A Student Commentary on Big Medias Attack on Fan Websites :: Sell Websites Buy Websites

A Student Commentary on Big Medias access on Fan WebsitesThe fight between legal departments at major movie and TV studios and producers of buffer websites has reached a fever pitch. The legal department of obscure TV sent out notices to cease and desist to two webmasters of fan King Of The Hill websites. Fox Primetime has cracked down on fan sites before, nearly notably those saluting The X-Files. It boggles the mind why fan sites pose such a threat to the studios. It would seem that for a fan to take the time and spend the property to build a website without any hope of financial reward would be the supreme compliment to a given show. I know of no fan site which makes currency. Usually, unless the webmaster has a save account through their College or University, their Internet access and web space costs money. And if not always a money sink, sites like these are always a time sink. These fans are taking time out of their busy educational and/or work schedules to give these shows free publicity. Still photographs from movies and TV shows used for reviews and/or given away, with or without autographs, to fans has been a traditional means of promoting a studios wares. When fans offer stills for other fans to collect on the Internet, they are conducting a type of trade which has for decades existed via the mail and in face to face memorabilia swaps. There is more controversy about audio and depiction clips, but the event remains that 10% of a copyrighted work of art can be duplicated for fair use purposes according to the Berne Convention, the current standard of constabulary on copyrights for most of the world. Current audio techniques for the Internet like .AU, .AIFF, and .WAV get very, very large unless the audio snippet is only a matter of seconds long. And literal Audio .RAM files and Shockwave Streaming Audio files both play as they pass by and are not stored on a persons computer. We are not public lecture about piracy here. We are talking abo ut a sample thats only a few seconds long, which the people who painstakingly make the sample knuckle down over without any hope of recompense, and which takes up frightfully large chunks of server space. This goes double for the most controversial element of fan sites -- video clips. AVI Video For Windows and QuickTime video files are extremely largely sized.