A Canadian Web upstart has shut down, after entertainment and sports pezzonovanti won the early rounds in a skirmish over the site's alleged pirating of copyrighted broadcasts.
iCraveTV had been rebroadcasting programs out of Buffalo, NY and Canada and surrounding them with ads it sold, the Associated Press says. The AP says ten film studios, four television networks, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association joined in getting an injuction last week which keeps iCraveTV from rebroadcasting their shows into the United States.
But the AP says it still remains an open question as to whether that will stop other Web sites from similar rebroadcasting. "iCraveTV was the hole in the dike," says Michael Shamos, co-director of the Institute for eCommerce at Carnegie Mellon, to the AP. "Pirating will become a bigger business."
And if Shamos is right, the AP says, industry leaders are fetting that they'll lose control over copyrighted materials, cheapening the materials themselves and compromising deals with advertisers and local stations.
For now, it's enough to declare war on copyright violators, says Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti to the AP. "iCrave is the first sighting on the horizon," Valenti says. "We could not allow them to go forward."
They may anyway, say some Internet and copyright experts who think computer whizzes enjoy solving apparently airtight problems, the AP says. Houston intellectual property attorney Robert McAughan tells the AP the vastness of the Net means you can stop copyright infringement one place only to have it pop up somewhere else.
Bill Craig, who owns iCraveTV, tells the AP Canadian law lets him capture TV signals and rebroadcast them within Canada, but the site's security was so lax the entertainment and sports companies believed he was trying to attract American viewers.
And Canadian broadcasters are suing Craig as well, saying the exception to which he alludes was aimed at cable television outlets alone, requiring the signal to go unaltered.
