Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:37:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100316/0140078576.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100316/0140078576.shtml tell stories in very different ways. And, in the end, that's what every content producer is really doing: they're telling stories. It doesn't necessarily matter what the format is, and there are no rules that say you're restricted to telling your entire story through just one platform.

This talk was given by Tim Kring, creator of the popular TV show Heroes, and he made some interesting points -- noting that he's "honored" that Heroes is the most "illegally" downloaded TV show out there, because "we'll take audience anywhere we can get it." But he's not just sitting back. The reason he doesn't care if people are watching the show on TV or elsewhere is because they're really working on ways to connect with fans in much deeper ways, including creating a pretty complex and massive alternative reality game that had true fans of the show actively involved -- such that they knew about certain characters and important plot points way before they appeared on the small screen, and were made to feel like actual participants in the story. As he noted, "people want to participate in their TV shows."

Again, this is a point that has been made before -- but so many of the suits upstairs still seem to think that TV is a purely broadcast media, not one where people want to communicate and participate in meaningful ways (and, yes, that means a lot more than just calling or texting a phone number to "vote" on something). It's great to see the folks actually making these stories are understanding this, because eventually that thinking will begin to become more common, rather than seem like some crazy idea to appease "the internet folks." We're not there yet, of course. NBC, which airs Heroes is still freaking out about those illegal downloads and wasting tons of money and resources claiming that it must be stopped -- all while its basic network schedule has been a huge disaster. If NBC top brass listened to folks like Kring, and realized the challenge is to make people happy, rather than spending so much time trying to force them into "the way NBC wants things to work," perhaps the network wouldn't be in so much trouble.

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]]> recognizing-the-future http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100316/0140078576 Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:11:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090312/1639204097.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090312/1639204097.shtml furious and considering a lawsuit because they claim an episode of the TV show Heroes "stole" a scene (yes, just a scene) from a movie they produced. The link above has clips of both scenes, and there's simply no case at all here should they sue (and hopefully they won't). You see various lawsuits all the time with people claiming they came up with some generic concept for a TV show or movie, but it never sticks. Lots of people have the same basic ideas. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, requires actual copying of the specific content. Not just the general idea. Yet, if you watch these two clips, they're only loosely similar. They both involve a blonde-haired woman (who is clearly not a comic book fan), applying for a job in a comic book shop. That's about where the similarities end.

But, once again, this is indicative of the culture that we've created in this world with over-aggressive expansion of intellectual property laws, where people really do think that ideas are ownable, and as long as they were "first" no one else can possibly have a similar idea.

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