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MPAA Fights Pirates with Gentle Threats
Gillious writes "Wow! It seems the MPAA has learned from the RIAA's mistakes. It seems we aren't going to get mass-lawsuits for grandmothers and 12-year-old kids. I find this quote most interesting: 'The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: 'Why do they want to steal from us?' The answer, he said, is simple: 'Because you won't sell them what they want.' The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too.'"
the cost of a DVD is several hours pay where I am. You can figure it out.
They need to come up with something like iTunes for movies that will let you buy movies, not just rent them and the file expires. And have just enough DRM to stop most people from copying. I think if the RIAA would have done this earlier in the game, they wouldn't be in the mess they are in now.
Am I the only one who was a little miffed at reading the offhand statement that it is now illegal to carry a camcorder in a movie theater? Is there any reason the movie distributors couldn't have just used their clout with the theaters to get them to crack down themselves on bootleggers? Why is a state law necessary? Seems to me policemen have much better things to do than try and help a private establishment such as a theater enforce its own house rules.
The movie industry, by comparison, estimates that it has at least 18 months before high-speed Internet access and high-capacity hard drives make grabbing a movie almost as quick and easy as grabbing a song.
Do they mean there will come a day when one can download a 700MB Linux iso in less than 5 minutes? If my math is correct that's a 2333.3 kbps download speed!
$cat
Gee, who'd'a' thunkit?? We're looking for music we can play on our pc's, our stereos, in our cars, on our little mp3 players. We're looking for movies that will play in similar devices, some more portable than others. Limiting access to a shitty little scratched up disc that only cost the companies $0.05 to make for $17 a pop is rape, plain and simple, especially when you consider there's one good song on an album and 12 other terrible songs. Sell me a song I like for $0.50 and I'm a happy camper! Let me use that song in any way I see fit (as long as I'm not trading it around like a joint at a frat party) and I'm certain the RIAA/MPAA can make a buck and keep their customers from thieving their works.
More important than being able to buy what is currently the hottest shit like LoTR, is in my opinion having access to a whole load of old and `out of print' movies, continental film, television archives, etc.
Im sure that such a thing could be implemented easily and would reflect very well on the industry from an academic and cultural point of view.
Dom
use Blunt::Instrument;
Offering free previews (perhaps in reduced quality, but watchable) and an easy option to follow up with a DVD purchase may be the way to go.
K
Maybe people wouldn't steal movies so much if cell phones, morons, etc didn't keep making noise in the theater, despite nearly 50 years of attempts to thwart their annoyance... there is nothing more annoying than paying $17 and being annoyed on a date.
stuff |
Copying is *NOT* stealing! It's "Copying". I've copied all my DVDs to computer to make it easier to watch them and keep the origial DVDs safe. Does that make me a thief? Nope. If I walked into a library or video store and stole a DVD or VHS then that is theft.
It's quite simple, you'd think they'd get it right more often.
oh and just to add on, i'll include an extract from the email universal studios productions sent to my ISP (which was forwarded to me when my ISP emailed me regarding the complaint):
"This unauthorized copying and distribution constitutes copyright infringement under applicable national laws and international treaties. Although various legal and equitable remedies may be available to Universal as a result of such infringement, Universal believes that the entire Internet community benefits when these matters are resolved cooperatively. We urge you to take immediate action to stop this infringing activity and inform us of the results of your actions. We appreciate your efforts toward this common goal"
seems pretty fair to me.
How about picking submissions that aren't so misleading?
The article reports that the MPAA sends hundreds of thousands of e-mails and letters to movie sharers, threatening to track them down and serve them with lawsuits. And that, by their own standards, has been 85% effective in scaring off the sharers.
They might not be launching high-publicity lawsuits yet, but the RIAA's actions have put the fear of God into many sharers, and the MPAA is taking advantage of this. Let the RIAA suffer the negative publicity while riding on the back of the credibility it lends to their own threats.
As for the "Because you won't sell them what they want." quote, it comes straight from some sharing-network monitoring company which, based on the information at their own website, hardly represents the views of the movie industry.
So where is the "wow" in this story?
Nice that the MPAA acknowledges the problem. Too bad that some members still don't do anything to remedy this situation. They still didn't give me what I wanted:
1. They're bigger, and with HDTV they're likely to become even bigger still. DVD players in general don't play DivX content, and full DVDs are many gb each. Of course, this reason is fading, but is still strong.
2. Errors/corrupt downloads are much more annoying. I.e. you'd likely only see the movie once or twice, while you might listen to a CD track 100 times. Checking it once takes a lot more time, relatively. Still, integrity checking is improving.
