Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment who was the subject of our last HissyFitWatch, has decided damage control was the order of the day after being caught making remarks suggesting the Internet had never come to any good and was filled with pirates and freeloaders. A recap:
“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet, period.”
The Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”
Just brought to our attention, Lynton decided he’d better clarify those remarks, because the blog world had already spent a week burning him in effigy for making them. So off to The Huffington Post he went to pen his long-form explanation on May 26th.
In March, an unfinished copy of 20th Century Fox’s film X-Men Origins: Wolverine was stolen from a film lab and uploaded to the Internet, more than a month before its theatrical release. The studio investigated the crime, and efforts were made to limit its availability online. Still, it was illegally downloaded more than four million times.
That kind of wide scale theft was very much on my mind when I was on a panel the other day which opened with a question about the impact of the Internet on the entertainment business, and I responded, “I’m a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period.”
But, I actually welcome the Sturm und Drang I’ve stirred, because it gives me an opportunity to make a larger point (one which I also made during that panel discussion, though it was not nearly as viral as the sentence above). And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content — music, newspapers, movies and books — have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Some of that damage has been caused by changing business models (the FTC just announced an inquiry into the impact of new media on the newspaper industry). But the primary culprit is piracy. The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.
He could have said this at the Whine & Cheese breakfast in Syracuse and it would have provoked the same reaction his original comments had. Not much to see here beyond another big corporate Hollywood studio executive pleading poverty and ruin because one of the industry’s own employees made off with a film print to score big bucks and eventually the copy drifted into Pirate Bay. Nobody need call CSI to determine the cause of injury in this case. Even the most casual observer can see most of these wounds are self-inflicted.