“I’m going to piss a lot of people off,” Ari Emanuel told the AllThingsD conference tonight. And in a room of tech execs, the WME boss kept his word. “Where Google decides to play in this piracy issue, plus Verizon, AT&T, is very crucial for our industry and I’m concerned they’re going to wait it out,” Emanuel to told AllThingsD co-founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in front of a packed house. “If they don’t stop the stealing of content I think it is going to be a problem.” Emanuel, who promised not to swear or hit anyone, was very clear to name names and point out where in the “pipes” he sees the theft of his clients’ and Hollywood’s content coming from. “We need Northern California to figure out how to keep our intellectual property from being stolen. If Google was in China, and their stuff was being stolen, they would leave China, right?” Emanuel didn’t miss the opportunity to chastise Silicon Valley and their industry for allowing the stealing of content and the scuttling of antipiracy legislation. “Ask Google, ask Verizon why they haven’t come to the table?”
Asked in the Q&A what exactly he’d like Google to do, Emanuel said “I’d like them to start filtering when people are stealing our product internationally, that’s their responsibility.” In a heated exchange with one questioner, Emanuel made his point emphatically, telling the guy to sit down to wide applause. “Stealing is a bad thing,” bellowed Emanuel to the crowd’s sudden approval.
Inevitably the question of WME’s recent deal to bring Silver Lake Partners onboard with a 31% non-controlling minority interest in the company came up. Emanuel said that WME has “been increasingly interested in tech.” Sitting on the same stage as Apple CEO Tim Cook the day before, Emanuel added, that “we’ve been buying and investing in startups. When we merged a couple years ago, we kind of shifted the whole focus in terms of where things were going, and we’ve spent a lot of time up in Silicon Valley, trying to figure it out.” All that effort “got Silver Lake interested” and that’s what started them and WME talking.
Piracy and content might have been the heart of Emanuel’s sometimes pugilistic appearance at AllThingsD, but it wasn’t they weren’t the only topics of discussion. Mossberg and Swisher drew Emanuel out of on what he thought was going right in the entertainment industry. When you think about the entertainment business, you can’t just think about movies,” the WME co-CEO cautioned the audience, “we’re in the music business with concerts, the author business, we have 230 shows on TV.” And TV got Emanuel going. “The television businesses’ economics are better than its ever been,” Emanuel said. “I think this is the best business in the world and I’m betting heavily on it.” Asked by Mossberg and Swisher if he was strictly traditional in his approach, Emanuel responded he knew the audiences are there because of the success of YouTube and other new platforms. “I’m OK with them watching it on Nexflix as long as we figure out the economics and I believe premium content is more valuable than two dogs on a couch.”
The 10th annual AllThingsD conference runs through tomorrow.
Related: Aaron Sorkin Says Writing About Steve Jobs Like Writing About Beatles: AllThingsD
Deadline's Dominic Patten - tip him here.


Ari is right but clueless how to close the deal. Ari – pick the battles you can win. Lead an international campaign to enforce and convict those who are stealing our content and re-selling it on the open market. Stop the multinational companies from making a profit w/o paying for it.
Go after these guys and the Googles of the world will applaud. Everyone else plays the role of an evangelist.
I am aware that are various studies that come to different conclusions as to the effects of “piracy” on the film and tv industry. Nevertheless, I don’t think that it’s necessarily “right” to dl a movie from bit torrent, even though almost all of us have at least once. Still, I think the bigger issue for the film business is that many people, such as me, who do not care about 3D, are waiting till a movie is released on DVD or Blu Ray instead of seeing a movie in a theater.
This is so funny. As if Google owned or controlled the Internet. Does Ari even know that there are Internet tools and protocols outside of web browsing that Google doesn’t even touch? Or is he just bloviating to keep his clients happy.
Hey Ari, what to cut down on the theft of intellectual property? Tell your clients to come up with some new ideas, instead of constantly stealing from other movies, books, and TV shows.
Have you been to YouTube lately? It’s a Google product, and rife with piracy.
Good luck going extinct, Ari.
It’s always strange when you hear these discussions and nobody brings up the Elephants standing in the middle of the room.
from eBay, at least three different times i’ve tried to buy “Highway to Hell.” All three were forgeries.
from Amazon.com, bought “For Your Eyes Only” received an obvious forgery with artwork from a color laser printer.
Drove a truck for five years and discovered that at the “Outlet Stores” Shopping centers there is only one dock for the entire shopping center and it is optimized for containerized freight. That means that all the DVDs and CDs in the DVD store came from China, not California. Not a small operation.
Real Piracy, Real Crooks, absolutely nothing being done about it, instead everybody here is trying to argue that the kids are the problem.
I’ve been told that in Asia most people buy their movies from street vendors that sell them six to the DVD. Saves a lot of money to get six movies all on one disk. Too bad you can’t blame that on the kids.
I have come to the opinion that any movie that does not have “Special Features” is a forgery (except for Anchor Bay because their stuff is so old that they can’t afford to pay the actors to record new commentary.)
And as of this minute I am going to attempt to get Amazon to list “Special Features,” but I’ll bet that they won’t. They started to, but discontinued the practice. I suspect it is because the missing Special Features would prove that many of the discs sold used are forgeries.
I’m probably not in your demographic in any case.
I live 70 miles from the nearest Movie Theater.
I live in the bottom of a valley with mountains on all side about 70 miles from the nearest television station. I get no Television.
I had a 12 foot satellite dish that worked until Jane Fonda’s ex-husband illegally began bouncing signals off satellites and eventually extorting stations by telling them his cable stations wouldn’t carry their signals unless they “scrambled” their signals (which was illegal at that time, but somehow Ted Turner got away with it.) So I don’t have satellite TV.
I, instead, buy DVDs, many used. I suspect I have several thousand. I refuse to believe that a digital download without “Special Features” and compressed down to where six of them would fit on a disc is “good enough.”
I suspect that I’m not your guy. But maybe if it was legal for me to create a DVD from a download that has all the “Special Features,” I might do that. There’s some torrents claiming to be complete out on The Pirate Bay, but by the time they get there there are $2.00 copies of the movies out on Amazon.com. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. If the movies were available to buy when everybody is excited about the movies, I’d pay more. But because the DVD isn’t there close to the time the movie is in the theater, the price goes way down. But the studios know all that stuff.
As a content producer I am continuously having to monitor file lockers, forums and pirate sites to maintain the value of our content with takedown requests. It is not fair use to use another’s intellectual property as you see fit. In fact I am at the point now, if you steal our stuff I will eventually knock on your front door (I am positively great at sleuthing) and make “fair use” of your head.
Try me – we eastern Europeans know all to well what life is like when others dictate ones right to self determination. Private property rights are essential to individual liberty. These individual rights are natural, inherent, inalienable and exist independently of government. I create it, I own it.