Woo-Hoo for Hulu?

Have you ever missed one of your favorite shows on television due to work or because you just plain forgot? Now there is a Web site called Hulu that was started by NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp) and ABC Inc. (The Walt Disney Company) to enable people to watch television and movies online.
Hulu offers commercial-supported streaming video (in Flash Video format) of TV shows and movies from many networks and studios and their videos are currently offered only to users in the United States (Wikipedia). Hulu is using a geo-filtering mechanism that restricts access to its content to viewers only in a certain geographic location – the U.S (Brightcove). Hulu buys the rights to hundreds of shows and movies by selling ads to accompany the videos. It doesn’t have to buy the rights to some of the shows and movies, though, because they own most of them. There are a few networks who do not allow Hulu to share their videos with viewers, however. For example, one of my favorite shows Numb3rs airs on CBS on Friday nights. Most of the time I am either busy or I forget that it comes on then so I sit down at my computer to search Hulu and watch the recent episodes. Hulu doesn’t actually play the show though; it redirects you to either the CBS or TNT websites to watch episodes and clips from the show. Other shows that I like, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for example, are only viewable on the USA Network Web site and even then I am lucky to find an entire recent episode to watch. Going back to the ads that Hulu sells to show as short commercials with the streaming videos, the ones I tend to see a lot are for Disney World, State Farm Insurance, and Sprint. These ads are a great way for companies to get viewed because they average about 30 seconds long as opposed to the regular commercial breaks during regularly aired television where people switch channels or get up to use the restroom or get something to eat or drink. Hulu also allows you to pause the show to do whatever you need to whenever you need to.
According to the Hulu Terms website:

You may not either directly or through the use of any device, software, internet site, web based service or other means remove, alter, bypass, avoid, interfere with, or circumvent any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices marked on the Content or any digital rights management mechanism, device, or other content protection or access control measure associated with the Content including geo-filtering mechanisms. You may not either directly or through the use of any device, software, internet site, web-based service or other means copy, download, stream capture, reproduce, duplicate, archive, distribute, upload, publish, modify, translate, broadcast, perform, display, sell, transmit or retransmit the Content unless expressly permitted by Hulu in writing.

I feel like this ties in to what Lessig talks about in his book Free Culture. One of the major recurring things I found in the chapter on “Property,” was his discussions on Jack Valenti (president of the MPAA) and Congress and the Constitution versus “creative property.” The Hulu Web site forbids you to copy in any way any of their content and Valenti agrees with that idea. Valenti thought that “Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation.” (Lessig 117) But Lessig disagrees:

While “creative property” is certainly “property” in a nerdy and precise sense that lawyers are trained to understand, it has never been the case, nor should it be, that “creative property owners” have been “accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners.” Indeed, if creative property owners were given the same rights as all other property owners, that would effect a radical, and radically undesirable, change in our tradition. (Lessig 118)

Lessig then goes on to say that his main point in the following few pages are to convince the reader that, “historically, Valenti’s claim is absolutely wrong.” I don’t fully agree or disagree with either of them. I can see both points and it makes me think back to a conversation we touched on in class and watched about in Rip! A Remix Manifesto. That topic being what Walt Disney did to his cartoons. First of all, he stole the idea from someone else and created an empire, but, he got involved with copyrights and laws and made it so that no one could do what he did to others. That is beyond unfair to the rest of us and brings up two more points that Lessig makes; that the past limits the creativity of the future and that we are less free today in how we use and create culture than ever before. No one is allowed to copy anything by the Disney Corporation without being slapped with a gigantic lawsuit. If anything even resembles anything Disney you could probably still get sued.
So how is Hulu able to show their copyrighted images? Simple: it mostly shows anything already owned by the founding companies, that way there is no doubt about ownership. As for people potentially stealing videos or images from the Hulu Web site, my bet is that if Hulu finds out (which they will if they have anything to do with The Walt Disney Company) they will be hit with a pricey lawsuit.