[ NNSquad ] Re: mangling payload

[Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com>]

Warren Kumari wrote:
> AOL used to (still does?) do this [downgrade image quality] for images in their client -- 
> http://webmaster.info.aol.com/compgraphics.html
>
> As far as I remember there was some legal issue where a company that 
> sold posters online claimed that the re-encoding of the image lowered 
> the quality and so hurt their sales. I think that it went to trial and 
> the ruling was in favor of AOL --- I cannot find the references now (and 
> for all I know it got settled out of court), but there have been others...

I wonder how they got around the derivative work rule.  Maybe they just 
had more money to pay lawyers than the poster vendor did, and so the 
vendor settled for some payment that was small enough for AOL to say, 
well, OK, whatever.

There was another case in the 90s.  Blockbuster was taking VCR movies 
and producing their own edited  "family friendly" versions -- that is, 
with (some of) the sexy stuff edited out.  They were paying the 
appropriate royalties (as if they had bought official versions from the 
studios), but the version of, say, "American Dreamer" that they sold or 
rented was _not_ the same as either the theater release or the studio's 
own video release.

The movie producers sued, and AFAIK Blockbuster stopped doing it. IIRC 
they cut a deal with the studio (e.g., Tri-star) for the _studio_ to 
produce the edited version.  The studio owns the copyrights, so that was 
AOK.  This had two advantages for the studio:

  1. They could be sure that the edited version met _their_ quality 
standards for editing and viewing experience,
  2. They got some extra money for doing it.