"Exclusive" Web Rights Are Soooooo 1997

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BoingBoing gets not just a nastygram from a law firm, but a preemptive nastygram.

Infront anticipates the possibility of unauthorised streaming and downloading of FIFA World Cup matches, other unauthorised use of clips or images of the matches and services which facilitate such activities. Infront and its agents are therefore taking active and strong measures to prevent such unlawful activities, both civilly and criminally.

In this respect you should be aware that Infront and its agents are actively monitoring your website and others to identify unlawful activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to ensure the protection of Infront's rights and those of its licensees.

In other words, Infront was sold exclusive online broadcasting rights and intends to defend those rights, apparently borrowing it's legal stance from The Washington Post circa 1997.

No doubt, with visions of millions of football fans happily streaming FIFA matches from its servers (and its servers alone) dancing in its head, Infront apparently thinks the Internet is a broadcast medium where one entity can "own" concepts and thoughts. This, of course, is ridiculous. Does Infront plan to go after fan websites where people post photos of their favorite players? Won't that be fun to watch?

By my count, Infront needs about half a dozen clues to bring them back to the future. Here's the most glaring one:

When you hope to make money by buying rights to stream content, you WANT people to post clips, images and whatnot. It's called free publicity, stupid. In other words, keep the lawyers at bay and let people post clips of the first round of matches and you'll have more people showing up to legally stream the second round of matches. Dumbass.

I won't even get into the notion of inferring that people are criminals BEFORE THE FACT. That one is so stupid, I won't touch it in fear of having stupid particles accidentally rub off on me and take my IQ down by several dozen points.

Blog Semantics

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When blogging was first emerging, the blogosphere knocked around the notion of what constitutes a blog. Of course, some basics were challenged, like whether or not a blog necessarily requires a chronologically-ordered archive of posts or whether or not a blog needs to be topical. Those were the minor, almost inconsequential elements of the discussion. The bigger point was that in order for a blog to be considered a blog, it had to encourage conversation through comments or some other form of feedback. Without a two-way channel, it's not really a blog. I think we can all agree on this. Except for the bandwagoners. I'm talking about some of the folks in the established publishing world who believe that if you post a press release once a week through a Blogger account and turn the comments off that somehow, this qualifies as a blog.

I've seen quite a few media vendors try to sell us advertising on "blogs" that are nothing more than repurposed content published via a blogging interface. In many cases, there's no interactivity involved - no comments, trackbacks, message boards or anything like that. They still call them blogs, however.

When I asked one recent office visitor why comments weren't turned on, he essentially told me that turning comments off made the environment safer for advertisers. Kind of like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, huh? Needless to say, they didn't get an order from us.

And this, friends, is yet another example of how those who don't get it are making money from the popularity of the blogging movement.

What's Up With Interactive Marketers These Days?

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Karl Long asks whether online marketers are obsessed with the wrong things.

Are they obsessed with RIA/Flash based "orgies" for the senses and missing the boat a little on the "new" marketing, the conversational marketing, the blog marketing, the social software, etc.?

It's a terrific question. Right now, I see the Interactive Marketers picking one of two camps - the Online Video Camp and the Engagement Camp. The former of the two wants to treat the Internet like television, and I think they'll make a lot of money in the short term, but won't have a sustainable model.

The Engagement Camp wants to treat the Internet as a two-way communications medium. I count myself in this camp, but I don't necessarily think of everyone in it with me as an ally. (Some of them are still obsessed with staying "on message.")

What sucks is that we've been one big happy industry for a while, and I see a lot of people I like and respect going over into the Online Video camp because their clients want to run their TV commercials online. They lose sight of two very important things - 1) The Internet is not television, and 2) Very few people want to watch television commercials online.

On the other hand, I'm happy that a lot of people in the Engagement Camp want see that the Internet is a two-way medium, but some of the people in this camp are even more dangerous than the online video crowd. They see blogging as an opportunity to disseminate press releases or advertising messages, not as an opportunity to advance the conversation. And that's bad, because many people are convinced that corporations and people can't exist in the same sphere without strangling one another. If we pollute the blogosphere with ad messages, we won't get another chance to communicate with people in a direct and human way. As it is, people are cynical enough.

But back to Karl's post for a sec...

...it seems that McKinsey is taking a leadership position in getting some old and new media leaders to get together in New York. Mind you, in support of the idea that what used to be new media is now traditional...

New Media is NOT traditional. One of the worst mistakes we ever made as an industry was convincing ourselves that we needed to serve up our medium as a one-way broadcast medium in order to succeed. And now we're at a point in time where we have an opportunity to show marketers that our medium works BECAUSE it is different and we just got done telling them it's the same. Ugh.

I'll be the first to admit that I reluctantly jumped on the GRP bandwagon after things got really bad in the online industry. So I'm not blameless here. But let's make sure the ship is heading in the right direction while we still can. We owe it to the medium. I don't want to be swimming in broadcast-model ads all over again.