Hi all,

Since my about-face on the "watch party" portion of our member hangout, I've gotten some feedback I'd like to address. Thanks to Kanal, Nora, and Sven for bringing various points to our attention.

To avoid any confusion, the official position is this: Official Brotherhood events should not include screen-sharing content from streaming services on to Discord or other "watch party" apps. This includes cases where the host can legally access the content, like the host using their Disney+ subscription to stream movies for other Brotherhood members.

Edit: Based on DMs and discussions in the comments, I've updated the policy to add "or other watch party apps". I've gotten a few suggestions about alternatives to Discord for watch party apps. I appreciate that you're going to the trouble of finding alternatives. The issue isn't with Discord specifically, though. The thing that makes watch parties break copyright law is taking content from a streaming service and sharing it to people who don't subscribe to that streaming service, whether it's through Discord or another app.

Location, Location, Location

The primary question that came up after my news post was, "What about non-US members hosting events?"

There are several reasons I decided to cancel the "watch" portion of the event rather than have it hosted by a non-US-based member. The first is that no matter who's hosting the stream, Discord itself is US-based. If someone reports the watch party, Discord will take it down so they aren't liable to be sued by Disney or whichever studio made the movie. Plus, Discord's EULA says that users agree not to do "anything illegal" via the platform, and I doubt they'll see "it's not illegal where I live" as a good enough reason not to ban people who break US copyright law.

#BrotherhoodDidNothingWrong

The second reason is that it's the Emissary Staff's job to raise our public profile and make us look good to prospective members. (Yes, we are the Brotherhood's version of Death Star PR. Thanks again to Wally for that idea.) Openly advertising official events that are illegal in the country where the club is based is not a good way to do that, especially if we're as successful at raising our public profile as I hope we are. "We're popular enough that Disney will notice if we have watch parties" would be a great problem to have, but it is still a problem, and I'd rather not go down that road if we can avoid it.

A Possible Alternative

Sven informed me that Amazon Prime and Twitch apparently have some kind of arrangement where Amazon Prime members can stream titles from that service for Twitch watch parties. I plan to look into this further, and if that's a feasible option for future Emissary events, you might see some form of watch party return.

Update: Going by Brim's comment, the Amazon/Twitch streams are limited to Amazon Prime subscribers. (Disney has a similar feature for Disney+ subs.) The whole point of watch parties was to make them accessible to all Brotherhood members, so that unfortunately doesn't help us.

What Now?

First of all, our hangout on the 20th is still happening! It just won't be a watch party like we intended.

If you'd like to host a social event for your unit or the Brotherhood as a whole, that's fantastic—as long as it doesn't include streaming a movie to the Brotherhood Discord server. The Brotherhood might include its fair share of space pirates, but we don't condone real-world piracy.

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you in the next report!