I don’t know whether there was a specific incident or specific set of incidents that led to Dan Harmon’s dismissal as showrunner of Community, and without knowing that, it’s impossible for me to say if that decision was fair or just. It does seem likely that the show without him will change considerably—a fellow critic suggested over dinner this weekend that Community’s heart will have to shift from Abed to someone else, because the other characters can be more easily kept alive and vibrant by writers other than Harmon. But while many questions about Community’s future remain, I feel pretty certain about one thing: it makes no sense, as some folks have suggested to me online, to pirate or delay watching Community beyond the time when you’d count as part of the audience because you want to punish NBC for Harmon’s dismissal.

First, there’s the question of whether it would even be effective. I tend to believe, as I’ve written before, that repeatedly telling Hollywood that piracy doesn’t actually hurt their bottom line gives content companies license to ignore people who do pirate content because they’ve been informed over and over again that pirates were never their potential customers in the first place. If NBC or Sony, which produces Community, and therefore shares responsibility for Harmon’s firing with the network on which his show has aired, does pay attention to a spike in pirated Community episodes, it’s more likely to be interpreted as a sign that even the angry audience is weak and unwilling to give up the show entirely. This is not a tactic that will move the hearts that broke Harmon’s.

Second, as much as Harmon’s singular vision has informed Community, he isn’t the only person who works on his creation. The actors who have turned in great work for the show, and who are at least publicly deeply distressed by Harmon’s departure, don’t deserve to be punished with declining ratings for a decision that’s beyond their control. If, under the new regime, they continue to turn in good, enjoyable work, it seems unfair to try to drive their chances of continuing to do that work into the ground, perhaps before they even know if they’d like to continue doing it.

And there are people other than Harmon who write Community. We should continue to give them credit if they continue to do good work even absent his tutelage. I’d particularly really like female writers like Megan Ganz and Annie Mebane to have creative and ratings success and to get credentialed by their work with a new regime of showrunners. As upsetting as Harmon’s firing is, I’d like to see people who share some of his wild and wonderful approach to television out there and succeeding to keep the flame he lit alive. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person working on Community I want to support, or keep an eye on to see what tremendously exciting things they do best. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person involved in Community who’s worth trying to keep the ratings up for so they’ll get renewed or have credibility pitching other shows in the future, particularly if you care about weird, smart, innovative, self-reflective television. Maybe pirating or driving down the ratings on those other people’s work will make someone out there feel like they’re in solidarity with Dan Harmon. But it isn’t an effective way to support the kind of work he’s given us for three years, or to make sure we see more like in the future.

There are a lot of folks who think that copyright terms are too long, locking up works long past the point when the people who created them can benefit from their sale. But when Congress passed the extension of copyright, it also wrote in the requirement that after 35 years, artists who gave up their copyrights to the companies they were signed with, often when they were in unfavorable negotiating positions, to get them back. And now a federal court has upheld that ability to reclaim copyrights, despite industry objections that producers should be given a share of rights or that individuals can’t reclaim their copyrights on works with multiple authors, which means that Victor Willis can get his copyright to some of the Village People’s most famous songs back. From Eriq Gardner at the Hollywood Reporter:

It’s a ticking time bomb for the music industry, and thus, the lawsuit by Scorpio and Can’t Stop to prevent Willis from making his own termination became one of the industry’s first and most important legal battles on this front.
In the case, the publishers made the argument that Willis’ copyright pullback should be deemed improper because the songs were created by several authors — not just Willis. They argued he couldn’t terminate a share; that he needed all of the co-authors on board.

On Monday, Judge Moskowitz rejected that assessment. “The Court concludes that a joint author who separately transfers his copyright interest may unilaterally terminate the grant,” writes the judge in the opinion.

The judge adds that the law doesn’t require a joint author to enter into a joint grant with one of his co-authors, nor does the statute provide that “where two or more joint authors enter into separate grants, a majority of those authors is needed to terminate any one of those grants.”

This is copyright working as it’s intended, to help non-corporation people benefit from the work they’ve created. I’d imagine the music industry will continue to fight this and do its best to hold on to as much copyright as possible. But I’ll be curious to see how the business model responds. Record companies are already confronting the fact that artists don’t have to rely on them for distribution. It’s not a good look to be the folks who are fighting artists’ attempts to profit off their own work, as if 35 years isn’t enough.

There’s something fitting about the fact that Tor, which publishes a lot of books in which people think about what the future might look like, has decided to remove digital rights management protection from their ebooks. From the company’s press release:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

I don’t think that all DRM protections are inherently evil, though I think the limits on the number of devices on which you can consume content from Amazon and Apple could be higher to be responsive to consumers’ needs. But ditching DRM is a sign that Tor trusts its customers and wants to meet them where they’re at. More signals like that would be a welcome thing from the entertainment industry. Something like the movie industry’s Ultraviolet effort to bolster DVD sales by packing discs and digital copies together are sort of missing the point. They’re trying to create a new space rather than going to the cloud lockers and the means of distribution and consumption their consumers are already using day to day.

