Hollywood fights Internet protests with... TV ad, billboard, radio spot

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/hollywood-fights-internet-protest-with-tv-ad-billboard.ars

by evo_9 • 15 years ago

81 45 15 years ago

dmor• 15 years ago

What's stopping us from raising money on Kickstarter to buy up tons of billboard inventory on AdStruc.com? (the Airbnb of billboards - kind of awesome btw)

mercury888• 15 years ago

Good idea!!!

firefoxman14• 15 years ago

Really awesome idea. Use democratic ideas to save information freedom. You really should propose this on Reddit as well.

rmc• 15 years ago

Nothing, go for it!

kyt• 15 years ago

They also fought it today with minimal, biased coverage. I compared the Google trends search volume of the headline stories that were shown today on the major news sites. SOPA was easily 2-3x more searched than any other headline, yet it barely showed up as a blip on sites like FOX News.

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

Fox, my daily dose of US Corporatist Christian bias, had the blackout as the main article on their site. The coverage was not particularly unreasonable.

CWuestefeld• 15 years ago

If you think Fox is the most biased news network, you clearly aren't watching any of the others. I say this not in defense of Fox, but because news coverage with slant in some direction is positively ubiquitous.

If you think you're looking at something that's unbiased, it's only because that news outlet matches your own world view more closely.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's impossible to produce news that's entirely without bias. So I wish they'd stop pretending to be even-handed, and just come clean with what their editorial views are. It would make our job of filtering a lot easier.

ethank• 15 years ago

So sad. All this effort because they spent years ignoring technology and trying to do innovation via outsourcing and customer dis-servicing business development.

I know first hand :)

firefoxman14• 15 years ago

I love how the TV ad plays on people's patriotism. Or, at least it tries to. It really just reflects their oldschool ways beautifully.

This isn't the baby-boom generation anymore. You can't just control young minds by saying "if you don't do (whatever), you aren't patriotic."

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

Good. The more antiquated notions they use in their propaganda, the less likely they are to succeed.

Natsu2• 15 years ago

The boomers, however, still vote. They're probably one of the largest voting groups by now. Just something to keep in mind. Not everyone is like us.

Zirro• 15 years ago

"Not everyone is like us."

That makes me wonder, what are we? Why are we different from "the masses"? How can our differences be defined?

alan_cx3• 15 years ago

When one appeals to patriotism, one is basically saying "I have no logical or credible argument, suspend your brain and do as we damn well tell you" "Patriotism" is nothing more than a device to control the brainless.

thebigshane3• 15 years ago

Well, not always. There are legitimate reasons to ring the "patriotism" bell: Pearl Harbor, 9/11 (spare the theories please). Drumming up patriotism to join the forces to defend the country is the original reason for patriotism and it can still be applicable. Just not in most of the cases you may hear on TV.

firefoxman14• 15 years ago

I think a better term than "brainless" is "mindless." Mindless is the opposite of mindfulness, which is being aware, awake, and just plain giving a damn. The mindless are none of those things.

j45• 15 years ago

Hi Hollywood: I like movies and stuff, but how about I stop watching them altogether?

I'm happy to pay for cable, netflix and more but you really need to stop punishing the majority of honest people, it's just not cool.

The internet gives me a lot more than the predictable formula plots that you do lately.

ithought• 15 years ago

We should have lobbyists pushing Congress to investigate Hollywood studios for massive fraud-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

showkhill• 15 years ago

You can joke around with this stuff but if your passion is the arts and real creativity (without profit motive) it's sickening.

In Ireland when senior fat cat state servants are threatened with any kind of reprimand the media and unions are mobilized for operation 'blue collar' shield. Police, nurses and teachers are wheeled out to protect the cabal at the top. It always works.

So Newscorp, Hollywood and the Label's are protecting the creative people now, the little guy? As brazen as you would expect from the axis of (creative) evil.

daniel-cussen2• 15 years ago

I for one am going to 1) stop buying newspaper 2) not listen to radio, and 3) not watch TV (ok, I was doing this already)

because I'm a little tired of old media and wouldn't mind if it went out of business a little faster.

manish_gill• 15 years ago

I find this incredibly fascinating. As someone who doesn't lives in the US, I used to just dismiss the amount of misinformation or propaganda (as some of my online friends in the states call it) was spread by news media as exaggeration. I never really got what the big deal was with 'Fox News LOL'. But this seems to be the pretty extreme.

megablast• 15 years ago

Each of those has the most tiny effect. You would do much better to 1) Stop hiring/buying DVDs 2) Stop going to the cinema 3) Stop buying music

daniel-cussen2• 15 years ago

OK, that too.

artursapek• 15 years ago

What an unsubstantial TV ad. The resistance from the anti-SOPA side comes with factual arguments. However they've chosen to go with their usual favorites: meaningless symbolic imagery and biased, baseless statements. They're trying to push their way through this with brute force. Idiots.

bad_user• 15 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't include "think of the children", although "criminals stealing american jobs" is pretty close.

