to pay for it), and began scrambling the signal. Dish owners fought back with descrambler's, arguing that the signal came onto their property, and that they should be able to see it. Back and forth it has gone (and still does today).
The 1980's came, and decoder boxes were the norm. Why? The national broadcasters were sending out the feeds via satellite and microwaves (in addition to over-the-air). These feeds still contained commercials (some also had spots where the local cable companies could insert commercials), which advertisers paid for. The cable companies, though, had to pay for a license to rebroadcast the broadcaster's signal. Because of this, they had to keep control of the signal, so they began to scramble their broadcasts as well. Now, it was difficult to impossible to see the signals via a satellite or microwave dish.
So, let's see - where are the broadcasters getting their money from? Ah yes, from the cable companies (and indirectly from the viewers) and from advertisers. But is the amount that viewers pay for cable still a "convenience" fee, like it was when cable started...?
At the end of the 1980's, and throughout the 1990's, more and more cable channels were added. Most all of these channels were "private" affairs - in other words, they weren't put out by the original national broadcasters (ABC, NBC, CBS). Many of these channels you had to pay for (either per-channel, or in a "package, most oftentime the latter), and most of the channels had commercials. We now have a wonderful system where you pay to watch commercials, rather than the commercials supporting the broadcast of the channel. Unfortunately, we don't have any choice about paying, otherwise we are stuck with only 3 to 4 on the air channels (and this will quickly go to 0 on the air channels when HDTV broadcasts are common). I am not arguing for free cable though. I think we should pay the convenience fee (to the cable company), and the premium channel fees to the cable comapny as well. The other channels are supposed to be advertiser supported. If this was the case, then why can't you pick up these supposedly "advertiser supported" channels on a satellite dish (like Lifetime, the History Channel, Discovery Channel, A&E)? Why is Lifetime only available in higher tier packages on DSS, not in the basic tier? How is it that the "convenience fee" that cable companies charge tend to go over $30.00 a month?
I guess one thing would be good about TV over IP, when it gets here: It will allow broadcasters to really compete for eyeballs, by only allowing those who pay-per-hour or whatnot access to the channels, and it will allow the "subscriber" to pick and choose what channels they want to see, rather than get the channels in "packages". The only thing I hate is that they will be able to track viewing habits, as well as control whether you can record a show or not. It will make today's banner ad and DVD problems seem like a sandbox spat...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Here's a link from the Prague Business Journal:
http://www.pbj.cz/pbj/article.asp?id=70386
It looks like the whole iCraveTV.com events played out in the Czech Republic as well. This simply proves that iCrave and their Czech counterparts were fullfilling a market niche (I watched a bit while I was in Japan).
If the MPAA doesn't want to keep repeating this around the globe, they need to sit down with the broadcasters and find some way to get television programming on the web. There simply is no reason, all these years after the first web radiocasts, that streaming television can't be found online.
...is that iCrave was registered as a corporation in the US by a US citizen... hence why the court was in Pennsylvania. If this had been done by a Canadian then the US networks and the NFL would have had to try it under Canadian law.
Present Canadian law says that the airwaves belong to everyone... anything on the airwaves is fair game.
So if I decide to put up a web-site (as I'm a Canadian) that has these channels taken from an antenna - then the US networks and the NFL would have a much tougher battle ahead of them.
Gee, maybe I'll just do that... any venture capitalists out there that want to go for a fun ride?
BlackNova Traders
This explains everything:
"Craig said the company was settling because it could not afford to continue fighting the suit."
The industry promptly postures:
"Today's settlement signals that the rights of copyright holders and creators cannot be ignored.''
What this tells me is who ever has the biggest bat wins. Not who's right or wrong, but who can pound the other into submission.
Seems like this would be the best forum to ask the question. Is it technically possible to create a Napster like software, at least for people with TV inputs on thier PC's?
The idea being that if you had a TV tuner on your PC, you would run the software to act as a server, for maybe 3-4 users. With a network of at least 2500 people running this software, you'd pretty much get wide coverage across the continent.
Illegal, most likely, but is it possible?