Net Video Bad For Network TV, Good For Network Web Sites
By Nate Anderson
November 12, 2007 - 07:25AM CT

Web video (both authorized and otherwise) is exploding in popularity, but is it simply drawing viewers away from the TV? Or are people watching more content then ever? That's a question tackled by University of Pennsylvania business school prof Joel Waldfogel in a recent paper (PDF, still in draft and recently mentioned on the Freakonomics blog).

His study, though it has some major caveats, indicates that the availability of popular television shows on the web does in fact depress television viewing. It's a result that might make network admen weep, except that the decrease in TV viewing has a flip side: web viewers spend more total time watching network-owned properties. Waldfogel surveyed 287 students at Penn about their TV-watching habits.

The thinking was that tech-savvy students would be an excellent population for getting a sense of how web distribution of content will change the future of TV. (Also, students are widely available, and generally fill out surveys in return for M&Ms or beer money.) This is not, and was not intended to be, a wide-ranging statement about the general population.

Waldfogel asked the students to write down the TV series they had watched for the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 seasons, along with whether such viewing was on 1) television, 2) authorized web sites, or 3) unauthorized sites, including BitTorrent. (Note that self-reporting opens the survey results to inaccuracies.) Waldfogel then crunched the numbers and found a huge spike in categories two and three between the two seasons of responses.

Ars Technica
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Prince To Sue The Pirate Bay
by Greg Sandoval
November 9, 2007 - 4:41 PM PST

Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits in three countries--including the United States--against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.

One of the world's best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood's requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized movie files, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective pirate tool.

Within the next few days, Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based. In addition, Prince is preparing to take civil action against some of the companies, many of which are headquartered in Israel, that advertise on The Pirate Bay, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff's president.

Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright. Giacobbi said Web Sheriff is also helping to launch an investigation into The Pirate Bay's off-shore connections to determine whether the company is compliant with Swedish and international income and corporation tax laws.

CNET News
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