Major Close Down

[Christopher Woods]

Come to Libertaria and visit the money tree gardens! Green all year round...

The sentiment of your email stuck in my craw. There has been no loss of 
freedoms. You may now be less able to infringe copyright law; you have 
never been free to do it.


The undeniable fact: for the overwhelming majority of content available 
from users on those sites, they were not legally permitted to distribute it 
to others.

For example, by making British-broadcast programmes available to people in 
other territories outside of an official syndication agreement, these 
people lose out:

- Original and syndicating broadcasters
- Cast, crew and production staff
- Fans, who can see their show cancelled from low official viewing figures 
or lack of advertising & syndication revenue

What's lost?
- Syndication royalties and trickle-down advertising revenue
- Employment for talented voice actors who dub into other languages, and 
skilled foreign language subtitle writers
- ...future work for everyone involved

It reduces opportunities for reinvestment by broadcasters because they 
might not perceive a profitable return on their investment or commission. 
Why would people watch if they've already downloaded it, circumventing the 
system -- so why bother risking capital to fund production, or pay $$$ to 
syndicate a widely pirated show? "Let them go run an indiegogo and 
self-fund their own series if their fans are so keen to watch it."

As so many of the programmes we enjoy are actually made by independent 
production houses, this has another tangible impact as they lay off 
employees or merge with other companies to avoid shutting down.

I've worked in the independent sector of the music biz and witnessed the 
crippling loss of revenue, jobs and inability to reinvest in new talent 
across the industry over the past decade. It's much the same across the 
other creative industries.

---

Don't conflate unlicensed distribution of copyrighted material with useful 
tools like get_iplayer, which is simply another method of accessing 
something all British citizens are already entitled to - per the terms of 
the licence the BBC grants to us.

Implying our countrymen fought and died for our rights to wilfully break 
copyright law is facile and tasteless.

Regards
Chris

(I'm not against P2P file-sharing as a mechanism, it's very efficient. 
Sadly it's short term gain for long term pain when it comes to quick-grab 
consumption of our favourite mass media.)


On 5 August 2014 18:40:05 "Chris Marriott" <chris at chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris J Brady
> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2014 3:25 PM
> To: get_iplayer
> Subject: Major Close Down
>
> >Earlier this year it was TheBox.bz. A few months ago Radio Archive closed
> >down. Now ZXCV.com (TB repacement) has gone for >good.
> >
> >Our forbears fought in WW1 and WW2 for our freedoms to be who we want to
> >be, to form sharing communities, and to live >how we want to live.
>
> I don't know what your "forbears" did, but mine certainly didn't do any
> fighting for the right to steal other peoples' copyrighted material. These
> are pirate sites, pure and simple. Good riddance to the lot of them.
>
> Chris
>
>
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