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Discovery Threatens Fan Site It Also Promotes
An anonymous reader writes "It seems the lawyers and the marketing people at The Discovery Channel don't talk to each other much. The marketing people behind the show 'The Deadliest Catch' have been supporting a fan community called DeadliestCatchTV.com for a while now. They've regularly sent the site info, free clips, previews and information about the show. On top of that, they link to it from the official site, including it in a list of 'fan sites' as a part of the 'Discovery Network,' and even will frame the site with the show's own dashboard for those who click through. Discovery's lawyers, on the other hand, have threatened to sue the site out of existence and have demanded that the owner hand over the domain name — which he is going to do, because he doesn't have the money to fight this. While there may be a trademark issue (which could be easily resolved with a free license), the lawyers are also making the ridiculous argument that posting the videos Discovery sent him to post are copyright infringement. They're also claiming that embedding the official Discovery Channel YouTube videos (which have embedding turned on) is copyright infringement. This is exactly how you turn lots of fans into people who hate your entire channel."
The whole last season was a tour de force of human tragedy, which Discovery happily played to/exploited (even adding in a melodramatic classical score this time around). Aside from the hundred or so tribute episodes to Phil Harris, it seemed like everyone in the fleet was intentionally playing to the cameras this time out even more than usual (with Edgar threatening to leave and fighting with Sig, Jake Harris's sudden "addiction" problems, etc.). Granted, the show will never be as good as the first season (before Alaska changed the rules and made the crab fishing a lot less exciting/dangerous), but this one seemed like a swan song more than any other season in the past.
Everyone involved in the show has always been about the money. The Hanson brothers in particular will do about anything for a buck, and have been known for trading on their fame by lending their names to some pretty sleazy ventures. But this season the cynicism (in particular the playing to the cameras) really showed in some nasty ways. This time the captains even whored themselves for Geico commercials that ran during the show. And the producers' constant cutaways to a tired-looking Phil Harris was particularly shameless (they all but put up "He's about to die" subtitles).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A famous writer once wrote: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"...
Ain't it fun? You can ruin almost anything with it.
Each department is doing it's job well. Upper management is responsible for overseeing and coordinating departments into a cohesive whole.
Guess who failed?
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
1) Looks like they're "discovering" how to piss of their fans
2) This is what you get by obsessing over a show as pointless as "Deadliest Catch". Oh wait, this one is not a joke. This is karma.
Isn't this the type of thing that the EFF is for?
Seems like setting a precedent for "if you send somebody your copyrighted material, you can't be sued" would be useful, especially with respect to RIAA honeypots.
Can't he just fill the site with porn and get the site blocked by most internet nanny software?
A judge with a brain won't let it fly that one side of the company supports the site and the other side of the company wants to sue it out of existence. They SHOULD find that once Discovery started 'supporting' the website, they gave it 'permission' for it to exist and didn't have a problem with it until they decided to sue. A company, in the eyes of the law, is one entity.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Relax folks, this is all just promotional groundwork for Discovery Channel's next big reality TV show, in which a few thousand lawyers will be released onto a remote, arctic island with no survival gear beyond an iPhone, some designer shoes, and a briefcase full of legal documents and moist towelettes.
The project has tentatively been titled "If you live, you get to sue our asses for putting you there."
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.
--Gordon Gekko, speaking the Mantra of unbridled capitalism. Greed may not get the outright worship it got when Wall Street came out, but many still consider greed to be a positive thing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It'd be a shame if anything were to, you know, happen to it.
Servers burn, you know...
If he has permission from Discovery to post these things, then he has it in the form of written permission. If he has this, then I would say go to court.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Instead of spending that much time and effort performing free labor for anyone. It's not like this is new behavior.
It's quite, simple really. There is the legal department, in charge of chasing people away. And then there's the marketing department, in charge of pulling people in. And then there's no communication between them. With opposite missions, what do you expect.
Add to the fact that the legal seems to be adept at the chasing away part, while somewhat forgetful of the law they apparently learned many moons ago in, uhhhunh whatwuzitcalled college methinks? To the lawyers: don't party so hard when in college, or you'll have trouble understanding the law later.
Does anyone do performance review on corporate legal teams? As in real reviews where any monetary awards to the company are balanced with lost goodwill and whatnot? There's a lawyer or two waiting to be fired here, methinks.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
And contrary to popular belief, you don't need a lawyer to be successful at it (remember, I've sued the government - and won).
This is just another case of "lawyers don't know their job" - the majority of lawyers are incompetent. Law school doesn't even teach them how to handle a court case (read any big-name lawyer's bio and they'll tell you as much).
Find a similar motion on the net, admit you own the aforenamed website and deny every other claim. Then the ball is in their court. They can do NOTHING without your cooperation. They will lose the domain name resolution process because you can show that the past history - otherwise they'd have used it
And they'll lose in court. And have to pay.
