Record labels pirate football game

Oh, dear, major labels - don't you realise that copyright theft is a SERIOUS CRIME? Do we need to send Britney Spears over to remind you that illegally streaming a football game at a VEVO party is no different from stealing a CD from a store? Tut. Tut. Tut.

TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid saw ESPN streaming from an unlicensed feed:

My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web.

Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free.

But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time.

VEVO stutter that, you know, it's probably not them:

As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee who was taking the helm. Must have been one of those nasty pirates.

Now, remind me: what is the attitude of the music industry when someone says that somebody else must have been using the computer at the time of an illegal download? Like in the case of Patricia Santangelo, when the RIAA insisted that because she owned the house the computer alleged to have shared unlicensed files was in, she was liable.

I'm sure VEVO executives will be handing themselves in at the local cop shop. After all, piracy is a serious crime. They will want to be punished to the full extent of the laws their colleagues have had created.