3. They're "one product". Unlike albums with single tracks, you don't get a bunch of crap you don't want thrown in.
4. Typically you have only one device where you like to play DVD movies. As for music, you'd like them on your computer, home stereo, portable player, car player etc etc. Which makes it fairly OK to have just one copy in form of the original disc.
5. They're relatively low priced. If you look at it cost-efficiently, it's smarter to download mp3s/warez/gamez and buy DVDs than the other way around.
6. You really don't mind spending one minute to put in a DVD to watch several hours of entertainment, but you do mind doing the same to listen to that 3 minute melody you suddenly *had* to hear.
Personally, the one thing I hate about DVDs is region coding. It's quite simply an abuse of copyright protection to enforce artifical market barriers and price gouging. Stuff like that is what can be their undoing, if they try to really enforce those (I think everywhere but the US multi-region players are common now).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This shouldn't be compared with the RIAA as much. Downloading mp3's and burning them to a cd gives you a product that is hardly distinguishable from the real deal. But comparing a divx movie to a DVD is like comparing a hyundai to a lexus. You can say they both get the job done but we all know that the lexus is going to do it better. Divx movies are pretty bad quality compared to a DVD. MP3's are just a few megs which can be downloaded in a minute over a reletively fast connection. It can take hours on a fast cable modem to download a movie. Storage is another consideration. If you download a movie that will fit on one cd it will look like shit. Or you can break it into two cds and you have to change it halfway through the movie. Either way, it's a hassel. The movie industry knows it does not face the same problems as the music industry because it's product can't be recreated as easily.
Now I have some movies on my hard drive and I only have them on there until I decide I want to cough up the $20 for a DVD. I have thousands of MP3s and I can hardly distinguish them from the cds I have sitting in a pile to my right. But in both cases, they're not shared on the internet.
Downloading movies off kazaa is certainly no fun. I'd be lucky if I can find the movie I want and if I set it up when I go to sleep and I'll have it in the morning. I've had good luck with bit torrent for downloading large files (not movies) so I'll have to try that later.
Anyway, computers have become high tech stereos, but they're not high tech televisions and they won't be for at least a few more years. The movie industry has a few years to figure out how to "handle" the internet.
I went to an art museum this summer, and they banned camcorders and digital cameras, but allowed regular film cameras. Why? All the paintings there were over 80 years old and the artists are dead, so none of it was copyrighted anymore. And you can use a scanner to digitize an analog picture.
What do they expect to gain by doing that?
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Everybody reading the article needs to read between the lines pretty carefully on this one. While the MPAA is seemingly offering the olive branch with one hand, look at the following quotes from the article:
Along with the warning letters, the movie industry is paying for consumer education programs and technology research, and pushing for laws and regulations that executives hope will protect their wares.
The most important thing for Hollywood to do now, Johnson said, is to move faster to develop the kinds of licensing agreements and protective technology
The path to a successful service has to involve the kind of technology that protects copyright unobtrusively,
Hand in hand with developing legal digital services, he recommends the kind of tough security that is built into satellite television equipment,
This whole article reeks of DRM. They never mention it by name, but this is exactly what they have in mind, and some of the stuff highlighted above suggests DRM in hardware.
So I don't see where the MPAA has learned a damn thing, other than the blatant tactics of the RIAA don't work so they're going to try more underhanded ones. The agenda of the MPAA has NOT changed one iota.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
...or rather, an attorney from a major music company (hint: one of the top 3). It's a larger group of friends, but of course, I'm the software engineer, and he/she's one of the IP lawyers who works "The List," so someone inevitably brings up the "who will win" question.
I hate that question. But it's true, I have an answer - my best guess is that ultimately the peer to peer networks will win, if the fight continues as it has, unless the Internet itself is radically changed (although "destroyed" would perhaps be a better word). And I've said as much many times. Keep in mind that I am not entirely unconcerned about the prospect of the Internet being radically changed to stop piracy, either.
Meanwhile, the attorney has remained confident that between "public education," lawsuits, and "governmental relations," they will prevail within a few years. So who is right?
I know they have very sharp techincal people. But those people are not the ones making decisions. This attorney has heard of Freenet, but doesn't actually understand how it works.
So I try my best to explain the evolution of the "threat" of being able to share information economically.
"You had your chance at the outset. Napster was centralized. They were the easiest to use. They were a ripe target - American, and sitting out in plain sight. You could have cut a deal with them, started slipping DRM and payment systems into the mix slowly enough and carefully enough that users wouldn't reject them en masse.
"But this is like fighting disease, in that when you come down hard on top of it, it might seem like you win, but you never quite kill it all. And what's left is what evolved.
