Warner Bros have done a good job of showing how out of touch the Hollywood old guard still is when it comes to today’s fans. Last month they issued a cease and desist notice to a Harry Potter themed dinner party being run by the ever charismatic food blogger and underground restaurant spokesperson @msmarmitelover.
While her home restaurant is undoubtedly a fantastic success (it’s very tasty indeed, I can attest) and she has been featured in the press all year, the event remains a very small, living room based affair. Hardly a major case of copyright infringement, but the dinosaurs are not going to let individual facts get in the way of a good bit of blanket protectionism.
Meanwhile across London in Bethnal Green, the infinitely more savvy TV channel FX have embraced the fan themed party concept. They happily allow the promoters of club night Fangtasia to use their proprietary name from the series True Blood (it’s name of the bar). Their involvement even stretches to permitting the use of authentic signs/logos and donating prizes including branded bloodsucker lollipops and holy water!
Bringing brands alive for fans promotes the kind of long term engagement with characters that most TV/movie franchises can only dream of. We simply don’t live in an era where heavy-handed control of brands is the best way to protect your assets and copyrights anymore. With so many companies seemingly rushing to adopt social media practices across their online and offline activities, it’s amazing to see that some of the biggest media brands in the world are still stuck on their old model, fighting an uphill battle against the boundless creative input of their audience.
And so in this particular case, stories ridiculing the ancient corporate overseers at Warner v the supperclub host were a gift to the press and circulated widely, even making it onto Perez Hilton’s blog. What good is that kind of coverage to the Harry Potter brand?
Read MsMarmitelover’s account of the eventual evening on her blog. (Unbelievably enough, she has since received a letter from London Underground objecting to her use of their trademark in calling her dinner parties the Underground Restaurant! These companies really need to get with the disruptive times…)
We’re wrong to think that today’s powerful social media tools are particularly groundbreaking – they are in fact a return to working methods that were popular centuries ago.
At least, that’s Charles Leadbeater’s argument in my Easter reading, the excellent book We-Think – Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production. I haven’t finished the book yet, but it’s already proved to be highly accessible and more dynamic/exciting than the slightly worthy Wikinomics.
Leadbeater’s point is that collaboration and sharing are as old as village life itself, and digital technology has forced concepts like ‘the commons’ to rise again through its leveling effect on all media. He reminds us that most of the great stories – from the Bible to the works of Shakespeare – were born from a history of shared storytelling, with bits added and changes made by whole range of voices.
It’s well worth bearing this in mind when worrying about the way traditional publishing/broadcasting is being decimated by the unstoppable march of progress. Huge profits for a few rights-holders can no longer be assured, but we’re not going to see the end of culture that some of the more blinkered commentators like to predict.
I imagine the rest of We-Think is going to be equally optimistic, and I can‘t help agreeing that all this is a natural progression from a rather brief period of human history where a few people controlled the storytelling tools for a while.
So with the Guardian now reporting that MySpace could follow YouTube’s lead in blocking all ‘premium music video content’ in protest at the financial demands of PRS, it looks like we may have reached an important point in online content history all of a sudden.
It’s quite a twist that now it is YouTube themselves pulling content over a copyright dispute instead of being forced to do so by scary lawyers representing livid major record labels.
Blocking the most popular music videos in the UK is clearly not a long-term plan by parent company Google since it really doesn’t benefit anyone in this (except their direct competitors – say hello MUZU.tv!) In fact, the whole escapade rather smacks of Russia’s little trick of turning off the gas supply to Ukraine when they fancy some more cash for warming European homes during an icy winter. I’m sure Google, with their ‘Do No Evil’ motto wouldn’t be too pleased at that analogy, but I can’t see a better parallel right now to be honest.
Clearly Google/YouTube feel that their service is vital enough to the music industry for them to be able to throw their weight around. Whether that is actually true will be revealed in the next few days (I can’t see us being in for a dispute of Virgin v Sky proportions anyway).
Yet PRS hardly look any better in all this either. Demanding too much payback from services that have yet to sort out a viable funding model is an equally rubbish policy. Making real money from music online is going to be about a lot more than screwing platforms for fees. Google may have earned $5.7bn in the last quarter of 2008, as today’s PRS press statement happily points out, but are PRS also guilty of inflating the actual importance of YouTube when setting out their demands?
In the hurry to try and find the ‘answer’ to making the traditional pots of cash that have dried up for the music industry in the digital era, perhaps both YouTube and PRS (and most other people, to be honest) have overinflated their expectations of what a free video service is actually capable of supporting?
Meanwhile, the artists PRS are supposed to be fighting for are immediately starting to suffer, as the embedded videos on their websites go blank, and their promotional campaigns are left in disarray.
As with the saga of DRM, attempts to block the march of free digital content are messy, costly and ultimately prove futile. Let’s hope this potentially dramatic moment in the development of the new media landscape doesn’t get too nasty. No company, even Google, can afford to make too big a mistake when the fans are in charge.
