Since the boom in the Internet, the dawn of bloggers and everyone having the opportunity to be a ‘famous’ – that line of professionalism and integrity has really, for lack of a better term (and forgive my French) gone down the shitter.

Everyone wants to be the one with the scoop; they want to be Internet famous. The one to be the first with the break, to get the most hits on their blog; which, like back in the day, was the writer who wanted to be the first to press with the big story. Fast forward a few decades, the timing on this now is down to milliseconds.

So people’s judgments, in my opinion, have become a bit skewed and a bit bias towards what will get them their 15 minutes versus what is right.

In the entertainment industry, the majority of people who work in it will have to sign indemnity forms, confidentiality clauses if they’re not already woven within the confines of their existing contracts. It’s even more tied down the closer you are to certain pieces of production. I’ve had to do this working in PR far removed from direct production because I was coming into contact with scripting pages, marketing communication materials and general details.

If I decided to ‘leak’ anything I knew or had seen out, even through ulterior means or other channels that weren’t directly via me, I would not only be fired, but I would be opening myself up to liabilities like you can’t even fathom, including lawsuits and kissing whatever was left of my career goodbye.

There are particular reasons why production companies, networks, and the lot do not want things released early. Things are still in the creative process. Meaning they’re still being created and creative, they’re still being tweaked, changed, and created. These are ever evolving processes. And as much as we would all love to have things at every single step of the way, there are legitimate reasons as to why we cannot.

In addition, when things do get leaked, we have no real context to if or even where they will fall because, as I said before, things are still in a creative process. Things get added and subtracted in the blink of an eye. No one other than the people directly within that process have the right to really and truly know about, despite the wisps and crumbs that make it through the cracks. That, however, is a whole other story.

So the writers, producers, publicists, marketers, senior vice presidents, they all have every single right to be angered when their intellectual property is stolen out from under then and given to the masses without their consent or in their own planned timeframe. It’s basically breaking contracts and in turn breaking laws.

After everything that has gone down in the last year to 18 months within the industry with major leaks, extras not adhering to confidentiality clauses and background information getting stolen from people within the company who didn’t have rights to it in the first place, anyone with touch points in that world knows what is at stake.

It’s ridiculously sad that people don’t understand what these leaks really and truly cost, that it’s just more than “I need to know everything as it happens because I WANT to so give it to me any way I can have it.”