Fox Fires Friedman, Friedman Pleads Innocent

It has been officially confirmed by all parties that Robert Friedman has been fired by NewsCorp for posting an article about viewing the leaked work print of X-Men Origens: Wolverine.

While it stikes me as a major over-reaction from NewsCorps, since there is little question that the leak itself is news, what I found more intriguing was a correction request that Friedman has released:

I did not download anything. I found Wolverine on the internet by accident on Wednesday night. I was looking for something else—info on another movie, which had a link to this site. I simply pressed “play” and when I realized it really was Wolverine, I skipped watching Lost and watched this instead. Afterwards I discovered that the Times had written about it earlier that evening. I guess what I did was called streaming. But there was no downloading. I am fervently anti-piracy, have written extensively about this, and spent too much money at amazon’s mp3 site. Please let’s clear up this misconception.

What a load of crap.

First of all, I am skeptical that a stream of Wolverine was available so quickly, but the internet is cool like that so I will give Roger the benefit of the doubt here.  The bigger fallacy is that someone by simply streaming the film and not actually downloading it to his personal computer that he is not guilty of some sort of piracy.

As far as I understand it, this is a pretty fine line to draw.  For instance, there is no such distinction made in child pornography cases.  If Roger Friedman had simply gone to a site (by accident, of course) and clicked on a link (totally by accident of course) and he then saw child pornography he would be open to criminal prosecution.

Friedman, ostensibly a movie professional, had to know that the footage he was watching was not an authorized release and so claiming he did nothing wrong by watching it just rings false.

Instead of trying to claim what a defender of copyright he is, Friedman would be better off making an argument for how absurd and impossible to follow the current laws are for copyright.

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