Over at Ars Technica, Tim Lee brings news of a disturbing lawsuit, now supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, that could set a legal precedent that embedding copyright video, rather than hosting it, counts as copyright infringement:

“Although there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links, this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites,” the organization writes. “Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content.” The MPAA also notes that embedding can enable sites to monetize infringing content by surrounding it with ads…

Numerous websites embed content from third parties they have not personally inspected. Under the theory articulated by Grady, and supported by the MPAA, these websites would be responsible for this content, exactly as if they had stored it on their own servers. This could create a serious disincentive for sites to allow users to post embedded content, hampering the convenience and user-friendliness of the Web

I, and the rest of my colleagues at ThinkProgress (not to mention our peers elsewhere on the internet), would have to dramatically reassess the way we do business, were this precedent to become law. Embedding is an elegant tool for journalists, and a great convenience for readers. It lets us write posts and stories that have a neat flow to them, framing a piece of content, letting the reader consume that content, and then move on to our analysis all without forcing them to click away, perhaps never to return. Sure, it keeps people on our site and lets us make money, but it’s also a convenience for the reader that provides a coherent consumption experience.

If this legal precedent is established, it would create a hugely complex situation. There’s a lot of content that the copyright holders would like to see widely embedded and distributed, whether it’s move trailers, music videos, campaign ads that no one actually intends to spend money to air but they would like to be seen, speeches, etc. That desire isn’t going to disappear if a new legal regime governing embeds comes in place. And that creates a terrific problem for both people who want their content embedded and those of us who need to embed a wide variety of content to do our jobs. Given the huge amount of content out there, and the large number of vectors through which it’s made available, it’ll be extremely difficult to comply with a new regime if there’s no clear way to tell if the content’s licit or not. And without that clarity, media outlets might be less willing to distribute even licit content if they can’t clearly document its provenance. That skittishness could prevent transmedia campaigns like the Peter Weyland TED Talk that’s being used to promote Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, where video is meant to appear sui generis rather than clearly coming from a studio, from taking off, which would be a loss both for the content producers themselves, and for the people who would enjoy that content if it was distributed to them.

Given the fuzzy, burdensome precedent this lawsuit could set, I’d like to see the clear numbers that explain why the potential use of embedding for intentional copyright violation is so harmful that it justifies upending the legitimate use of embedding for the rest of us.

The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con:

There’s a long tradition of pop culture fans banding together to raise money for or take action on good causes, whether it’s the Browncoats, fans of Joss Whedon’s Firefly series raising money for charity, or the Harry Potter Alliance, which has done everything from send medical aid to Haiti to campaigning for marriage equality in Maine.

And fans of Suzanne Collins dystopian young adult series The Hunger Games are no different. Pegged to the opening of the film adaptation of the first book in the series, a movie that could be the most profitable film release of 2012, Imagine Better, an umbrella group of multiple fan franchises spearheaded by the Harry Potter Alliance, partnered with Oxfam to launch a campaign called “Hunger Is Not a Game.” It’s a multi-pronged effort, but the main thrust is in support of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, which aims to make food aid more efficient by encouraging local cultivation to reduce shipping costs and waste from spoilage.

These are noble goals, and you’d think Lionsgate would welcome the good publicity that stems from them. It should be a gift to the studio that The Hunger Games isn’t just poised to be a massive blockbuster, but that it’s getting young people to think and act critically, so much so that they’re getting written up in the New York Times for it. And a month ago, that appeared to be the case: a Lionsgate representative emailed Andrew Slack, the executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance which is the organizing force behind Imagine Better, in February to say that while Lionsgate couldn’t join Imagine Better as a partner, they wished Imagine Better “the best of luck.”

Apparently no longer. Lionsgate’s senior vice president for business affairs and litigation, Liat Cohen (who’s been rather vigorous in defense of the project in the past), has issued a takedown notice to the campaign through Oxfam, accusing them of “piggy backing off of our motion picture” and “causing damage to Lionsgate and our marketing efforts.” The full text of the email is here:

Hello,

This morning I left 2 phone messages for your CEO Mr. Jim Daniell regarding your campaign “Hunger is not a Game” piggy backing off of our motion picture “The Hunger Games” and using Lionsgate’s fans and fan internet sites to promote your cause.

As I mentioned in my phone message, Lionsgate has formed a partnership with two large organizations fighting hunger, the UN’s World Food Program and Feeding America. We are encouraging fans to support this effort by going to www.wfp.org/hungergames.

What is not a part of the Lionsgate plan is the distortion of our Motion Picture title. That is what Oxfam has done with your “Hunger is not a Game” logo. And with the many website you have incorporated into your campaign. This is causing damage to Lionsgate and our marketing efforts.

We understand and support your cause and mission. We are on the same side. We are looking for an amicable resolution. For a start we request that you immediately remove any mention of “Hunger is not a Game” from all of your websites and its affiliates and stop using the slogan in your interviews and publicity or press releases. Additionally, please contact the undersigned so we can work out a mutually acceptable plan to go forward where we do not infringe on each other’s rights.

We are truly making an effort to work with you on this. We have the ability to take down your sites as a violation of our trademark and other intellectual property laws. We hope that will not be necessary as this is too serious a subject.

