Slashdot Mirror
The Other Side of BitTorrent
ByteWoopy wrote to mention a Wired article giving more coverage to the upside of BitTorrent. From the article: "Film and television executives no doubt wish the increasingly popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system never saw the light of day. Thousands of consumers are using the software to download hundreds of movies and hours upon hours of television programming. But one industry's threat is another's opportunity. There's an upside to allowing viewers to transfer copyright material content over BitTorrent. As noted by Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series. The relatively obscure program has spawned a global following in online forums, internet relay chat channels and fan sites."
If the 'upside' of BitTorrent is still copyright redistribution then it has hard times coming its way.
If they were to distribute Movies over BitTorrent on a pay per download basis, they could make a lot of money.
The reason a lot of people use BitTorrent is not because it is free, but because it is easy. If the industry were to give people easy access to data, more people might purchase it.
"Film and television executives no doubt wish the increasingly popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system never saw the light of day."
Instead of hate it and wish it gone, why not work towards this new technology with hopes to use it with fewer worries?
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Looks like the smartest ones have understood what "innovate or die" means. Small companies will innovate while behemoths will slowly disappear... or not?
Global warming is a cube.
I've been using BT for years to grab the latest and greatest anime from japan.. For once someone actually see's the good use for BT. Yeah I grab the TV Series.. I then later buy the dvds for the extra content.
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
Someone once kept direct downloads of the translated Naruto episodes on an MIT HTTP server. I hear that the MTRG from that server hit 300MB/s for a few hours after release.
Why don't *they* (MPAA ETC) use BT to their advantage and get on the bandwagon.
Their day of controlling content is over, no matter how harsh they make the laws.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw once that said "I'm a musician in favour of P2P". I think we need more people like this give stories. Afterall, if the ARTISTS (musicians, movie makers, whatever) come out and say they support online file sharing of this nature, then the MPAA and RIAA and such lose a lot of ground.
The quoted entrepreneur does expect you fans to buy the retail DVDs eventually. He wouldnt want those freely traded on bittorrent.
Plus Linux ISOs, Open Office, OpenCD etc etc.
The *AA and friends basically regret that *digital* had ever been invented.
Deleted
To call Joi Ito just a Japanese entrepreneur is to slight his credibility. Joi is not just an entrepreneur, but also a venture capitalist. He is also on the board of directors of ICANN and Creative Commons, among other organizations. His blog is ranked in the top 100 on technorati, although personally I have always been a bit suspicious since he funded that company also.
Come on guys, bittorrent is not limited to illegally sharing copyrighted materials for evil (which movies companies hate) or for good (which obscure anime companies love).
There is also this large world of legally sharing copyrighted content, like linux ISO or actually free radio or TV shows.
....where a fairly uncontested "proof of concept" would show that P2Ping -can- increase show viewership.... I'll bet that if you surveyed the fans that download it, they'd be interested in some form of merchandise and/or getting it via TV - certainly more than would have if the show had remained obscure.
Now when we get sued by the RIAA/MPAA, we can point them to this Slashdot thread and they will no doubt drop all of their lawsuits because Joi Ito has a larger fan base thanks to BT.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
There are legal uses for bitorrent?!?! I don't believe it. Torrents are illegal and detrimental to the global economy. All of them... no exceptions. It's the technology that is illegal, not the content. Death to bitorrent!
P.S. Glickman is a hottie! yum!
I happen to follow naruto - its incredible how this works.
The show airs in Japan on wednesday night at 7:28pm local time. Within 24 hours, a fansubbed version is released on the internet. The most recent version was released about 13 hours ago, and there are currently 15770 seeds and 13600 peers on this torrent. In 12 hours, 11.5 terabytes has been transferred, and just over 71,000 people have downloaded the episode.
I honestly wonder if there is an environment that does the same thing to bittorrent on such a scale.
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There are many 'other sides' to bit torrent, such as downloading patches, programs, and non-copyright material. The only whining we hear about bit torrent is when the **AA complain about users downloading their material, thus attacking their distribution methods. I'm sure they'd feel differently about bit torrent as a distribution tool if they embraced it. Sadly, they seem to be attacking it in the same way they attacked VHS, cds and other recording mediums.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
we poor Americans wouldn't even know about the funniest show ever made, Trailer Park Boys, if it wasn't for BitTorrent. Damn Canadians always wanting to horde the good comedy....
some websites are finding bittorrent doesn't help them justify charging people for stuff - 3dgamers.com has just started subscriptions for downloading from their 'fast' FTP servers, and presumably to make them more attractive, they are not offering bittorrent downloads for game demos.
Sure, you can make obscure copyrighted things popular, but that's the same argument everyone's used for Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, ad nauseum. It's a weak argument IMO.
The brilliance of Bittorrent is that you can use it to distribute massive things without the correlating massive bandwidth (i.e. linux distros, original video). Why not tout the fact that the cost of bringing large content to market is the real business benefit?
If you have any comments about file sharing, copyright enforcement, etc. (and who hasn't?), this may be a good place to post them.
There are 10 different themes for discussion, including "Public domain and open information: at odds with the IP system or enabled by it?" and "Enforcement of IP rights in the digital environment".
