I. Firefly is currently in the top 5 (all-time) of best selling television dvd box sets. Right up there with other such failures as Lost and 24.
Source: The New York Times. Firefly is still on Amazon’s top 100 currently at #73 (not bad for a 4 year old tv show with only 14 episodes)

II. Firefly was cancelled by Fox because they just didn’t get it. Firefly remains the only tv show cancelled after less than 1 year, yet still get a major motion picture release (Serenity).

III. What was Universal’s first High Definition DVD to hit the marketplace?!?! Class?…anyone?…it was SERENITY! So much for there not being an audience made of anything.

IV. The t-shirts made by The 11th hour don’t even have the Serenity logo on them. They have a Chinese symbol and you can’t copyright letters or symbols of any alphabet. Just do a search on U.S. copyright law. Even her design was different.

V. The Serenity DVD was on Amazon’s top 20 list for over 3 months. The DVD was released in Dec. 05.

In closing I think Universal should work out some sort of deal with 11th hour. They have every right to protect their copyright, but in this case I think they lost their sense of reason.

Sincerely,

JBJ

Because TV networks don’t think that way. It’s a cliche to say that MBAs don’t understand the Internet, but it’s absolutely true here. They want you on their website and their website only so they can claim the ratings. They don’t realize that it’s not like TV where as long as the transmitter’s hot anything you put out on it is essentially free after that.

See, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Why would Comedy Central not use YouTube to spread interest in their TV show? Streaming video is rather bandwidth intensive, and the cost for running a very popular video site is probably pretty astronomical. Why not get the same popularity on the cheap, by having YouTube foot the bill?

There’s a downside when Universal runs another viral marketing campaign.

I agree with your point that opposition to YouTube on the grounds of copyright infringement makes no sense considering the free advertising YouTube provides.

However, it does make some sense Comedy Central would take down the videos considering YouTube is in direct competition with Comedy Central’s website. A significant amount of Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers are online. Of course Comedy Central would rather direct that viewing traffic to their own site.

Actually, even the legal picture is muddier than that. Universal had previously encouraged the fans to post their original art work for sale on a website that Universal ran. The site is closed now but the fans continue to gather and to sell items elsewhere. In the case of this woman (not a guy) who received the first of these threatening letters it was all original artwork, not images from the characters or movie scenes or logos. She’s a longtime fan who has shown great loyalty in the effort to bring out an audience for the franchise and now she and the other “Browncoats” are willing to cooperate by limiting their art to further help feed the success of their beloved show/film but this was a ham-fisted first approach by the legal department of a corporation that the fans had thought of as their partners in fantasy.

The story is just starting to get out and if they insist on this approach it’ll certainly be a messy PR matter and their legal case may not be a slam dunk either. 11th Hour, (the name used by the fan with the original artwork inspired by the show’s theme) might be wise to ride this spaceship for a bit and see where it goes. It may not last forever but those shirts could become collector’s items soon.

The downside is killing future viral marketing campaigns. Sure, it didn’t work for this one – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Fox has made $100 million off the Rocky Horror Picture Show (and most of that was pre-inflation money). It wasn’t from a wide release and massive advertising.

The next time Fox or Universal tries to get a groundswell going, people just might remember this.

BTW, your Typekey identifier doesn’t seem to be working.

It’s not about the $8,750 at all then, is it? It’s about Universal establishing a credible track record of not letting people get away with ripping them off.

It’s kind of like Tony Soprano whacking someone who owes him a few thousand dollars. The money means nothing, but if people see him letting people slide, then everyone will start doing it.

Such demonstrations of will often involve costs far in excess of the nominal value to be gained. The real gains come by deterring future ripoffs.

There’s a downside when Universal runs another viral marketing campaign.

Well, how about what CBS is doing—provide their own way to watch the shows for free from their own web site, so they can control the revenue derived from it?

Honestly though I think the content providers need to play a little hardball with YouTube, just long enough to get a reasonable piece of the money they intend to make.

(P.S.—any chance you can change your blog code so that a poster has to only enter one CAPTCHA per post, no matter how many times he previews? :))

Serenity/Fireflop failed precisely because it’s fans were rabid. There just weren’t that many of them. The movie was/is like Donnie Darko. A nice cult movie at a million dollars, a total failure at $40 million.

There never was an audience that was worth much of anything, so no this is a smart move by Universal to prevent precedents in other areas (loss of merchandising rights for other actually valuable trademarks).

No downside to “alienating” people promoting a movie since that model obviously failed to generate enthusiam at the box office or in DVD sales (if Universal actually made money off DVDs there would have been a sequel).

Fireflop is exhibit A of being caught in the Long Tail phenomena with old-media budgets. If the movie had been made independently I could see the point but Universal probably found the whole exercise a massive waste of management time (which could have been devoted to stuff actually making money) and a dangerous precedent of giving away merchandising rights.