Sky Television a media pirate?

This month’s email newsletter from Sky Television featured an interesting “This Month’s Top Tip” at the bottom: “We are always getting queries on how to open up the back of your remote to change the batteries”. Really? That must mean there’s a design problem with the remotes.

Sky’s solution: “To make this process easier for you, our customer services team have put together this video showing you exactly how to do it.” Sky should get credit for offering an easy way for Internet-using customers to see how to change the batteries—seriously, it’s not easy or obvious how to get the thing open.

However, their “new media” video on the battery-changing technique is incredibly ironic: The background music is copyrighted. Sky Television was one of the backers of the now defunct Section 92A of the Copyright Act. Sky supported the measure because, like record companies and Hollywood movie studios, they’re convinced that they’re losing revenue to “piracy”.

As the debate raged, particularly over how fast and under what circumstances alleged pirates would lose their Internet connections, and even as Internet giant Google announced its opposition, “Sky Television said that ISPs should cut off copyright infringers sooner than… proposed.” (full quote at the bottom of the linked story)

There’s no way the music in the video is “fair use”, a defence that doesn’t actually exist under New Zealand copyright law, anyway. Sky will have a license for music they broadcast, but New Zealand doesn’t offer a license for Internet use of copyrighted music. So, in essence, Sky became a “media pirate” when they used copyrighted music for an Internet video.

Ah, sweet irony…