VirginMega, a business unit of Virgin France and one the main forces behind France’s recent attempt to ban proprietary DRM formats, has adopted an interesting position on piracy. A 500,000-euro (about $628,200) deal had been struck by cellular service providers France Telecom and Orange with Warner Music France for one week’s exclusive rights to offer a new Madonna single released last October (“Hung Up”) for download onto mobile phones or from their website. Virgin France was shut out of the deal so what did they do?
They became pirates! As soon as the single was available Virgin France downloaded it, reputedly cracked the DRM, repackaged the track, and made it available for sale on their Web site. Talk about having balls. According to a BBC News article: “Virgin France said it had broken the exclusive agreement in the interest of consumers.” That is perhaps the worst self-serving defense since “I was only following orders.” The issue was put before an industrial court in France which found VirginMega guilty of piracy and fined them 600,000 euros (about $753,840) with both cellular providers getting 250,000 each and Warner getting 100,000 euros. While Warner was apparently happy (“Warner welcomed the decision, saying it had succeeded in protecting its rights and those of its artists.”) you have to wonder how much VirginMega made from the escapade — I suspect more than enough to cover the fine and if you consider the PR value, they made out like bandits. “Ah, but … ” you might be starting to say “Wouldn’t the public frown on such duplicitous business behavior?” I suspect not as according to the BBC VirginMega put some serious spin on their piracy: “Virgin France said it had broken the exclusive agreement in the interest of consumers [and that the] judgement ‘confirmed the need to do everything to help build a balanced market for legal downloads’.” You can’t make this stuff up! Apparently the “problem” of these exclusive distribution deals has enraged several retailers including HMV which recently pulled all music products by Alanis Morisette from their shelves in a fit of pique over a deal the singer signed with the Starbucks coffeehouse chain for six week’s exclusivity to an album release. As reported in a June 14th article on CBC Arts: HMV justified the move as being “consistent with the views of the majority of our customers” while Sunrise Records, a Canadian retail chain that also de-shelved Morisette, declared the deal “a betrayal.” Now while we can see that this is a case of HMV and Sunrise flexing their commercial muscles (albeit with a little dissembling and undue emotionality) VirginMega France has taken their response to being shut out of a deal to a whole new level. They have justified illegal actions as being selfless acts of disobedience in the interests of others. What crap. The fine should have been orders of magnitude greater! Will we be seeing more of this kind of wanton disregard for the law as the big media companies and their channels compete for the consumer market? I’ll bet what we won’t see is consumers giving a damn — as long as they can get their music and ring tones cheap, they’ll be happy.
