Paramount COO Shows FCC How To File Share, Blames Tech Companies, Has FCC Hide Its Presentation

from the funny-how-that-works dept

Last week, the FCC held what was ostensibly a panel discussion about the National Broadband Plan, but which was actually focused on copyright issues. How, exactly, is copyright an issue for broadband? Well, mainly because the entertainment industry has been trying for years to get ISPs to act as copyright cops... and apparently the FCC felt the need to hear them out. While the deck was mostly stacked in favor of the entertainment industry in terms of speakers, thankfully the FCC allowed Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge to take part as well -- and she questioned whether the FCC even had any mandate over such issues and wondered why the hearing was even being held. However, beyond stacking the deck of speakers, it appears the FCC gave significant other beneficial treatment to entertainment industry speakers.

Paramount's COO, Frederick Huntsberry, not only was given twice the amount of time to speak as the rest of the speakers had (10 minutes, instead of five, as Gigi was told), but also was able to convince the FCC that his talk was "owned" by Paramount, and should not be placed online -- as the FCC has done with all its other hearings. Wow. Yes, this was a public government hearing. Thankfully, the folks at Public Knowledge went through a low quality video of the whole proceeding and pulled out Huntsberry's part, where he not only demonstrates how file sharing works for the FCC, but goes on to implicate plenty of companies as aiding in the process, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, Boxee and others:

In the video, he demonstrates using Mininova and Drop.io (which is an amazingly useful site for many things that have absolutely nothing to do with unauthorized file sharing -- and is now being unfairly tarred by Paramount). There isn't really anything surprising in the video. He basically shows what everyone knows: it's easy to share files these days. But he seems to miss the point of that. That is, he wants the gov't to come in and try to stop this (an impossibility), rather than recognizing that it's time for him to shift his business model. Yes, distribution is cheap and easy these days. In most businesses when distribution becomes cheaper and easier, that's a good thing. Why is it that Hollywood top execs still can't figure out how to take advantage of it?

Mehan Jayasuriya points out the many problems with the way the FCC handled this whole event:

• Any presentation delivered at a public government hearing should be made available to the general public in a convenient format. Not everyone is able to travel to Washington D.C. for hearings and those who cannot should not be excluded--rather, they should be encouraged to participate in the debate. The mission statement on the Commission's new Broadband.gov site seems to agree: "A great way to create a connected America is to involve all Americans in the development of a National Broadband Plan. The FCC welcomes civic participation, and we look forward to more interaction through this website." If Paramount was concerned that its video would encourage "piracy," then the company should not have presented it at a public hearing. It's as simple as that.
• All of the other presentation materials for all of the other workshops are available on the FCC's website, so that citizens can download, read, comment on, reference and critique them. Why should Paramount's statement be treated any differently?
• During the presentation, Huntsberry seems to suggest that a number of legitimate technology companies, including Drop.io, Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple, Boxee, Sony, LG, Yahoo!, PayPal and Rapidshare, are arguably acting to enable or encourage unlawful filesharing. These companies and the users of their products should have an opportunity to respond to this allegation.
• In the beginning of the clip, Huntsberry walks us through a timeline of when various camcorded copies of Star Trek were leaked to the Internet. This timeline provides a great example of how widespread the problem of camcording is, though it's worth noting that camcording is already illegal in most U.S. States and has little relevance in the context of this workshop (it's also worth noting that Star Trek made over $200 million at the box office regardless of the fact that camcorded copies were available within hours of its theatrical release). This evidence that films are commonly pirated while still in theaters undermines many of the arguments made by the studios in the FCC's Selectable Output Control proceeding (i.e. "We need to be granted the power to shut off outputs on the back of your A/V gear, otherwise you will unlawfully copy the films that we broadcast via cable").

Not only did the FCC treat Paramount's presentation with kid gloves, the agency also treated the Hollywood execs preferentially throughout the course of the workshop. Upon entering the room where the workshop was held, attendees were greeted by a massive vinyl banner--presumably belonging to Paramount--on which the aforementioned Star Trek timeline was printed. While I appreciate the fact that a visual aid can be helpful, I can't help but feel like a PDF file submitted to the record would have sufficed.

But that's not all. Though these workshops were technically less procedural in nature than a formal hearing would be, MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman was repeatedly allowed to call his technical expert, MovieLabs CEO Steve Weinstein, up to the stand to chime in with additional comments--even though nothing he said was actually technical in nature. The Commission allowed Glickman to do this so many times that Weinstein also started calling others from the audience up to the stand, including Disney Executive Vice President Preston Padden and Disney Vice President Troy D. Dow. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical but I doubt that the Commission would have allowed any of the other panelists to engage in this kind of behavior.

And, again, uh.... what does copyright have to do with broadband policy in the first place? And where is it in the FCC's mandate that it has any say in copyright policy?

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Update On The Free Summit: Speakers Announced

from the update dept

Wanted to give everyone an update on The Free Summit that I'll be emceeing next month. We've lined up most of the speakers, so check out the agenda. As already mentioned, Chris Anderson will be doing the keynote, talking about some of the concepts from his new book on "Free" (I'm reading it now -- and it's great). There will also be two panels that should be quite interesting. One of the things that we wanted to ensure was that the panels we put together didn't just involve people who all agreed with each other (or with me, certainly), so that the discussion would remain quite interesting. So, on the panel about music, we're having Jim Griffin (who I've certainly clashed with in the past) from Choruss, the major record label-backed attempt to come up with a new business model for licensing music, Gigi Sohn from Public Knowledge, the public advocacy group that has taken a strong pro-consumer position on copyright issues, and Dave Allen from the seminal band Gang of Four, a big advocate of "free," and who now helps plenty of other bands learn how to embrace and profit from "free." It should be an exciting discussion.

We've also got a panel on the news business, involving Kara Swisher from AllthingsD/Dow Jones, Dan Gillmor, the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship as well as one of the first "old school" reporters to jump on the participatory media bandwagon, Alan Mutter, a journalism professor/investor/entrepreneur/former reporter who's been a vocal critic of newspapers' decision to go free online (calling it "the original sin") and Marshall Van Alstyne, an economics professor from Boston University and MIT who has studied information economics and who recently debated with Mutter and others on the Freakonomics blog about news organization business models. There will also be a session from Alex Iskold (another person I've disagreed with in the past) who will be presenting on "the dangers of free."

What's great about this is that it really is a mix of folks with (sometimes starkly) different opinions -- but who all believe quite strongly in their positions and are willing to discuss and defend them. I'm hopeful that what comes out of all of this will be some great new insights from all sides about what "free" means in terms of business models and economics today.

Finally, we're excited to announce that, as a part of this, we'll be including a mini-Techdirt Greenhouse at the beginning of the event. For those who have followed Techdirt for a while, you may recall we ran a series of "idea workshops" called the Techdirt Greenhouse, where individuals would do short, 5-minute presentations not as a "demo," but to discuss a challenge they were facing -- and then we broke up the audience into workgroups to take on those challenges and come up with ideas/plans/suggestions. Those events were a lot of fun, and we received a ton of great feedback. We've been meaning to start them up again (and we still get emails from attendees demanding we do so), but have been too busy to focus on them -- so this is a good way to sneak in a mini-Greenhouse, and also get us geared up to do a full Greenhouse again in the near future. In this mini-Greenhouse, we'll be focusing on the challenges associated with using "free" in a business model. It should be a lot of fun...

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