Although it doesn't explcitly say so in the invitation, I assume that Slashdot readers are welcome to take part as well. But keep it clean :-)
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
Joi Ito's opinion: "fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series." I'm really tired of seeing this sort of thinking repeated over and over as if it were to suddenly make the act of sharing copyrighted materials legal. I won't disagree that in some cases piracy can be a good thing, but that still doesn't make it any less illegal no matter what spin you put on it.
Typically, anime is only distributed via torrent when there is no american company planning to sell it. This policy is meant to help smooth frictions between american publishers and file sharers. It's hard to argue that money is lost when americans download episodes of an anime that may never even be shown anywhere but Japan, and if no money is lost then a lawsuit is rather pointless.
The day that Naruto got licensed for US distribution, the fanbase seemed to go completely crazy. No one wanted to stop watching. Several groups decided to take their effort "underground" (by which I mean not listed on popular anime tracker sites, only from IRC and obscure group webpages).
If anything, bittorrent is good for series like Naruto. Distribution companies get a free, zero-effort focus group for nearly every anime that comes out. By watching anime tracker stats, it's easy to see which series are a crazy success and which are bombs. This is also much more reliable than watching screening attendance at conventions (which tend to vary wildly by time and location).
It just goes to show that just because you can excercise your copyrights, it doesn't always mean you should. I seriously doubt an anime like Gantz (or even Midori No Hibi, although I think people would argue with me about that) would have ever seen american distribution without a lot of fan support from subbers and the thousands of people who download unreleased anime.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
You need to take the logic one step further.
1) Series is not available outside of Japan.
2) Internet and fansubbing make series available outside of Japan.
3) Fansubs build series' popularity.
4) Publishers see demand and release series worldwide, seeing huge amounts of sale from fans they never would have had before.
5) Profit.
This works out extremely well for the developer, who doesn't need to spend money advertising, and gets a large amount of revenue they wouldn't have seen before.
On the flipside, maybe this is another reason the RIAA/MPAA are afraid of P2P and the internet in general - it allows content from other parts of the world (that they do not necessarily control) to come over here and become popular.
What we had long known becomes news once it's reported by Wired. Yes, many, many indie filmmakers got enormous amounts of word-of-mouth through torrent, particularly documentarians. Wanna be famous fast? Make a half-decent homemade documentary about a hot topic featuring a bunch of talking heads and put it on torrent, and you're likely to have your hour in which you're in more demand than Michael Moore!
What the RIAA and MPAA are most afraid of is that there is now a free distribution mechanism for artists. they don't need someone to label and distribute their art, they can just push up on a bit torrent. They can by-pass the leeches that only exist to take more from the talented people producing great work. They also can't control what we listen to and what we watch. they make their money by pumping out the same crap month after month and taking a small percentage from the artists.
If they lose control of the mechanism for distributing art, then they can kiss their racket goodbye.
No, not that survival show.
If Bittorrent had been around for 40 years instead of 4, maybe all those lost episodes of Dr. Who that vanished when someone threw them away would be recoverable off of someone's hard drive.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
So no we don't assume that quality content will be made just to put on BitTorrent, but was can already safely say that all quality content will end up there, whether it's legal or not. Smart content producers will try to tap into this, it's an enourmous audience after all. I expect we'll see more of the same from the MPAA though, instead of trying to adapt to the new technology they'll just continue to sue everyone instead. What a waste of money.
Kedora lets you subscribe to a number of shows (including MS's Channel 9) and you're alerted by RSS whenever a new show comes out. You then click the link in the RSS and it downloads the show via bittorrent. If somebody could create a totally integrated solution with an iTunes style frontend (I'm thining in the playlists sidebar have all the subscribed shows) and then release good shows on it in decent quality without DRM then I would actually pay good money for a subscription to this service in the same was as people subscribe to cable and sattelite TV.
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And that's it. There is simple answer to all that - of coarse, I don't protect copyright infrightement - BUT there is simple rule and it sounds like that - people who CAN and WANT to pay for your product (movie, music, media, game, etc.), they WILL. Those who can't, will stick with 'piracy'.
It is simple as that.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Considering how much the big conglomerates (TV and Movies) spend to secure your attention, a show capturing everyone's attention through somehting like BitTorrent scares the bejeebers ought of them. It means that they can't just slap something together and, "since its the only thing on..." expect to keep an audience. It means that in order to be successful they are going to have to take risks and provide a high level of quality in what they do. I think the pirating card they keep playing is more mcguffin (sp?) than anything. What they really want to avoid is having to be creative, innovative, and responsible to their audience.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
There are so many artists and companies who complain about reduced sales due to Bittorrent and other file sharing strategies. How many of them lose money? Probably none.
In fact, many of them double their profit simply because songs, games, software, etc. that would never have become popular get the equivalent to media attention which so many of these artists and companies desire, and they don't have to pay a red cent for this automatic advertising.
Did Episode III lose money due to Bittorrent? I don't think so. Did Microsoft lost money due to sharing copies of XP? They may not have received money for those copies, but their lock-in strategy has never had such an ally.
