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Monday, September 08, 2008

Entitlements to Entertainment and Blog Posts

Some Harry Potter fans are fuming at the decision by Warner Bros. to delay the release of the next Harry Potter film by eight months.  From the WSJ:

To a world of wand-wielding Harry Potter loyalists, the studio executive had crossed to the dark side. Within hours of Warner Bros.'s decision to postpone the release of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" to next July, hate mail began to pour into the studio. An online petition expressing fans' disgust with the decision garnered more than 45,000 signatures. The studio says it even received death threats. "I hope you choke on your own saliva," snarled one fan in an email.

Reminds me of VC readers upset when Volokh, Kerr, et al. fail to blog about a newsworthy Supreme Court decision.  Apparently, fan uprisings sometimes work:

The withering attacks over a family-friendly franchise like Potter show how the nature of fan uprisings has grown increasingly hostile. Thanks to the Web, angry fans can arm themselves with the latest information and speedily deliver profane brain dumps straight into executive email boxes. When CBS canceled its drama "Jericho" last year, fans deluged its network with vicious emails and a cavalcade of nuts -- a sly reference to a word used in the finale. As a result, CBS changed its mind and ordered up new episodes. 

Posted by Adam Kolber on September 8, 2008 at 09:45 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Interesting, it looks like these fans subscribe to the idea that there is a moral obligation to publish, which I've blogged about before:

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/01/is_there_a_mora.html

Posted by: Bruce Boyden | Sep 8, 2008 2:08:46 PM

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