This is probably the face the user made when he realized he was being asked to pay $20 for pirating a single Friends episode that’s probably airing on a half-dozen stations this week.
A quick search on our TV menu here in the Consumerist Cave finds that there are more than 150 episodes of Friends set to air on various channels — both cable and broadcast — over the next couple of weeks. Not bad for a show that’s been off the air for over a decade and which is also streaming in its entirety on Netflix. Given this ready availability, we don’t know why one would download a pirated copy of a Friends episode, but if you do, prepare to be slapped with a bill for $20 from Warner Bros.
TorrentFreak.com reports on notices being sent from Warner Bros. through Internet service providers to users alleged to have illegally downloaded episodes of the show that made Jennifer Aniston’s hair a star.
“Although WB understands and appreciates that you are a fan of its content,” reads one notice set to a supposed pirate, “the unauthorized uploading and downloading of its copyrighted content is a serious matter.”
The notice in question calls the user out for illegally sharing the Friends episode “The One With Five Steaks And An Eggplant,” from the second season of the show which aired in Oct. 1995.
The notice includes a link to an automated settlement page where the accused pirate can make it all go away by paying $20, while also qualifying “to receive future digital content offers from WB.”
Even though you can get the DVD set of the entire second of Friends for less than $10 on Amazon (the Blu-ray is around $14), and the 22-ish minutes you’d spend watching that episode on Netflix is worth only a few cents of your monthly subscription, Warner insists that “The damage to WB from your conduct substantially exceeds $20, but in the interest of having you stop your infringement of WB content permanently, WB is prepared to make you this settlement offer.”
This seems like a reasonable settlement offer. Sure, you could buy the entire season for less, but if you pirated it, you didn’t. It’s sort of like how you could avoid paying speeding tickets by driving slightly slower. Or better yet, avoid paying parking tickets by feeding the meter. You could pay $2.00 for an hour of parking, or a $55 fine if you are caught not paying. The first option is what you are supposed to do, and the second is to discourage you from doing what you aren’t supposed to do. In any case, it’s a lot more reasonable than what the RIAA had been doing. (Are they still approaching people with settlements for thousands of dollars?)
You make a good argument — one that convinces me that the guy should have really had to pay more. To use your $2.00/hour for parking example: If a parking ticket was only $5, a lot people wouldn’t bother to put money in the meter. They would reason quite logically that not everyone who doesn’t pay is going to get a ticket, so they’d probably be money ahead by cheating and risking that $5 hit. I suspect it takes a fine of $40 or $50 (it’s $42 in my town), along with a reasonable chance of being caught, to discourage parking scofflaws. WB’s fee in this case should probably have been higher — maybe $50 or $100. On the other hand, the RIAA’s approach (their website still talks about $150,000 for each violation) is nuts.