Talking Points Memo: Right-Wing Bloggers Launch Campaign — With MoveOn! — Against Fox News Over Debate Footage. A coalition of right-wing bloggers and MoveOn that helped force several networks to allow public use of their political debate footage last spring has just launched a similar campaign against Fox News.

Good for all of them. Fox News’ position is untenable from almost any point of reference.

Good.

My major point was that in the age of bottom-up media, controlling everything is impossible — and a lousy idea in any event.

This is an increasingly tricky question, in large part because of the increasingly controlling use of copyright law by (of course) the entertainment industry and the sports leagues. Here’s an example from the Williams law firm’s blog: “Who Owns Baseball Statistics?” — a case in which Major League Baseball is launching lawyers at people who indulge in the widespread online fantasy leagues. These are some of the most ardent fans baseball will ever have.

I’m going to offer no legal advice, because I’m not a lawyer. But I will say some of the following.

First, given the unhealthy preoccupation Americans seem to have with professional entertainment and sports, part of me would be pleased to see these industries annoy their best customers sufficiently that the customers decide to spend their money elsewhere. I don’t expect that.

Second, the journalist in me is appalled by the way the sports and entertainment folks are using copyright law — abusing it, in my view — by claiming ownership of what look to me like basic facts. I know it’s more complicated than that, but there’s something perverse about telling people that the statistics your players generate by playing the game are owned by the league.

Third, and most important, the game is basically over, if you’ll pardon the expression. The democratization of media means that journalists are being supplemented by folks who are covering events themselves. Banning digital cameras, as some have tried to do, is futile as cameras shrink (and disappear into clothing, for instance) and have higher quality in taking pictures and videos. Bloggers will ignore the restrictions pro journalists may have agreed to. And so on.

This should be interesting, anyway.

Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD “screeners”, but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.

The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. “It’s been quite a cock-up,” said one Bafta member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

What’s faulty, of course, is the region coding itself. It’s a longstanding method of market-fixing that the movie industry uses to keep prices higher in some areas than others.

The DVD cartel — and “cartel” is a precise word here — have agreed to split up the world into regions. Getting a license to sell DVD players means agreeing to put region coding in them. The DVDs themselves are typically set to one region, and are unplayable elsewhere.

At a conference a few years ago I asked someone from film industry to explain why region coding exists. He said movie prints are expensive, and therefore films are launched around the world at different times in different regions. This means, he said, that it would undermine the box office for films if the DVD from other regions was available when the actual theater release was happening elsewhere.

Okay, I said. Then why are old movies region coded? After all, I noted, they’ve long since seen their days in theaters.

The industry guy, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, hemmed and hawed and essentially offered no justification. Not that there was one. This is rigging markets, nothing less or more.

I’m a big fan of Spielberg’s movies, but I have to say I’m glad to see that this fiasco could cost him.

This topic matters because it’s an example of the entertainment industry’s overall insistence on control of digital content. This wouldn’t matter, except that new art is always derived from old art. Artists and other creators build on the work of others.

Digital “rights” management (substitute “restrictions” for “rights” and you’ve a more accurate picture) makes that difficult or impossible. It steals from creativity and innovation. Today, the movie people prevent you from quoting from their material by using such tricks. Yet quotation is at the heart of creation when it comes to art, journalism, history, scholarship and so much more.

At the moment, however, they can’t tell you what to do with the videos you create. Tomorrow, the way things are going, they’ll try to do just that.