Henry Jenkins takes a deeper look for the MIT Technology Review into the implications of viewers’ “contracts” with programmers to watch advertising as part of the deal:
Treating Viewers As Criminals.

…I stumbled across the recent comments of Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of “stealing” broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that “Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots.” He conceded that there may be a historic loophole allowing us to take short breaks to go to the bathroom but otherwise, we are expected to be at our post, doing our duties, watching every commercial, and presumably, though he never said it, buying every product.

Kellner’s intemperate rhetoric is, alas, characteristic of the ways that the media industry increasingly thinks about, talks about, and addresses its consumers in the post-Napster era. Napster may