Category: media

The entertainment industry wins big as the US Supreme Court rules that file-sharing services are liable for copyright infringement for illegal downloading over their networks. “We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”

The movie business isn’t just down in the US – the rest of the world is in a box office slump too. “Whether it’s because consumers are distracted by the Internet, DVDs, videogames and ever more sophisticated mobile devices — or something as simple as warm weather, as has been the case in some key European markets — it’s clear that people around the globe are not going to the movies as much as they have in recent years.”

One of the hottest new categories for advertisers? Movie theatres before the show. “Advertisers like these spots, and have been buying more of them. Movie ads are one more alternative to television spots, which are losing favor as TiVo and other digital video recorders make it easier for viewers to zap them. Last year, ads in United States movie theaters grew 23 percent to $438 million.”

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is suing the studio that financed the trilogy. “In his lawsuit, Mr. Jackson claimed that New Line committed fraud in its handling of the revenues generated by 2001’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” and as a result, he was underpaid by millions. The suit does not specify a damage award. But in an interview last week, his lawyers said that, after New Line applied its contract interpretation from “Fellowship” to the other two movies, Mr. Jackson was underpaid by as much as $100 million for the trilogy.”

For the 18th week in a row fewer people went to the movies in America than went during a similar period last year. Is the buzz over the celebrities who star in the movies drowning out the movie hype itself? “Hanging over many of these summer movies has been the public focus on the behavior and personal lives of their leading actors.”

“Since Jan. 6, when the five-member Rochester-based group Newsbreakers executed its first bust, as it calls them, of a live remote in their hometown, viewers in Boston; New York City; Manchester, N.H.; Columbus, Ohio; and several other cities have seen their local news briefly hijacked by elaborately planned vignettes that are more likely to baffle or alarm reporters than make them curse on the air. “

“Grosses have been dropping for three years now, and, worse, after you adjust for inflation, it becomes clear that attendance is down even further, anywhere from 8 to 10 percent depending on who’s talking. People are simply not going to the multiplex as often as they used to. The question is not only why but whether the trend is reversible or if it’s part of a much larger cultural shift in the way we entertain ourselves.”

Joanne Ostrow is out of patience for the right-wing mudslingers who have been trying to take out public broadcasting for the last decade, and who have recently scored some serious victories thanks to a conservative chairman at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “The politicization of public broadcasting is in full flower… The man who is supposed to be the buffer between PBS and Congress has instead become a battering ram. This former head of the Voice of America seems to have confused the role of PBS and NPR with that of the VOA and Radio Free Europe, explicit political mouthpieces.”

The rules of media-politic have been clear for some time: talk radio belongs to conservatives, Hollywood belongs to liberals. But a new generation of conservative filmmakers is determined to change the equation, and they’ve been joined by an increasingly vocal group of Hollywood stars whose political leanings veered right after 9/11.

After years of trying to beat file-sharers into the ground, the music industry appears to be shifting strategies. Rather than focusing on money lost to pirates, the industry is now focusing on creating new revenue streams from new technologies such as peer-to-peer file-trading networks. Of course, this is exactly what many observers had been saying the industry should do from the beginning, but it may be that the years spent fighting online piracy have created a need for music peddlers to find a way for music sales to coexist with the free transfer of concert tapes and unlicensed material.