Leaked Fall Series are absolutely totally probably not intentional, maybe.

Fall’s coming.  Leaves changing, kids back in school (and sharing your subway commute with you to work every day), weather gets a little brisk…good thing there’s plenty of new stuff on TV to keep you indoors. You may or may not have already seen the promos…I remember sitting through a 2:30 commercial for Life on Mars just for me to say at the end, “meh, the British version was better.”  

Obviously, the hype machine isn’t working too well on me, and to be honest, with marketing including the line “He knows how to solve crime, but what he doesn’t know is why he’s here” and a 2-dimensional score consisting of a 1970s low-budget-porn-quality cover of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Right Place, Wrong Time” (I guess Bowie was in space), why should I bother keeping it on my radar until October?

Apparently ABC is catching on to this way of thinking, as are myriad other TV studios, though they’ll never admit it.

With just a month to go before the annual onslaught of new shows from all the major networks, it seems nearly every major hot new show has made its way onto the internet and is downloadable via peer-to-peer trafficking software such as Bit Torrent.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Eric Garland, CEO of digital media tracking site BigChampagne, tells us what we already know: “The number of leaked pilots and shows is always increasing. Pilots started leaking as early as May and June, which is much earlier than usual and it will continue.”

Besides Life on Mars, leaked shows include TNT’s Leverage, Fox’s Do Not Disturb and J. J. Abrams’ Fringe, and HBO’s Vampire show True Blood.

This is becoming more than a security issue; it’s a full-on trend, and it makes me stop and wonder: How naive to the studios really think we are?

Can they really expect us to believe that these leaks aren’t intentional?

The phenomenon has a name: “PreAir Season”. If it’s not copyrighted yet, then I want it. © rebelscum via rgbFilter, 2008.

Torent trackers torrent freak discuss the PreAir phenomenon on their site in great detail, but the short & skinny is, there’ no proof, but come ooonnnnnnnnn. Leaking material months in advance is a great way to get the hype machine running at full steam, and best of all, costs the studio absolutely $0.

But without express consent from the studio that allows downloaders to snag and view this content, technically, that content is illegal, and the studio is therefore condoning and in fact explicitly endorsing an illegal action in order to get their marketing done for free.

This is, of course, not so in Canada, where P2P file transfer is not yet illegal and holding digital media is not a crime…yet. But according to the RIAA and the DMCA, you’re committing a crime by downloading that PreAir trailer.

The only honourable thing for the studios to do is take a stand, either for or against the practice of leaking material to file sharing sites in adance of launch date. If they’re for it, then make a statement saying they’re for it and expressly “forgive” or condone anyone downloading the files. If they’re against it, then say so expressly and put the onus on the studio to keep the show off the internet.

Obviously, that won’t happen, because once the studio recognizes this action as acceptable, then legality becomes a factor, and they immediately lose that worldwide audience they so dearly want to hear feedback from for those few months leading up to launch day.

But who ever accused television studios of ever doing anything honourable, anyway.

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NOTE: We here at rgbFilter neither condone nor condemn the action of downloading files for free via P2P software.

ED Note:  Actually, we wholeheartedly condone the usage of P2P software for sharing any number of files.  Pirated material is another story.  It’s an important distinction.