The darkside of bittorrent is also in the news. Worlds biggest bittorrent tracker did a nice publicity stunt (the front page said it was busted) and has really nice clean new look and comes in many languages. Check it out http://thepiratebay.org/
For example, I could create a skecth comedy show with a strong focus on dry humor, where I only produce 4-5 episodes a year. No network would pick this up (not enough content, not a big enough audience, language is too filthy, etc..). The other old choice was to serve the episodes from a web server. Though, when thousands d/l my show, it is me, the conent producer who pays. If its popularity increases, I pay even more. I could press DVDs, but for every one I can't sell, I'm stuck with the bill (again, I'm dealing with a limited audience that isn't going to take a $5 chance on something they've never seen).
BitTorrent, (esp trackerless) allows anyone with content to share it with the world for the cost of an internet connection. I care about that far more than getting a free copy of Monster In Law.
I thought the "other" side was the warez side, and "this" side was the legitimate-use side.
That makes me sad.
Bittorrent just lets average people publish large files to big audiences.
The big media people are really saying that they don't want people to be able to do that. If bittorrent is bad, then letting average people publish to large audiences is bad.
I can understand why the media companies are saying that. Piracy is a big problem for them, and they have business models that depend at least in part on being able to control distribution.
But I think we have to stand firm on the idea that letting average people publish things to large audiences is a good thing.
(I know in their skewed logic x always = y and z > $1e9, but I don't buy it.)
How often have you seen some person out there saying, I saved $$$'s this year by downloading instead of buying records/movies/games/whatever? I wouldn't believe them if I did because if true, they should be in jail instead of on TV.
I mean, the RIAA claims losses from songs you can't even buy any more since they lump every MP3 download into their lost sales numbers.
I may be alone in believing that the record companies and movie companies have yet to lose any money to filesharing since the items would not have been bought otherwise, but there's at least one of me here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Everybody knows that the "piracy" thing that the RIAA/MPAA talk about is total fiction, since a downloaded album or film does not represent a lost sale almost ever. If anything, it's free advertising for music or films that would otherwise never have attracted one's attention, so they gain from it rather than lose.
This makes the whole issue of sides pretty irrelevant. One side is fact (reduced cost of legal downloads through P2P), and the other alleged "side" is pure fiction.
I'm not sure what universe you live in, but the vast majority of those pirating materials on the Internet aren't doing so because of the lack of a well-thought-out legal distribution model.
The reason is that these people believe/expect that everything on the Internet is free.
These are many of the same people that believe people are born with the right to pirate their copy of Windows because Microsoft has tons of money.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
(Testimony to the House of Representatives, 1982)
"Heyyyy.... howzabout we get our viewers to defer the bandwith bills for downloading episodes? Sounds like a middleman's wet dreams to me, get your customer to pay your distribution expenses. Now if they could only work out the "get paid" part."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Dear God, you call Naruto an /upside/? WTF is wrong with you? Naruto is a travesty to the world of anime, it reeks just like Gundam (Gaydamn) and DBZ. There are actually decent animes around, don't be fooled by the stupid grade-school shit that is Naruto. Try watching something worthwhile like Serial Experiments Lain, Wolf's Rain, or Chobits. I mean seriously, just because something is popular (and most of all with freaky teenage girls who have livejournals) doesn't mean it is an upside to anything. Bittorrent is a great distribution method, and is a great way to find hard-to-get anime, music, and other types of media. None the less, I would rather it wasn't associated on Slashdot with something as silly as Naruto... come on, people.
So a "video search engine" which displayed low-rez videos with low-bit-rate audio might be permissible. That would actually be useful for sites that sell DVDs of old and foreign movies.
6) Sue the people infringing copyright.
This works out extremely well for the developer, who doesn't need to spend money advertising, and gets a large amount of revenue they wouldn't have seen before.
If it works out extremely well for the copyright holder, then they should GIVE PERMISSION for copying. Otherwise it's illegal copyright infringement, even if they turn a blind eye temporarily.
I'm sick of BitTorrent constantly having copyright infringement allegations. What about the SXSW festival? They distributed gigs of music legally , and they simply wouldn't have been able to do it without BitTorrent. But how much publicity do uses like that get compared with illegal copyright infringement?
So the "upside" (legit trading) is the "other" side?
The the "downside" (illegal trading) is the original side?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Have a customized password-based BT client which will connect to your subscription-based BT tracker.
Why didn't I think about this?
You know, I naively had the idea when I read the title of the article in Wired that it might be about distributing Linux with BitTorrent, or something else legal. I should have known better. Wired is a sellout... any tech magazine with articles for vodka and ads for Parade magazine (in Wired magazine--advertising for their competitors?! whatever...) with the caption "Ever seen a magazine decode the digital world?" is a tech magazine that has lost its way.
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The point is, given the choice between paying for something and getting it for free, most people would get it for free. This includes people who were going to buy it. So, I don't think lost potential sales is a myth. The numbers *AA put up are a myth because they just count the number of times something was downloaded. They never subtract the number of people who, given the choice of buying what they downloaded and not having it all, simply would have done without it.
Again there is a push to attack the P2P application. We hear this more than anything.
So when do we start hearing more about companies moving their attacks to the source of the problem? The movies don't spontaneously appear in P2P search queues. Someone had to take a movie and convert it to a share-able format, and stuff it up on the P2P networks.
