I suggest reading their letter in the link – very polite, I’d say.

“By allowing critics to see films early, at different times, embargo dates level the playing field and enable reviews to run within the films’ primary release window, when audiences are most interested. As a matter of principle, the New Yorker’s breach violates a trust and undermines a system designed to help journalists do their job and serve their readers.”

In the rather intelligently titled article. “Deadline HollywoodSo What If David Denby Broke Sony/Scott Rudin’s ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Embargo? Fuck It!”  How quaint.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/12/05/143134255/honor-among-thumbs-a-dragon-tattoo-spat-and-an-imperfect-system?ft=1&f=93568166

Note that the embargo is/was until Dec. 13 for a movie opening on December 21.  It’s not a matter of keeping the review out of sight until it’s too late to be of use, it’s (on that point of view) an agreement for the benefit of all the other reviewers, so they don’t have to rush it out to get the jump on others.  But there’s even more interesting stuff at that link; there’s enough silliness to go around.

Grow up.

Companies like this bank on consumers having short memories. I don’t forget that easily.

I hate it too.

Because they where the only critics in the nation to get a special screening, Sony took the unusual step of forcing an embargo until the nation wide press screenings. As a side note it appears that the original embargo breaker has been banned from Sony press screenings.

It’s common practice, when nothing is signed, that embargoes evaporate when someone breaks one. This is because the information is public; you are, in effect, no longer sourcing the information to the embargo-imposer but to the embargo-breaker.  

When these agreements are signed, however, in a form such as an NDA, trouble always lies around the corner. You’ve agreed not to report something even if the public knows about it! You are one flapping set of lips away from having to justify the control you have ceded to the people you write about.

If someone breaks, as has happened here, then the other reporters are in the horrible position of being incapable of talking about something even though people *never* party to the agreement are free to do so.

All they’ve done by signing the agreement is ensure that if the embargo is broken, they’re the last people who can talk about it.

Now they’ve been exposed, the reporters have no choice but to collectively follow the embargo-breaker’s suit. 

If they do so collectively, Sony can’t use the threat of losing  access to early screenings to bully individual reviewers.

Besides, no matter what they do, early screenings aren’t just a privilege for reviewers. It’s an important pre-release marketing tactic. The implied threat of banning reviewers from them is a bluff.

Referring to this as bullying seems absurd to me. I know what bullying feels like, thank you very much.

All this chatter about embargoes, and how they end, is completely orthogonal.   You aren’t criticizing Sony for requesting an embargo on reviews prior to a certain date: you are criticizing them for punishing a reporter who broke the embargo.

In fact, if your point were that Sony shouldn’t have any such embargo, I would tend to agree in principle: I think that people should be able to find out whether a movie sucks before they pay to go see it.   But Sony isn’t obligated to help us to achieve that end, and it’s bizarre to suggest that they should.

The right way to solve this problem is to go to the first public showing, and immediately post your review so that people who want to see the show that weekend can be informed in a timely fashion.   That way you aren’t taking favors from Sony, and you aren’t breaking your word either.

People who aren’t willing to wait for the initial buzz on a movie then pay the price for their wish to be first.   I really don’t see a problem with this mechanism that requires fixing—this is how movie reviews work now, and you see evidence of this in the speed with which bad movies drop out of theaters and get released on DVD.

They’re acceptably cool in many ways, but they certainly like money evaporating quietly into the ether.

The question, then, is whether it is the unethical behavior that was improper, or whether it was the response to the unethical behavior that was improper.   If it were not a Hollywood studio sanctioning the unethical behavior, I think it’s unlikely that anyone would have concluded that the sanction was the problem; most, I think, would, like me, conclude that the unethical behavior was the problem, and that the sanction was proper and justified.

Next thing you know they’ll be phone hacking and obnoxious photographers following power-couple’s newborns around their pre-schools.

That being said, I find myself upset at them over this move.  They’ve already gotten rid of the ability to resell, and made it hard to share.  As far as I’M concerned, if these days all I get to do is license the right to USE software, and never get to own it, then I should be able to use it as often as I want.  If I can only use it on one machine at a time, fine, but it absolutely shouldn’t matter what machine that is.If they want people to pay more, maybe they should provide more?  Very few download games have had the value, imo, of a physical disk game I could get for the same price.  And now, we see that they care more about ‘piracy’ than value for money, even when the goods are most certainly not being pirated!