Companies We Hate - Warner Brothers

Given You tube’s one million hits a day isn’t it the Perfect tool, for film companies to see what demand is out there for particular classic movies and what should be released? As for movies on release, they have the perfect opportunity to advertise “trailers” to a 1million a day audience at no cost! If you just insisted Youtube users posted a link to an online shop with the clip and that it wasn’t more than a certain length you could have the biggest free advertising site in the world. Most of the film companies have not caught onto the potential of youtube like sites and at best just ignore them hoping it will all go away.

Warner Bros however have decided to go in all guns blazing and get any fragment of their copyrighted material removed. Messages are appearing all over these sites with “removed at the request of Warner Bros for copyright infringement” Well that's great PR for them isn’t it, Goliath like corporations crushing David like Youtube users.

Instead of seeing the potential they have unleashed massive internet based hatred for their heavy handed approach and alienated a large section of internet savvy buyers, exactly the people they want to buy their new film download services from!

It seems they haven’t learned from their partners at Warner’s Music who have insisted on suing anyone and everyone for copyright infringement including, in a recent case, the family of a man who had just died. The resulting internet and news backlash of this PR fiasco forced them, in this case, to back down.

What Warner’s and other of their ilk refuse to see is the huge potential rather than threat in new technology they refuse to release their vast back catalogues on DVD and in so doing are missing out on the sort of boom experienced by the record companies in the 80’s as vast numbers of consumers swapped vinyl for CDs.

Instead they are holding huge chunks of our cinematic history to ransom, locked in vaults and inaccessible to everyone and anyone who tries to make them available will feel the force of Warner’s mighty legal team. For a business they are acting in a very un-businesslike way, its simple supply and demand if they won’t satisfy demand then others will fill the void with pirated copies sold on ebay and clips on Youtube.

The Warner Bros stink site

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