"No one would have bothered with Fasttrack or Gnutella if Napster had lived - they are inferior from a user's point of view. But they are more decentralized. Their foreign. They're encrypted (at least, Fasttrack is). And they saw what you did to the first guy. So they're sitting in a bunker in Vanuatu.
"But of course, they're not completely beyond reach. Fasttrack is the best one, and it's commercial. So maybe, if you're very, very good, you can nab them. And then, you can always infiltrate their network, and go after their users. And that's exactly what you're doing. Trying to wipe it out again.
"Say you succeed and Fasttrack and Gnutella become a thing of the past - you shut down the networks, poison them, scare the users away by getting nastier and nastier with them. Maybe you finally lock someone in jail for sharing a song. What comes next? What's left over?
"Freenet, and its various workalikes, are almost entirely decentralized, and what's more, they not only use "real" encryption, but the developers understand traffic pattern analysis. They can build a model that will make it near impossible for you to even determine who got what with certainty.
"Oh, right now there's only a few of these guys. They toil in obscurity, their user interface is a joke, their network is slow... but when you kill Fasttrack, guess what is first in line for the attention and love of hundreds of millions of internet users, and hundreds of thousands of engineers, who until then had no reason to bother? The next step in our evolution.
"And it's a nasty one. You'll have made the 'disease' so resistant that the FBI won't be able to track child pornographers who use it, and the CIA won't be able to track terrorists who use it. And you guys, the RIAA, forget it. You'll be history. You'll go down in the history books for finally achieving copyright anarchy. Or rather, copyright voluntarism, which is what will really happen.
"Ian Clarke has pointed out that the choice between communication safe from anyone's observation and control is more important than the RIAA, the MPAA, and even the theoretical benefit of law enforcement's dream of eavesdropping on everything, everywhere.
"He is right. For saying this, many will damn me. But why is that a controvertial statement: that I should
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
How do you download something at all without some sort of Internet connection:)?
Alphanos
Or perhaps he's a college-educated, 60-hour-a-week working South American in a country like Uruguay, Peru or Argentina. My own (Peruvian) relatives earn about $800 a month doing work that would get paid about 10 times that in the US (lawyers, doctors, financial professionals). For paying for housing and food and even internet access, that's all well and good, because the costs are relative. For things like consumer electronics, DVD's and CD's, videogames and the like, those are even more expensive in real terms than in the US, and are essentially true luxury items. If I were them, I would be almost exclusively watching movies I downloaded online. Those goods were priced for US markets.
My brother in law always gets me BestBuy gift cards for the holidays. So since my bd is around this time of year to I normally end up with a couple of them. While shopping around I was going though the DVD section and saw all sorts of great deals. DVDs for ~15 USD and many even closer to ~11 USD. While some did get a little more costly they were all very reasonable for what they gave. A movie, which was produced at a rather high cost on average, some bonus material that is always fun to have, and lastly the knowladge that even though the silly DSS is there the quality of both the sound and picture will be quite good.
Then I was looking around in the music area and the prices were at least +5 to +10 dollars on average higher than the DVDs! And some of the albums that they were selling for clost to 20 USD were quite old. Many had to actually come on 2 CDs due to the size. Also, while for the majority of the CDs I saw there was no real protection on them, the quality could be kind of iffy depending on the metholigy they used to make it. (AAD, ADD, DDD. Thanks for not telling us anymore!)
So, after a bit of thought I game up with a few generalizations. I can buy a DVD with more content, the knowladge that this movie at some point had a lot of cash sunk into it (At least as much as it would take to record an album.), more than likely some extra stuff, and on average a better price. The only bad part is the DSS and the region but whatever. They are pretty trival to overcome if you care that much.
On the other hand I can buy a CD that is old tech, for typically more money, of questionable quality sometimes, but with no real protection to speak of.
Now maybe each respective orgnization can do a survay of what is right and wrong about each diffrent model and figure out how exist without continueally pissing people off but of the two I choose the lesser evil, the MPAA, as being able to survive. The RIAA is wayyyyy to far behind in the game to even come close to pulling their heads out of the sand.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Fearless, you have summed things up very well.
For the last couple of decades a culture has been nurtured which is founded on the idea that those with money will win over those who don't. And it can be argued today that those with the most money are also the ones that make the rules (like the DMCA, like the stupid camcorder ban).
What the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk have been assuming is that their considerable wealth will still allow them to bully anyone who doesn't follow their rules.
If they were battling some monolithic entity - say a company churning out thousands of bootleg copies of LOTR each month - they might be right. They could sue them and shut them down.
The problem is that they instead are battling hundreds of thousands of tiny operators in dozens of countries. They are battling hundreds of clever programmers who don't really care about the money, preferring instead to be one more nail in the coffin of the multinationals.
