Usenet copyright violations and Wolverine
My usenet provider has deleted all binary articles relating to the recently leaked Wolverine work print. This is interesting because it hasn’t deleted terabytes of other data that infringes on other copyrighted works. Why not?
Either the copyright holders or their agents can’t/are not pushing the same buttons as were pushed for the Wolverine film (FBI involvement?) or they don’t really care about it. I’d like to think it’s the later, and that gives me hope that that some people in these big organisations have a clue about the internet and online piracy.
The “theatrical box office” takings of a movie are much higher than DVD sales, so it makes sense for the distributors (20th Century Fox in this case) to go bat-shit-crazy when something happens that affects their primary income. The distributor will also get a much higher % of the box office than it will from DVD sales (it costs a lot more to produce and sell a DVD than licensing a print to a cinema) and whilst the box-office is 5x the DVD gross, it might be 20x the revenue they actually receive.
The way my provider has very quickly removed the content shows that copyright violations *can* be enforced if there is enough will (although I’m not too sure of the state of the P2P systems) but at the same time suggests that run-of-the-mill violations like TV episodes or DVDs are allowed to exist.