If you ask me, that should be the major focus of the industry. BT has legal uses. Either way, all the companies are doing by attacking BT (and any other P2P app) is spraying the flames, not the fire. It's a pointless agenda.
BT is an excellent distribution model for open source software and operating systems.
It's too bad that those materials are in the minority of what materials the technology is really used to obtain.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
*Of course* it's about growing the fanbase! The same held true for Napster and Kazaa, years ago... people got exposed to and became fans of all kinds of bands/music they would never have discovered if it hadn't been a relatively quick, free download.
With BitTorrent, the same thing is happening for TV shows-- legally, like the example mentioned in the article and the new Battlestar Galactica, and illegally-- the only thing that has changed since the Napster days is the file sizes involved.
The best example I can think of on the illegal side is ABC's "Lost"-- you can't watch the episodes out of sequence, but the show's positive buzz got a lot of new people interested weeks into the storyline. Granted, ABC ran nearly every episode a second time within 4-6 weeks of its original airing (and is rerunning the whole season again, in order, starting last night)-- but this is the 21st century, and people want to watch what they want, when they want. All our lives, we've been conditioned to desire instant gratification, and now we're unwilling to do things by the networks' schedules. Why should anyone wait a month and a half to watch a rerun of a show when they can download a gorgeous HD version less than 24 hours after it originally airs?
You'd think that in the post-Napster world, Big Media would have learned a lesson or two about embracing the new technologies to give us what we want. It amazes me how a record company can take a talentless whore like Britney Spears and turn her into a superstar, and FOX can take an asinine show like American Idol and turn it into a gold mine, but these companies somehow can't figure out HOW TO GIVE THEIR CUSTOMERS WHAT THEIR CUSTOMERS PLAINLY WANT-- and will take by themselves when it's not given to them.
For an example of a business model that embraces the concept of giving away free product as advertising, see http://www.baen.com/library/
And isn't the latest Star Wars movie both the most pirated and the biggest box office in history?
The meaning of your Life is up to you. Mean well. -- Me, 9/11/2001
That's true.
However, society's opinion can change, sometimes overnight. What was illegal yesterday may be completely legal tomorrow if the majority demands it.
There is no Universal Moral Code stating that creating your own original work by fansubbing a broadcast and distributing it to people unable to receive it otherwise is, or will always be, illegal. As a result, I always use those terms with caution.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Context , muthafukka, do they understand that in "What"?!!!
Sigh, when are people going to get it? Even more enlightened articles like this one totally miss the point:
Bittorrent or any other data transfer program or protocol is totally agnostic, it's just data damn it! It's not for pirated movies, it's not for music concert recordings, it's not for pr0n, it's just for data, billions of 1s and 0s. Whatever it happens to be used for predominantly has virtually NOTHING to do with the morals of the developer or the legality of the software.
One of my hobbies is producing videos for friends & family, reasonably good stuff from a nice DV camera/mic/light setup and whipped together with Premier. Especially stuff I do for the online motorsports community, it can be hundreds of megs of video that gets downloaded hundreds of times, and Bittorrent saves our ass bigtime when the stampeding hordes descend on our server for the latest release.
What about those who CAN but don't WANT to?
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Your point is empty, since the whole issue here is that the law has been perverted by vested interests and is out of step with reality.
Blind obediance to arbitrary laws as if they came from heaven or were laws of nature is underwhelming. Try to overcome your inferiority complex and see beyond them. People are currently exploiting your gullibility, and you're defending them instead of noticing the lashes on your back.
Attacking bittorrent for piracy is like attacking the highway system for drug running.
The behemoths will buy the small companies and patent their innovations in name of progress...
What people forget is that fansubbed anime has been going on for a looong time now. It used to be on 4th or 5th generation VHS tapes that were so crappy that you couldn't read the subs. The ONLY reason that this is being discussed is because of the ease bit torrent creates. If you wanted this stuff before, you had to find a fansub distributor, who was usually a one person team who did the timing, QC, translation, etc and wait for him to translate it. Then the fansubber would open distribution or even worse, open up trading for other anime he did not have (which was a catch 22 because they owned it all already). Then you had to pay MONEY for the subs on VHS. Digital subs are free and they are fairly easy to get. That's the whole reason why it has take off. This is more of a commentary of our "we won't pay for anything we can get on computer" culture than it is about anime companies.
This is a kind of advertising that directly benefits shows that some people will find worthwhile.
For the crappy stuff, Bittorrent is very harmful, since it illustrates just how crappy the stuff is before you actually buy.
So, Battlestar Galactica (the new one) profitted greatly, but The Hulk (more precisely the studio's potential profits) was greatly harmed.
So, the problem with bittorrent (again, from the studio's point of view) is that it interferes with their ability to profit from viewer's ignorance. The potential loss is greater than the potential reward because the greater percentage of their product IS crap.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
Yes, but does the producer of the classical music CD own the copyright to the performance if the song was written by a composer who died hundreds of years ago? Granted, there are newer classical composers, but for the most part the IP restrictions have passed, correct?
Just because BT distribution expands the audience for content doesn't make it legal or right.
Distributing closed-source software packages based on GPL software expands the audience for the GPL software, but it still violates the license.
