Cape Town – Forget Pirate Bay or Popcorn Time or Sidereel. The future of piracy is live-streaming, and it’s here. On April 12, eight million people watched the fifth season premiere of Game of Thrones on their TVs. But on Periscope, the buzzy new Twitter-owned live streaming app, hundreds of users also watched the show on their cellphones.
That’s next to nothing, of course – tens of thousands of people pirate that show every day – but the mere possibility of more people live-streaming has HBO running scared.
The company promptly declared Periscoping “mass copyright infringement”, despite the utter lack of any audience approaching “mass”. And on Tuesday, the company sent a series of takedown notices to Periscope over Game of Thrones.
Which is extra-peculiar, as HBO usually takes a pretty chill stance towards Game of Thrones piracy.
This, however, is piracy of a totally different breed. There are no torrents, there are no files, there are no flash drives or DVDs. That makes Periscope a bit of a challenge – not terribly dissimilar from the era when VCRs threatened TV.
Consider, for instance, the takedown requests that HBO sent Periscope. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, online platforms aren’t responsible for what users post to them. But if they receive a complaint from a rights-holder, they have to remove the violating content. The problem here, of course, is that there’s no content to remove.
Periscope is live, and Game of Thrones lasts only an hour. By the time HBO filed its takedown requests, they applied only to users who had archived their stream for later review.
There are other abstract ambiguities here, as well: what if a user is live-streaming the episode to a private audience after it airs? That’s not so different from taping a TV show for home use. Or what if he’s live-streaming while critiquing the show?
In both cases, the issue at hand is whether the Periscope is “transformational” – in other words, if it’s a distinct creative work or a straight rebroadcast of the show. Intriguingly, that’s a question that could theoretically apply to users streaming many other things too, like concerts or plays or sporting events.
“I couldn’t tell you the point at which live-streaming becomes transformational,” said Richard Stim, a California copyright lawyer. “That’s a slippery standard.”
So slippery, it would seem, that HBO wants to clamp down on it fast – even though, if we’re being real, watching TV on Periscope is hardly worth the hassle.
The quality is poor, the streams are hard to find, and if you join late or your phone needs to buffer, there’s no way to pause or rewind. Then again, you can’t underestimate the adaptability of a bored, cheap person with a gadget in hand. The Washington Post