In the post "Complicated entertainment laws" I wrote about how Warner Brother's TheWB.com wouldn't allow users outside of the U.S to enter the site and how they instead displayed a message telling users to write their governments to "fight this injustice". It seems as the complaint got to Warner since the message now only says: The WB can only be viewed in the United States. Great! Thanks Warner for listening and acting on this little thing, shall we now proceed with the bigger issues? Read More

TheWB.com update

Newteevee and the Korean Times are reporting that Sony Pictures has left South Korea because of "sluggish sales and rampant piracy". Sony wasn't first to abandon the Korean market though – appearantly Paramount, Universal, Buena Vista and 20th Century Fox have all left which means no big Hollywood studio is operating in the country. This is important news and means the DVD Industry is actually dead in South Korea - and the death is spreading! South Korea's DVD sales has rapidly been falling in the recent years ($673 million in 2002 vs. ...Read More

The death of the DVD?

My first entry on Digital Renaissance will unfortunately be a post that resembles a rant – but comes with a FREE suggestion of how to make the digital world a better place. Warner Brothers just relaunched it's television website TheWB.com with ad-supported streaming of popular tv shows. While the service has some new interesting features and a nice rollout of shows (Friends, The OC, Veronica Mars, Smallville etc.) it shows a digital territorial gap between the US and the rest of the world. See below. This is what it looks like if ...Read More

Complicated entertainment laws?

You have all heard about the long tail. All of you have now also heard about how the 'biz' as in the 'music biz' and the 'movie biz' was slow to react. They were shutting down when they should have been opening up. And so forth. They are now on the case though. Last week we were in a hearing at the swedish parliament where the topic was "Copyright Law on the internet". A lot of things were said, one line that got stuck in my head was when a guy ...Read More

Who has a long tail?