As creative people, nothing upsets us more than having someone steal our work. Especially when they take money out of our pocket and put it into theirs. The theft alone makes one feel violated and the money part makes it exponentially worse. When big companies steal our work, what we hear is that it\u2019s \u201cAn innocent mistake\u201d, \u201cThe intern did it\u201d, \u201cThe outside design firm is responsible\u201d, and so on. When the shoe is on the other foot, it interesting to see how extremely upset these companies can become.<\/p>\n
Aaron Elstein, writing for Crain’s NY Business, has a wonderful article titled, “Stealing Signals”.\u00a0 In this great column\u00a0the author gazes into the ever-expanding world of pirating live sports feeds.\u00a0You can read it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rather than pay your friendly cable or satellite\u00a0TV provider for your sports, you can now go\u00a0to a\u00a0pirate site headquartered in\u00a0say, in Panama, Kazakhstan, or Whoknowswherestan, which\u00a0can provide you with a stolen signal of a live hockey or basketball game.\u00a0 Major League Baseball, The National Hockey League and NBC and just\u00a0a few of the concerned parties.<\/p>\n Note that according to the article, Bob Bowman MLB’s chief of enforcement\u00a0has ironically borrowed\u00a0Mr. Reznicki’s favorite phrase regarding pursuing thieves:\u00a0 “We go after copyright violators vigorously…and we’ll never catch everyone. <\/em>In the end, we play wack-a-mole”.<\/em> (<\/strong>One of Jack\u2019s favorite phrases and one of his favorite cheap amusement park games.)<\/p>\n These sites are pirating for profit. They are stealing from the big media companies who are\u00a0now in the same shoes as individual creatives have been\u00a0in for decades.\u00a0Like those who steal from photographers and illustrators, the likelihood of prosecution is so small that these sites\u00a0simply operate on an illegal business model.\u00a0You can now add cable carriers and TV networks to movie studios as high profile victims of infringement. These companies spend tons of money and employ lots of people to prevent this financial bleeding but alas they lag behind the bad boys.<\/p>\n Whether you choose to call it karma or irony we can’t ignore the fact that some of the companies victimized by these pirate sites have been accused of doing the very same thing to photographers. There are few if any television networks,\u00a0 newspaper chains or media conglomerates which has not intentionally or negligently infringed on the copyright(s) of a photographer. If such infringement were not so common, Ed would need to get a second job to pay the rent.<\/p>\n Another article on how legit advertisers are supporting these pirate sites is linked here<\/a>.<\/p>\n