Let them sue. You'll enjoy making (greater) fools of them.
I'd like to see a cast of nothing but attorneys go all "Lord of the Flies" on each other. Or maybe a lawyer could stand in for Buster on Mystbusters. Or Mike Rowe could make them clean up some kind of poo.
Either avoid cable via alternitve methods (i.e. Netflix etc) or don't give them your ratings. I am really sick of being bullied around by the same companies trying to sell me stuff.
Our entire economy is built around earning what you want by pleasing your fellow man. That is what keeps us all productive.
What the hell is wrong with wanting money? You need it to buy food and medicine for your kids, to put a roof over your head, and to do just about anything interesting. What's so damn bad about artists etc. working because they are paid?
And what is bad about trying to maximize the amount of money you can get in return for what you provide? Haven't you ever asked your boss for a raise? You think people have to work for free and live in poverty in order to be good people?
You are nuts.
I was going to have a cracking good fan-site for the upcoming LEGO: The Deadliest Catch Years 1 & 2 video game, but screw that!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Anybody else think this was all a ruse just to get the domain name? Like their lawyers set it up just so they could bend over the domain name holder?
The Discovery Channel has really disappointed me. It used to be that they put out good, educational television shows. Now, they've added all kinds of extra drama to shows to supposedly make them more interesting but in reality they have a dumbed down appearance. Now, they also have gone the reality tv route. I fail to see how Deadliest Catch really teaches us anything - it is really only drama. I remember when TLC and DSC really had good educational shows that could captivate thinking audiences without all the bleeped out cursing and melodramatic garbage. It would seem that the last of the truly informative and educational shows are on PBS.
Discovery used to be chock full of good nerd programming that was +1:Informative and +1:Insightful.
Now it's just -1:Overrated and -:notthebest
This was undoubtedly the nefarious plan all along: let the fans do all the hard work creating a social site with valuable content, even encourage them to do it, then (ab)use IP law to cash in and monetize all their hard work.
phone call from the owners of the fan site to the marketing people, followed by a phone call between the marketing people and the lawyers, would result in a free license, an amicable settlement arrangement, Discovery getting a bunch of free advertising, the fans being happy to have a good fan site, and everyone winning.
Except we don't live in that strange, logical place. We live here, where it's all about the almighty dollar and name rights, and the hell with corporate goodwill! Any PR is good PR! Et cetera! Rabble, rabble, rabble!
Disgusting. When will we get wise and finally decide, "Enough is enough." Sometimes I think it's a pity there wasn't an ACTUAL "Year They Hanged The Lawyers..."
"Get the facts first. You can distort them later." -Mark Twain
"But I don't think of you."
First, I'd say you misspelled "colostomy," but given that we're talking about the legal profession, it wouldn't surprise me that its a word from a specialty dictionary. Then again, we're talking about the legal profession, so "colostomy" seems like the best word after all. But down to business:
That classic image of the lawyer charting a perilous and circuitous path through a legal maze to exonerate a client of criminal charges? That's a warm, fuzzy fiction from the bygone days of Earl Stanley Gardner, and that's where it belongs. More often than not these days, the client hires a lawyer explicitly to cut across as many peoples' rights as possible while incurring minimum risk. They're not defensive legal teams, they're intended to play offense, to take advantage of peoples' ignorance of the law as much as possible without getting sued themselves.
Why does this work? Most people don't have lawyers themselves, making them incredibly easy to bully. See also RIAA, MPAA, etc.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I wonder if the fan site has asked the marketing people to intervene. Usually, although lawyers can get lots of money, marketing people HAVE lots of money and that can make a difference to the upper echelons.
Alaskan crab fishing is ok as a "dangerous reality TV" show. Apparently the stats for Alaskan crab fishing is 356/100,000/year. That's a lot - getting on for 1 in every 100,000 per day. (US National Average workforce fatality rate is 7.0/100,000/year.) I wondered if North Sea fishing was worse - it has a vicious reputation and the North Sea has no landmass between it and the north pole. However, statistics indicates that the mortality rate is 151 x national average in the UK, and the UK's national average is 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people. That puts the North Sea fishermen at a paltry 76/100,000/year. Not safe, by any standards, but many times safer in absolute terms. In relative terms, the US' workforce fatality rate is 14x worse than that in the UK, but the Alaskan crab fishing is only 4.7x as deadly as North Sea fishing. By this standard, North Sea fishing is the deadliest fishing occupation relative to the health and safety of the country involved.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
An entertainment company chasing away fan sites and therefore damaging their product in the eyes of their customers?
Didn't we already have this crap during the late 90's when they went after science fiction fan sites?
I still remember Paramount happily shooting themself in the foot whenever they got the chance back then.