Your comment is absolutely correct. Profit and piracy have always been side issues, a diversionary tactict. The real issue is one of controlling content *creation* and distribution. What the RIAA/MPAA really want is to make sure that independent content producers HAVE to use their services to be able to publish. They are the middlemen, and they want to stay that way. Allowing artists to publish directly to consumers is their worst nightmare, regardless if there is an effective payment system or copy controls.
Think about all the DRM stuff. Even the technologically flawed controls in DVDs should make this clear. They don't do a darn thing about stopping piracy. But they DO inhibit the independent creation of content (or are the first step in such a plan). Because the technology must be licensed, the keys must be issued, and it's not opened up to anybody except their small set of cartel members.
Now it just so happens that their best bet is to use the whole "piracy is stealing" approach as the most likely to cause sympathy with legislators. So once they get mandated technological controls in place in all hardware devices, then it's relatively easy for them to start using those same mechanisms to start locking out content creators...not just those pirate consumers.
Lexmark abusing the DMCA as a way to prevent other manufacturers from producing products had nothing to do with actual piracy or IP "stealing". But that was just a preview of what the RIAA/MPAA ultimately want to be able to do themselves...to be able to lock out all other producers. This is what a cartel is all about; only they're paying off the legislative system to make their cartel not only legal, but also mandated by force of law!
"fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent.."
My buddy who helps me maintain our gaming servers used to grab these episodes and then create english subtitles for them and then destribute them using bitorrent and our gaming server as a master seed.
It was always kind of a side project for him as he was a big fan of the series (anime soap opera basically) and wanted to share it with other friends, I believe he even had a dedicated IRC channel for the distributions (to notify his friends when new episodes had been released) but I never would have guessed this would have taken off as it has...
I was just talking today with a VP from a very large network hardware company and we were discussing all the embedded advertising they do, showcasing their products in movies and television series. This being driven mostly by the acknowledgement that the "TiVo" crowd skips commercials anyway.
It seems to me that as soon as movies and television shows become (even more) "draped" over a framework of advertising the incentive to have as many people as possible see the content is aligned with the consumer's desire for free content that they have full control of.
A system that allows this mass distribution with accounting to calculate the exposure given to the sponsoring products will win in the end.
I can't say I look forward to seeing all commercial entertainment feeding the materialistic consumer machine and I have grave reservations about how this impacts "infotainment" shows that are (mostly) fact based today. But the notion that we will get what we asked for is very compelling to me.
The cartidges weren't cheap, either.
So we used a few unique ways to help make an informed purchase:
- Rent the game from a video store.
- Borrow your friend's cartridge.
- Read game reviews in your trusted game magazine.
There was no "downloading" of these games possible. And certainly no burning ISOs to discs to "try" a game.We had to buy the game (or at least incur the expense of renting it).
People today are using BT to download games for their modern consoles and PCs. Instead of relying on game reviews and rentals, they're making their own digital duplicates and then deciding if it's worth their money.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
You either make an informed decision or gamble. Either way, you pay for the game.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
You mus be kidding! They bent down and kissed the solid gold streets to zillion$ that it paved for them. For almost 2 decades they milked and bilked their customers who went out and bought everything again and even after the manufacturing cost of the CD plummeted to a point less than vinyl records (mid-80's, IIRC) still changed a 50% premium on CD's. Then to put the final gouging boot in, over a period of about 2 years, they completely wiped out vinyl record production, so they could squeeze the few remaining holdouts.
What they regret as the day that the digital tools, once their sole dominion, got into the hands of consumers who hit back at years and years of gouging and price-fixing with a vengeance.
Every media attacts Bit Torrent for being the reason for the distribution og movies, music etc., and claming that if it wasn't for Bit Torrent these things wouldn't be copied. Why not blame xvid, mpeg4, mp3, wmv, ogg??
I know that sci-fi released the pilot episode (or was it the miniseries, I don't remember) online for free, but I wish other networks would wake up and let people buy season passes to certain shows. If they did that, I would cancel my cable in a minute (which is of course, the reason why they won't do it).
As it is, the two main shows I download are Dr. Who and Call For Help, neither of which are available in the US. If they were on my cable, I would watch them, but since they aren't this is the only way I can watch them. It may be illegal, but I hardly think that downloading something I couldn't even buy if I wanted to is morally wrong.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
So imagine if thiefs stole Honda cars and shipped them to US. So would Wired be like 'Whoa,look at that, larger audience, since these Hondas not available over here in US'
And would slashdot be like, see I told you giving away free stuff is good.
The problem here is something else, patents and copyrights cannot be enforced. So the best thing for artist and software developers is to invest in companies that do their utmost to hide their intellectual property from others, like obscuring code and making it hard to copy. I mean there has to be bread on the table, but you can't be copyrighting the XML document format, the Bible, Slice toasts, IPOD design, the OK button, and the Koran can we now?
If the studios move toward digital content rather than film for their theaters, they will want a high speed method for distribution of that content.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Just for a twist of fun, Id like to point out that the guys running the naruto fansub group are the same people that run the GNAA :-)
Remember during the dotcom boom the record companies' shares where talked on the grounds that they were originators of content who would benefit from new distribution channels? it looks auite amusing now but at the time it was very hard to persuade investors otherwise.
