IP: Skipping Commercials is a Business Problem, Not Theft.

[David Farber <dfarber@earthlink.net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: "Ray Everett-Church" <ray@everett.org>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 13:43:59 
To: <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: FW: Skipping Commercials is a Business Problem, Not Theft.

For IP, forwarded with permission. An interesting perspective on the
whole "skipping commercials is theft" argument from that executive at
Turner.

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Rathbun [mailto:mdr@HONet.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 12:26 PM
Subject: Skipping Commercials is a Business Problem, Not Theft.


In the world of commercial broadcasting, there is one central
transaction, the one in which money actually changes hands and value
must be delivered.  

The fundamental transaction in commercial broadcasting is the sale of an
audience to an advertiser.  The broadcaster and the advertiser are the
only parties to the exchange.

If the audience fails to materialize, then it is not the audience that
has defaulted, it is the broadcaster.  It is the responsibility of the
advertiser to exercise diligence (as any purchaser should) that value
will be received in exchange for value delivered.  If the advertiser
pays for an audience of 200,000 and later can determine that although
280,000 pairs of eyes watched the program, only 50,000 pairs of eyes
actually saw the commercial message[s], then both advertiser and
broadcaster have a business problem.  

How they choose to remedy that problem will have much to do with their
ultimate fate in the market place.  Short of taking such steps as
decrypting the broadcast signal or tampering with the physical
infrastructure, nothing the audience does or fails to do has any moral
or legal significance.

mdr (who has worked in commercial broadcasting)

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