The MS lawyers, who clearly hadn't been in the loop until then, demanded the rights to the show. After a baffled silence, the PBS people shot back, 'What the fuck do you mean?' The response to that was, 'Oh, our mistake. We want the rights to the SERIES.' You know. So they could protect MS's image or something.
But no, this doesn't surprise me at all. This guy's basically been set up to be harvested like a ripe tomato-- he puts all of that effort into site design and upkeep, ropes in fans that might otherwise not care for the Discovery website, and delivers them up.
Worse, there's the possibility that this poor bastard is collateral damage from some internal power struggle-- someone in legal trying to be a keener, or a strike at a rival in marketing.
Or to put that in more words - what we have today is no longer what we used to call Discovery Channel.
Whatsoever and all that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Or you could just call the marketing department and ask them to hold for the legal department, hit transfer, call the legal department and hit transfer again. They can work it out between themselves!
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I don't feel any guilt in taking back what was taken from me. Most rich people got rich the old fashioned, by stealing. Or buying laws that transfer wealth upwards. Oh, there is a serious class war going on, and the upper class is winning, so I say:
1.) We live in a Democracy.
2.) We are in the majority.
3.) Therefore, we are in a position to rain down a nuclear firestorm of class warfare, legally, and without violence.
We've let them win. For thirty-odd years now, middle and lower class incomes have remained the same, while nearly all the increase in GDP has gone to the top 1%. And we live in a Democracy, so we have no one to blame but ourselves. But we can change things, and bring back the powerful and wealthy middle class we had in the fifties, when the top tax rate was 90%. Bring it back. Tax those criminals until their wallets bleed.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I love my trademarks
I love DMCA
I love to sue fans
I love to make them pay
I love the whole world
And its litigiousness
Boom-de-ah-da
Boom-de-ah-da
Boom-de-ah-da
Boom-de-ah-da!
The Bering Sea gets nasty weather - but you can't produce a full season of TV off that.
Maybe Discovery can't, but The Weather Channel could probably make a series about people who thrive in nasty weather. They could call it something like "Cantore Stories".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh, they understand the law. They REALLY understand the law. They understand it so well that they know just what they can get away with while not even having the tiniest atom of a case. They know how to tell a brazen lie without being liable for perjury, slander, libel, or harassment. They know just how much it costs to defend yourself in court, and therefore just what they can ask for so that it's most cost-effective for the victim to settle. Greed, maliciousness, a predator mentality, general sliminess, and a heart of stone are hallmarks of corporate lawyers. Ignorance of the law is not.
It still amazes me, the quality of shows they can, seemingly, slap together with nothing more than few 'local yokels' trying to do their jobs. Sure it descends into pure silliness and dramatic fromage now and then, but still...you get insight into something there is NO WAY you would see otherwise.
Lawyers OTOH....everyone knows what they're about. No mystery at all. They are like a physical manifestation of greed itself.
Speaking of cool shows though, here is another, and it's not even on Discovery(oops guess that only applies to Canada). Shame it seems to be over after 3 seasons, though I guess you can hardly blame the guy heh. Filming yourself "surviving" various harsh environments is a tad extreme. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Survivorman
This is exactly how you turn lots of fans into people who hate your entire channel.
Really now, /.
This constitutes "news"?
Discovery is to PBS, what FOX is to network TV.
Need i say more?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The site owner should demand Google and Bing remove the site immediately, they will blacklist the site and make the domain worthless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ8KleL4fS4 from http://videosift.com/video/This-is-how-the-History-Channel-died
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Given how fast Internet news spreads, the PR team is probably shitting bricks right about now. I'll be curious to see what kind of spin they put on it. Also, I'm surprised there are so many Discovery haters here, given /.'s usual love of MythBusters.
The channel's ok. The stuffed shirts seem to know their place. The lawyers are the problem. Find them a problem that fits them.
A smart business realizes that free advertising is worth its weight in gold and tells its legal department to STFU.
I guess this is what you can expect when companies are so big that they have a full blown legal department with lawyers on salary. They need to justify their employment and the obvious outcome is litigious behaviour.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
I think the precise moment I died inside was when it started airing wrestling.
Need to give the lawyers a shotgun, and the marketers a shotgun, have them take three paces...
... Adam & Jamie can do something?
Please Mod UP Parent!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This just in!
Discovery Channel is suing Best Buy for distribution of copywrited materials.
Discovery's lawyers have threatened to sue the retailer out of existence and have demanded that Best Buy hand over the all DVDs, videos, software and cable advertizing promotion materials.
A spokesman for Discovery Channel admitted that due to their new line-up sucking so badly, they have decided to follow the RIAA's lead and sue everyone. "Hey, we've got to make money somehow."
Are you saying one is the mouth and the other is the anus?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Not so much a reply more of a Kerouac_ian free prose. Lawyers, Money, dirty technology. we all file slowly into HELL! THEREisnosuchthingasnegativePRESS
THEREisnosuchthingasnegativePRESS