At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
Radio stations in the US don’t have to pay artists for playing their works for money. They claim that this provides free advertising which increases record sales.
Not sure why this works for music and not other forms of media.
I’m not one to defend giant media conglomerates, but to compare radio broadcasts - which are not on-demand for the consumer - to downloaded content (which is) is kind of silly. People also tend to listen to a song/album repeatedly and thus want to own it and have it on hand. Most people who watch a show as long as GoT don’t watch it again.
Not so long ago we had video broadcasts, akin to radio, which was called « television » I think…. Yet it was generally not free either.
Television was free. Network TV was broadcasted out for free and the shows were paid for by sponsors running ads. Then we invented cable and got double-charged for them providing the content AND we still got ads.
Most people don’t rewatch movies or shows like they do with music. And how often do people, who want to rewatch a show, actually buy the dvd or BluRay once they’ve seen it trough a pirated source that still sits on their hard drive?
Also artists do get paid when a song gets played on the radio. It’s called radio royalties, though only the people that have writing credits get paid.
Radio stations in the US don’t have to pay artists for playing their works for money
That’s false. ASCAP/BMI/SESAC is there so stations are obligated to pay artists for use of their work. Radio stations are supposed to submit playlists to them to calculate mechanical royalties.
There is a lot of fuckery afoot and these rules aren’t enforced, but stations are supposed to pay artists for their work when they use it
Here is an article that talks about how artists get paid for radio play. Not sure why you’d think they do not. The basics are:
- Radio acquires a blanket license(s) from its local PRO(s)
- A song is played on a radio, and the airplay is reported to a PRO
- The PRO distributes royalties and songwriter gets paid
The songwriter is paid the royalties due