JamesLeonis• 15 years ago

You are thinking of Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act (H.R. 1981), which could easily be extended to include internet piracy.

Natsu2• 15 years ago

They're not idiots. They're very good at making emotional appeals that will reach people who are not like us.

thebigshane3• 15 years ago

Right, we are not the target audience. Actually we probably aren't part of the target audience for most TV/radio ads and billboards.

droithomme• 15 years ago

It really bothers me that their lobbying organization is called "Creative America". Creative America is me and other people who make things. It's not corporate parasites who form insidious symbiotic relationships with corrupt congressmen to pass laws that strangle free expression.

"Creative America" does not represent artists and intellectual property producers. It represents the interests of the predators who feed off out what we produce while adding nothing of value, and the interests of those who want more power and control over the populace, including the ability to stiffle dissent.

I think Ars Technica should either put "Creative America" in quotes, abbreviate it CA, or place it in italics. Appearing many times in the article in plain typography is confusing and misleading.

capisce• 15 years ago

Has kind of the same ring to it as "Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea", doesn't it? If you have to put it in your name, you're not really it...

thebigshane3• 15 years ago

   United States of America

That's interesting. We are still united, but I think most people would look on the US as a single entity, not co-operating states anymore. States have lost most of their sovereignty. But then again, at the time we came up with the name, it was more fitting.

I wondered if North Korea had a similar history, but it appears they were always a communist dictatorship (since 1949, just after Korea split). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_North_Korea]

tluyben2• 15 years ago

This is exactly what annoys me about it; all artists I know are against. I don't think many creative people are in favor of SOPA/PIPA. Maybe Lars Ulrich is... I guess he should be considering his stance on 'copyright' and I hear he needs a 12.000th pool. /rant. Anyway; it's the publishers across the board, not the creative people. The creative people should let their voice be heard; maybe they cannot because of contracts or?

ricree• 15 years ago

It's especially ironic considering the nature of the blackout protest.

On one side, for the most part, we have a bunch of creators using their own creations to spread the message. On the other, there's a bunch of distribution companies paying someone else to spread their message for them. So of course, guess which side picks a name claiming to represent the "Creative"s.

freejack• 15 years ago

This is a typical lobby tactic. I spent many years fighting similar interests related to DNS issues at ICANN and in Washington. Our position was to support a smaller ICANN and more control by the community - less regulation and more checks and balances. Anyways, we were always bouncing up against Big Business, Big Media and the Telco's and they would lobby back under the guise of organizations like The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, The Free Speech Coalition, Net Choice and many others. After a while when I came across a new group, I'd just take the opposite of what their name said and that usually represented their position.

Many of these groups have mastered pre-emptive appropriation of key terms, usually forcing the opposition to do verbal backflips in order to make their point without conceding the oppositions opinion.

Looking back, I hated every second of it.

bsphil• 15 years ago

Not to mention, Creative America's logo is awfully similar to the Creative Commons logo...

prawn• 15 years ago

People off the net and unaware that this was an issue are now aware that there's something that large swathes of the internet are kicking up a fuss over. How many will get curious and investigate? More than none, I imagine.

bitops• 15 years ago

I find it somewhat ironic that the only way I knew that "Creative America" even existed and that it was running TV and billboard ads was through the Web.

Also, it's not just "foreign criminals" who are pirating content. People right here in the US are making money doing it. See http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk for an example. (I did a whois on funnyjunk.com and they appear to be US based).

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

35 minutes of reading the oatmeal later...

One thing the guy definitely has going for him is that even if they strip the label off, the sense of humour and the style is still recognisable as Oatmeal.

mydnite• 15 years ago

If ever a billboard needed some C 'n' B work done to it it is these billboards.

Arise the gorilla C 'n' B army of the new millennium.

But seriously it just makes me want to get into politics just to kick these fuckers out and I'm not even a yank, I'm Australian, so I couldn't directly help the people in the US.

alan_cx3• 15 years ago

Let me get this straight. The advert in Times Square has News Corp and Sony surrounding America's creative community.

Does that not perfectly show exactly what the whole damn problem is?

ypcx• 15 years ago

Fun fact: the 7 consolidated media companies (all media there is in the US basically), are intimately interconnected with Pharmaceutical and Insurance companies. Link: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3845

(My original source: http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1023-financia...)

jdavid• 15 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if the biggest reason media companies are pissed off about piracy, is because they can't add their own free political messages to any content they want. they are loosing the power of distribution, which is fundamentally more important that loosing a revenue stream.

Hollywood fights Internet protests with... TV ad, billboard, radio spot

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