That said I do not think they can stop the change, unless legislators are even more stupid/venal than I thought. What they can do is slow it down to give themselves a few more years of profits.
Are there any website hosting legal anime bittorrents? I'm looking for romantic comedy instead of DragonBallZ clones. :P
So where are all these great up and coming artists bypassing the cartel and making their works available for free?
All of the legal free music downloads I have heard are shit. If they were any good they could get a recording contract and actually earn money.
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
ive downloaded my share of movies, TV and games off of bittorent. But i try to be halfways legit about it. when i DL a game, it is usualyl because there is no demo, or i thought the demo was too limited, and if i like the game, i will buy it or delete it shortly thereafter (and let it seed a while, ofcourse ;) )
but a perfect example of how somone will profit from my using bittorent to DL TV shows is this:
a couple weeks ago, a friend of mine told me to check out the show Lost. i Dled the first 2 episodes, and was istantly hooked. ive downloaded and watched about 1-2 episodes a day since then, and am almsot done with the season... and come Sept 3, i believe, when the DVD is reelased, i will be the first in line to pay the $60 or so for it!
im not saying that this fully justifies "stealing" the show... its more like walking into a store and stealign a 25 cent piece of candy (pretend it exists), then comign back the next day, and buying $20 worth of goods, to make up for it... but its a whole lot better than just stealing the candy, eh?
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
In the final episode of this anime the creators actually thanked the fansubbing groups and also thanked everyone that downloaded. I was surprised by this and laughed, along with everyone else.
Yes, there are some, but I guess they are very minority, at least, according to my observations. So in fact they really don't make impact so big.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The reason is that these people believe/expect that everything on the Internet is free.
Not so.
People believe/expect that everything should have a sensible price which takes into account the huge advantages of digital replication and online distribution. When it's a reasonable price in that context, they pay.
When the prices do *NOT* drop to reflect the new technology, that's when people do the natural thing and exploit the new forms of distribution for themselves.
You can lay 100% of the blame on the distributors for trying to maintain their old prices despite the new digital technology changing all the rules.
For TV shows, it isn't just a matter of sales, but eyeballs. You don't think that Cartoon Network is concerned that fewer people will watch Naruto this year? It is free to watch, but they still make some money on advertising and that advertising revenue is determined mainly by the number of people watching.
/. favorite, Battlestar Galactica. Yes, they should have simultaneous broadcasts everywhere, but for whatever reasons, they didn't and it hurt a bit if you believe what people say.
Or let's look at a
While I believe that many pirates won't pay for content no matter what, lost potential sales aren't exactly a myth.
Hey, fuckers. Guess what? If it's hard for me to buy a Volkswagen Beetle (the old kind, not the shitty new ones), and I steal it, am I a thief? Most people would say I am. Just because your book, movie or television program isn't as concrete as an automobile doesn't mean you have any more right to steal it. Yes, that's right. You stole it. You didn't download it, information is free, you're no better than someone trying to steal a candy bar out of the 7-11. I used to think I was entitled to everything I wanted, but then I turned four. You're no better than the small children throwing tantrums over not getting a new toy. Now all of you are throwing fits over whether someone might be so audacious to protect their property. I hope the copyright protection people fuck you all up the ass. If I ever saw someone downloading a bootleg movie, I'd treat thgem exactly the same as if you had shoved a DVD in your coat and were trying to walk out of store.
Oh, and to all of you foreigners complaining about it being hard to find American television shows, might I direct you to www.ebay.com? Additionally, regionless DVD players aren't too damn hard to find.
But isn't it a right under constitution for giant corporations to be able to own individual artists and sacrifise the originality of their work in return for gross profit which the artist will see so little off?
*So where are all these great up and coming artists bypassing the cartel and making their works available for free?*
garageband.com
None of the music there is up to the high quality of Brittney Spears or Janet Jackson, but with a little browsing, you'd be shocked what you could find.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
You can lay 100% of the blame on the distributors for trying to maintain their old prices despite the new digital technology changing all the rules./i.
Okay, what is your price?
I'd be willing to write, produce, shoot, and distribute a feature-length movie if I could recover the costs and make a small profit. My costs are:
1. Cast
2. Crew
3. Equipment
4. More Equipment
5. Advertising
6. Legal fees (to protect *me* from lawsuits)
7. Administrative salaries
Based on your interpretation of business, I am just greedy if I want to charge $30 for a copy of the movie I make.
So how do I recover the few million dollars of invested cash and my time by giving it away for free through bittorrent?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
to quote:
Also another interesting quote:
Also see: Fansubbing,
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
No, I don't agree with you. I guess myth is also:
+ everyone has DC++, eDonkey, BitTorrent, etc. installed on their computers (don't care that most people simply don't have time for searching for warez);
For example, I have almost NONE (ok, BitTorrent for Linux distro CDs) of these programs. And I am serious computer geek for 11 years.
+ everyone will try to check out dark corners of Internet to find 'free stuff';
I think most people stick with working formulas to find music - record shops, Amazon, iTunes - because they got most advertising.
There are people who will stick with products which will they find in shops - they will NOT compare even prices and will try to get somewhere cheaper. Because they simply don't care about saving some few dollars.
