Sony's Grouper Picks On Searchles TV 37
pradeepe writes "Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site, has sent Searchles, a social search engine, a cease and desist letter over Grouper videos being streamed through Searchles TV, "the Internet's first video player that empowers users to mashup videos back-to-back with one player using multiple sources like MySpace, YouTube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Grouper." Grouper claims that Searchles has "effectively stripped away Grouper's extensive copyright protection system, including the 'Flag as Inappropriate' button and the link that appears on every single page of the Grouper website to allow copyright owners to report allegedly infringing material, in accordance with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." It's interesting to note that Grouper itself is being sued for copyright infringement."
Ah, good ol' sony. (Score:0, Interesting)
deep linking wars replayed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is not the start, just the early innings.. (Score:1, Interesting)
And that being, the internet is essentially driven by advertising. As are an increasing number of other "entertainment" outlets.
What happens when the advertising dries up? I know its alarmist and smacks of "oh no the oil is going away", but it's not. The first bubble burst because the advertising FAR outstripped the viewer base. The concept is simple, it's called saturation. Aren't we there?
Given that I think we are there, and personally, my saturation point was reached a long time ago, can we expect the media industry to figure this out
To take another track, how many here use ad blockers? Come on, put your plus 1s here. You probably use an ad blocker, you might not even know it. Ever install NIS on a system? Notice the host file changed?
In any case, all these "hosting" sites that purport to make their revenue off of "advertising" are deeply missing something. And that is, how is that they can sell my personal time and attention? Phrased differently, how is it that they can sue one another for infringement, which is lawyer speak for selling something you don't own, when THATS THE ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY?
Sorry, I'll stop yelling now and go back to my rock. I'm pretty sure the world isn't ready for the point I'm trying to make. (and that I'm totally incapable of making the point as clearly as I should)
I don't like this comment... (Score:4, Interesting)
Whereas my initial reaction to this piece was more of the kind of "Sony needs to wake up to the realities of the Internet, and if it's not legal to do this, it should be."
I think Searchles is probably pretty cool, but I also think that this is going to end up being a bit like several Linux tools -- for instance, ies4linux. While it's not likely to be an issue for most people, it's probably illegal for them to redistribute IE, and it's certainly not legal to have a copy of IE without a Windows license. However, they probably have avoided trouble because they're so small, they warn you that it might be illegal, and they do it with deep linking, not mirroring -- you actually are downloading IE from Microsoft's website.
Besides: What copy protection, anyway? Sending an unencrypted flash video to a proprietary browser plugin is worse than DVD CSS, and that's saying something!
Moral of the story? I suppose I won't shed any tears for Sony anyway. Sony can do no right, and Google can do no wrong -- but they earned these reputations, and they continually reinforce them. Compare that to, say, desktop Linux, where there are actually far fewer jokes about recompiling your kernel, as people start to realize that it's unlikely you'll have to compile anything while using Linux, ever, unless you want to -- it certainly earned its reputation as a geek operating system, but it's now working to correct that.
Re:This is not the start, just the early innings.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And you act like they have no right to sell exposure to your eyes. "Selling your time which they don't own." You're enjoying content that you know is paid for. You're making a bit of a transaction there. It may not be UCC consideration, but you gain and you give up a bit of room for an ad. and adblock aside, every single slashdot user does in fact read ads, many of these stories are, in fact, advertisements and even the content that didn't arrive via payment to slashdot editors or slashdot itself probably got into the media via a media consultant.
You cannot avoid the fact that information is managed. I'm not making a moral claim, it's just the way of the world. The internet is a major medium for information, so the market for managing it will not dry up. The bubble was largely due to the fact that Clinton's US Attorneys were not prosecuting accounting fraud (not a political statement, but its true). Crappy business practices led to instability in speculative markets like dotcoms in the late nineties.
But Google and other serious internet advertising firms are not selling pagehits, they are selling clickthroughs. So you don't have to worry.