As Napster begat Gnutella begat Freenet, we can reasonably expect a fast, easy to use and totally secure P2P network to evolve very soon. And if that is defeated, we can expect a successor.
What could have been a simple marketing challenge has evolved into a near guerilla war.
What the music companies have not understood is that it is very, very hard to defeat a guerilla force, especially one that has widespread popular support.
Of course the ultimate absurdity is that they could have stopped this dead in its tracks. Maybe three in five MP3s that I have downloaded were of decent quality, or complete, or even the song they were titled.
A buck a tune is still too much to pay for a file that comes hindered with all the current DRM restrictions. If I could buy an un-crippled copy of a tune for 25 or 50 cents I would never waste my time messing with Kazaa or any other P2P client.
Three Squirrels
I don't mind previews. I actually like watching movie trailer at the theater. I enjoy seeing what new movies are coming out. I however do not enjoy paying 10$ to watch the same commercials I regularly see for free on TV.
On my dvd's I can skip commercials, on tv I can skip commercial, on tivo I can skip commercials, at the movie I am forced to endure these advertisements. On downloaded copies I get no trailers or commercials, however I have a reduced quality movie for free.
How about they add some commercials and let me watch for free? How about they lower the cost to 4$ and leave the commercials? Better yet, free soda and popcorn..well soda and popcorn is how the actual theater makes money. How about instead of trying to prevent something make the actual experience worth it again.
Karma's over rated. Speak your mind.
And this is one of the big issues region encoding was *supposed* to address. If it worked, your relatives could buy DVDs for 1/10th the US price, as the studio still makes a profit at that level. Region encoding would prevent people from importing cheap copies to the US, and everyone's happy. Sort of, anyway.
Well, sort of. The intent was to segment the market so that the studios could sell at multiple pricepoints, because they wouldn't otherwise sell to the third world at all. This isn't the whole reason, else USA, Europe, and Japan would be one region. The additional thing they can do is segment release dates, so they sell the DVD here while showing the movie there, then gouge the Japanese for $50 to buy it.
The problem is that, should you have a DVD that the owner only wishes to sell in one region, then you have to get a second or a third player, rather than just paying for the disc. Thankfully, most DVD players in the civilised world are region switchable, so all you need to worry about is PAL-NTSC conversion.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
If there are no logs the RIAA can subpoena, there are no logs the police can use. You can't have that both ways, either you are anonymous, or not. Black and white.
The second thing is that online, all is 0s and 1s. You can not separate between protected speech, libel, slander or kiddie porn until after a program has interpreted those data. Black or white.
The core issue is that pretty much everything you do online is not anonymous today, in the form of various logs. It is only anonymous because there are legal protections providing checks and balances, lifting anonymity with warrants as the court sees fit *after the fact*.
That is the final black & white, and the RIAA doesn't see it coming. The moment that changes, that what you do is anonymous to begin with, there can be no "checks and balances". It ends up with only two scenarios:
White: True anonymity is allowed. Since you can't tell in advance what a message contains, everything from protected speech to mp3s and kiddie porn flows freely through the anonymous network. The only way you can not contribute to it is to not take part at all.
It's basicly anarchy because noone can control anyone else's actions, or control any specific piece of information, like a copyrighted work. Nor libel, slander, racism, nazism, anti-semittism, terrorism (yes, Al-Quaida could put up a damn homepage and not get shut down).
Black: There is no anonymity, no privacy. Everything is automatically monitored, controlled and logged to ensure that anonymity can be revoked, making 1984 look pale by comparison. Freenet, mixmasters, probably encryption itself is outlawed except for "trusted" programs with backdoors, less they would cloud the all-seeing Big Brother.
Which would of course be ready to lift any anonymity whenever, for whomever it sees fit, without anyone knowing about it. After all, it's already sitting on the information. No need to subpoena it from anywhere. Total power.
Pick the lesser evil. Usable anonymous networks are coming, it's simply a matter of time. RIAA may speed up the process, increase the user base, but it would none the less happen. At which point, we will have to make the choice. There is no third option to freeze time. I think many will actually look back on the time when the Internet was fairly civilized and call it the "good, old days".
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Off of usenet or another machine on my ISP, less than 30 minutes. Less time, in fact, than most people spent downloading an album during the Napster years. And we all know how unsuccessful that was, because people only want "instant gratification" :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
How much of this has to do with the MPAA "learning" from the RIAA's mistakes...
And how much has to do with the fact that a federal appeals court just ruled in the last few days that it is illegal for the RIAA to subpoena ISPs for customer information, thereby putting a quick end to any RIAA-styled tactics the MPAA might have employed?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.