And there are people who will always try to get things for free. For God's sake, let them install all this stuff and get some spam virus or something. They simply won't change and won't start pay regulary about music, movies, etc.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
People expect stuff to be free, advertisers will leverage this by releasing content over P2P, advertisers already sponsor shows, product place in shows and buy advertising between shows.
Mark Pesce was on about this recently and had some math to show it was cheaper to pay for a show and distro it via P2P than buy advertising - I am bit skeptical as many shows fail to take off in a Broadcast environment, but given the huge size of the Long Tail of Interniches...
He reckoned regionality would be a problem, well ok for department stores, but not for web stores, well maybe web stores that only ship to one zone so they overcharge chumps in the UK - but for online gambling, a show about sexy winners, winning and having a good time.
Then there is subscription models like the BBC and WBAI new york.
Web CI* and P2P is good because it takes cash from all those dodgy fake DVD selling pirates who are tied to organised crime.
Prohibition of stuff people want, whether absolute or to create scarcity to drive up prices, funds organised crime.
*Copyright Infringement/ Copying Information
Big companies can levarage bittorrent technology to save bandwidth costs for them. There have been lot of Content Distribution Networks which offer that service.
Example is the game company that hired Bram to develop a distribution system based on BT.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
It's true much anime licensing and popularity in America - indeed the whole American Anime industry - stems from the free availability of fansubs and the BitTorrent swarms that help distribute them, but Naruto was not one of them. Naruto was clearly destined for a long-running anime series and inevitable licensing in America since about volume 2 of the manga, whether or not the fansubs were ever made. It is, dare I say it, the next Dragonball Z. In fact it'll be on Toonami in the fall. If only one anime series were to make it to American TV, this would be probably be it. The only thing holding up its licensing was probably the high price they were charging for it!
On top of that, the specific fansubbers of Naruto rely more on conventional IRC fileservers than BitTorrent than many other groups. So BitTorrent was not so important there either.
In fact, of all the anime which has made it to TV (aka the Adult Swim Action and Toonami line-ups), I can't think of any which were particularly "obscure". Pretty much all of them were major series from major studios in Japan too, and destined for the American Market. Fansubs and BT have certainly helped propel series onto DVD, but not TV yet.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The problem is now the following:
2 23244&tid=155&tid=126&tid=103
If you fansub in the US or distrib in the US, and the company who owns the rights for the series in Japan, America or anyone else who America respects copyright wise...
You can get 3 years Jailtime...
Even if it was bought AFTER you did this
Even if they can't show damages
Even if you stopped on first notice.
Thank the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/1
Seriously...Fansubbing as a practice is going to fall HARD in the next few years when one over zelous fan pisses off the wrong company thinking "fair use" or "they didn't have it when I started" will cover his ass. Once one fan falls, several more will follow suit as US corps try to "impress" their Japanese cohorts as being tough.
Think I'm kidding? Already one japanese studio is sending C&D letters to US fansubbers...and several fansubbers are directly ignoring them...
This house of cards is set to be destoryed soon.
(and its not necessarily something I think will be good for the parties involved...But both have been known to be stupid without thinking -_- )
It's not so much "myth" as "really hard to make quantitative statements about", because it's so difficult to research or get a look at the big picture. Neither extreme - every pirate would have paid, or no pirate would have paid - is true; the truth is somewhere in the middle but there's no way to find it so the argument continues.
Honnestly, I think this concept does not only apply to Animes but also to music, other TV shows and movies -- even software.
OK, it all starts with an illegal act: someone shares a file, thus violating someone's IP. However, what happens then is a wonderful marketing scheme that, somehow, no industry seems to grasp yet. People get to know new stuff in vast quantities everyday -- things that would probably never have been popular enough, or promoted enough to be known.This attracts new *potential* costumers to what you do/sell/produce, without paying for any advertising.
E.g.: You discovered a new, obscure death metal band from Sweden. No, you did not pay for the album you downloaded. But you shared the files with you buddies who in turn shared with their friends, etc. Some will buy the album, some will buy t-shirts, some will buy other albums from the band, and many will be at the show when they come to your town (and maybe they would never have come if it wasn't for the new fans they got from the net). Then, there are people who will download the music, and do nothing. And I think my exemple may be applied to any other media, even when it's mainstream. You discover things that you wouldn't have paid for, and then you become a potential costumer.
My point is: the industry seems to see things the wrong way. The "bad" file sharers are collateral damage. They are NOT the problem. The problem is the industry itself who never took time to profit from the worldwide, free advertisement they get. Music labels count file sharers as lost sales... instead of seeing it as a promotion for the next band's show, or audience for the ads in a TV show, or PR people who will promote their products for free. These file sharers wouldn't even have heard about the band without the net -- where did the labels lose any penny?...
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
NASA's WorldWind has a bittorrent download. It's about 180MB. I downloaded it the other day and sat there and watched it for 30 seconds. It didn't transfer any data. I go tired of watching and went to the restroom (~5 minutes). When I came back and checked on it, it was done already.
I figured it took maybe 3 minutes to download (i'm on a pretty fast connection).
Just one more success story.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Just because it's the next DragonBall doesn't mean it's bad.