All rights reserved. Thank you.

Liat Cohen, Esquire
Senior Vice President Business Affairs & Litigation

It’s not clear that the takedown notice would hold up, but it’s still an aggressive move against advocates who are passionate fans of the franchise and have no desire to damage it.

“Fans have been changed by this story and have expressed a wish to change the world based on the message of this story,” Slack emailed me. “I would hope that Lionsgate would celebrate fans, not pick on them, for taking the message of their own movie seriously. It’s amazing that they’re working with two great partners already to fight hunger. But why get in the way of fans who are working with a third one?”

Much of the frustration consumers feel for media companies is based on the idea that these companies are disadvantaging consumers—and themselves—by refusing to make content available as quickly as possible and in the widest possible variety of formats. But I think Todd VanDerWeff does something valuable in explaining why, for HBO at least, the company’s careful control of access to its highest-value content is what preserves its ability to keep producing that content:

HBO, at least, has long based its model on the idea that a certain amount of people—more than 20 million of them at last check—will pay for the rights to watch the network’s highly acclaimed programming first-run. Those subscribers, in recent years, have also gotten access to the network’s HBO Go, a streaming site that contains nearly every show in HBO’s history, as well as whatever movies the network has the rights to for that period. (Numerous cable companies have made HBO Go unavailable to their subscribers, recognizing—correctly—that it probably represents the cable-less future of the network. They’re being idiots.) The network then releases its shows on DVD around a year after they initially debut…

The problem HBO (and the other premium cable channels) faces is that it’s boxed in by its need to be in bed with cable companies. The easiest solution to the problem posed in the Oatmeal cartoon is simply to make HBO Go available to anyone who wants it, for a monthly fee that would probably be slightly larger than what the monthly fee for the TV network is (to offset any costs lost from cable providers). The problem is that if the network does this, it will be seen as declaring war on the very providers who keep it coming into people’s homes. Even though it seems, to a generation raised on the Internet, like everybody watches stuff on the Internet all of the time, the vast majority of Americans still consume their entertainment on TV. Without the cable companies beaming HBO into those people’s homes, the network loses subscriber fees, which robs it of the ability to program anything beyond cheap movies.

I think folks really want to believe that if content companies were just willing to give them what they want, the alternate revenue streams would make up for the money those same companies would lose by walking away from other formats or lowering prices. But if we’re also arguing that companies shouldn’t get so upset over piracy because most of the people who are pirating things wouldn’t have paid for them in the first place, then companies may not have a lot to gain by trying to appease them. I’ve always been willing to accept that if we were, for example, to unbundle cable, that a lot of channels would die. It’s probably time for folks to acknowledge that if Hollywood moves away from its current pricing models, it will likely change the mix of things that it produces. And some of the casualties will be things that people like.

The bridge is yours.

-Carmen Sandiego, Latina role model.

-In a Don Henley v. Frank Ocean fight, I know which side I’m on.

-Warners v. Hotfile and takedown notices.

-This HBO series about war photographers sounds pretty great.

-I really hope Lindsay Lohan is okay. I miss her:

One complaint I hear a fair amount in the conversation about how to get more people to get their content through licit sources is that the word “piracy” isn’t really a fair or accurate term to describe the behavior of individuals as opposed to large-scale content theft operations. I’m not really comfortable describing individual action to get content outside of legal channels in terms that are positive, or even neutral. But I’m genuinely invested in deescalating this debate, because I think it’s the only way to forge meaningful cultural change, however square that ambition might seem. And I’d love to hear suggestions, if people have them, for language that would provoke a less negative reaction from the people we’d like to get to quit downloading content for free that they really ought to be paying for.

Friend of the Blog Gabriel Rossman has a post on the enormous challenges of estimating the cost of piracy that I think has an essential formulation for moving the debate forward:

In the arguments over SOPA, I’ve seen a few arguments from people I respect that piracy basically doesn’t matter. These arguments strike me as somewhat plausible but probably wrong and grounded in wishful thinking that a solution being unpleasant means that the problem it addresses is nonexistent. This is not to say that I support SOPA, for I do not. My main intuition on this is that an industry that sponsored the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act has forfeited its claim to our sympathies. Thus even when it has a legitimate grievance, I am inclined to give it only mild weight. Thus I tentatively favor the Megaupload suit but I’m gonna say “sucks to be you” when the industry demands escalating the fight against piracy into the top priority of US trade diplomacy and a total war waged on the terrain of the internet’s low-level infrastructure. Nonetheless I think it’s important to clarify just how complicated estimating the effects of piracy are…I think we need to be skeptical of free lunch thinking that if a policy has undesirable consequences this doesn’t mean we have to pretend there is no real problem it is addressing. It’s a common position to say “I don’t like bullying tactics, bad faith arguments, and rent-seeking of the IP industry, therefore piracy is not a problem.” I sympathize with this frustration but it’s more intellectually honest to take seriously that there might be a problem that we decide it is better to leave unsolved.

Really, read the whole thing. But I think that moving the debate back to a more realistic look at the costs of piracy, and a serious conversation about the costs and benefits of a range of interventions to get people to buy more content through licit means, is the most productive way forward.