Streaming Media West 2005 Wrap-Up Part 2
Legal Challenges to Media Innovation
Moderator: Jason Schultz, staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Panelists: Mary Hodder, CEO, Bolqx, Inc.; Jason Krikorian, CEO and vice president of business development, SlingMedia; Andrew Wolfe, Ph.D., consultant
Attending this talk was like attending a Mothers Against Drunk Driving meeting. In standard EFF style, we were presented with a sobering and depressing description of how a flourishing, vibrant, and innovative consumer electronics company of 400 people was drawn and quartered with a simultaneous lawsuit by every major content holder.
The panel was held in the biggest of the conference rooms, so there was a palpable "empty-discotheque" feel to the session, and whenever one person would leave to go to lunch or to go outside and cry, a few others would follow in the slipstream. Nonetheless, a core group of 35 interested and engaged audience members stayed for the duration.
The end of the talk found a bit more levity. One funny moment was when Jason Krikorian of SlingMedia disavowed any knowledge of people using his company’s SlingBox to watch out-of-area sports events. But the difference between yesteryear’s consumer electronics makers, such as SonicBlue, and the new breed is that companies used to build first and worry about legal ramifications later, while today's less intrepid companies (like SlingMedia) have thought about how to include the existing stakeholders and jump into the value chain themselves.
Our take on the session? It's difficult to see lawyers as little more than obstructionists who look at new media as inherently bad and likely to infringe someone's rights, thereby offering an opportunity to post billable hours. Krikorian explained just how scared content owners are of anything outside of the standard theatrical, TV, and DVD release models. The idea that a person can send media from their home, over the Internet to a streaming receiver device just plain freaks the studios out. It smacks of loss of control. That loss of control is not merely perceived, it's real, but the cat is out of the bag. It's silly to think that we can go back to the draconian content control model of the pre-VCR days where people rushed home from work to watch one of three TV channels. Those days are gone, yet innovation continues to be derailed by fear-based content holders.
What makes all of this far more complex is that each grain of content sand that exists has its own unique ownership contract. Simply put, there is no way to blanket cover content licensing, and as long as that is the case, consumers will suffer. There is a solution: wholesale contracts. All content could be covered under a giant contract where anyone can pull content from a massive library, publish it through their channel and pay a flat rate where people who contributed to the content are paid through a simple automated system. Seems simple enough; get the actors, producers, directors, studios, and other content stake holders to all sign off on the flat rate. Sadly, this simple solution will never come to be. Greedy people and greedy lawyers will never let it stand. There is too much money to be made from the subtlety of individualized contracts, and each person involved wants a say in how much they can squeeze out of each content item. Once again the consumer suffers.
Innovation is restricted all too often by what you cannot do. Engineers are a can-do bunch; their only can't-do is related to the physical realm of budgets, size constraints, and technological restrictions. If that were not enough, lawyers come in and offer up more restrictions, barriers, warnings, contracts, NDAs, and the spectre of infringement.
Is there some irony in the fact that the legal issues we are trying to overcome are all created by the lawyers we employ?—Lionel Felix/Damien Stolarz