Heck, for its time, Dragonball wasn't that bad. Dragonball only became bad once it was forced to continue on past the the series end that the creator envisioned (after the Frieza saga).
Naruto is still appearing in Jump and the original creator still has a story to tell. It is not the Eternal Series just yet. It's just long.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
While it's nice to have fansubs a few days after the episode is aired in Japan, it would be even better if the people doing the fansubs took the time to learn basic English. Or at the very least, find an English IRC channel and have someone look over the script. Or better yet, don't rasterize the subtitles into the video stream. Save it as a seperate subtitle (normally in ASCII) file so that people can edit it. While this would add an extra file, it would greatly improve the quality of fansubs. If they used Ogg [whatever the video container is called] or some other similar system, then each release could have multiple fansubs for various languages or by various groups in addition to the pure captured video.
Another poster mentioned getting hooked on "Lost".
It was originally put on the air for "free" to begin with.
Any TV with an antenna could get the show when it aired without paying a cent to do so.
How is this example any different than using your Tivo or VCR to record a show and watch it later?
Whether you watch a show on your VCR or computer should be irrelevent. So what if you miss the actual airing of the show? Since the show was "free" to begin with, why should it be illegal to download it?
The bottom line is that the content providers want complete and total control over every aspect of content distribution. It doesn't matter to them that the show was "free" to begin with, and that just isn't right.
Piracy definately hurts sales in a very real way, though. When I went to a CD store, my friends ask me "you're going to buy that?" and they reminde me that this CD and others are available for free download. When I went to a bookstore in Japan and checked out the cartoon section, I was shocked to discover just how much of the titles on the bookshelf were ones I've also seen listed on piracy related websites.
With P2P piracy, consumers can spend more time on freely downloadable material than spending more cash for legitimate goods. Most downloaders find the copyright law to be of little deterrence and also tend to care less about paying for non-pirated equivalents. What people who paint the RIAA against artists fail to grasp is that artists sign up with RIAA labels on their own free will.
Instead of going after people who download the shows, companies like HBO should make their shows available for download to paid subscribers. I get HBO, but I am almost never watch the TV that has HBO on it. Why don't they provide a way for me to download the shows to my own computer?
What is this downside you speak of Sir?
Naruto sucks, get over it narutards.
I think this has been covered on /. before but,
0 .html
The Deceberists released a music video via BitTorrent awhile ago. http://decemberists.com/16mw-torrent.html
It was covered in Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66969,0
Another concept that I feel hasn't gotten much attention is how P2P dissemination could cause earned customers rather than lost customers. Not just fans, mind you, but real paying customers.
Ever seen one of those QuickTime Wrapper movies? What if videos had pointers to external advertising/payment URLs that, when the video is opened, download and cache advertising or the lack thereof and play them inline the video.
Using simple stuff such as HTTP Authentication and Cookies, the media player can ask for a username and password or store a cookie, which could be used to identify a user. If a user had a premium account, the ads returned to be zero seconds in length.
This is just one example of how we can create P2P friendly media that earns revenue constantly. It's an anti-DRM, if you will.
Would some customers bypass the ads? Sure; but one would imagine that if the ads are targeted to the audience and the premium service is cheap enough, the system would work.
I predict the next 5 years for video will be what blogging has been for journalism. A new era of video production and distribution is amongst us; let us celebrate.
See http://pixelcort.com/2005/05/28/131/ for more information regarding my idea.
http://pixelcort.com/
Classical music would disappear without fierce enforcement of copyright laws. Nobody will perform classical music at all if they aren't guaranteed absolute control over future distribution of their recording. Just look at how little classical music was written or performed for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the mid-twentieth century, after the RIAA established a track record of boldly protecting the intellectual property of artists, that anybody had any incentive at all to perform classical music. But now we have a classical music renaissance thanks to the protection of the RIAA.
</sarcasm>
For American companies, the logic is a little different. A lawsuit is not pointless if no money is lost -- a lawsuit is only pointless if no money is to be gained (extorted).
" ... The relatively obscure program has spawned a global following in online forums, internet relay chat channels and fan sites. ..."
What this means is that some "Little Guy" can do is catch some interest in the marketplace, promote his stuff via bittorrent and make a living. This removes BigMedia from the equation alltogether. It scares the PeeFuck outta BigMedia. They lose control of marketing and lose leverage on the "artists" that they profess to be protecting.
JMHO, YMMV.
Maybe the MPAA/RIAA should go after FTP too. Ya know, The people that release the illegal stuff often use it to move stuff around.
Eat more bacon!
Naruto may have not been discovered by the rest of the world, remained unpopular, and eventually died off.
If only this had really happened, there would be a lot less wantabe anime "fans" right now.
This has been known since the Napster days, and gets recycled and modded up everytime it's posted in this type of discussion.
...it's popular, too. Back in high school (early '90's), those of us who liked anime were ridiculed by our peers. Okay, we were the "odd ducks" and someone would have found a reason to make fun of us anyway, but that's not what I'm getting at. If we wanted to watch the shows that we loved, we had no choice but to scrounge 10th-generation VHS dubs of fansubs. If you went to a movie rental or sales store, you were lucky to find a worn-out copy of Astro Boy in the kids' section, or maybe a dusty copy of Akira or Ninja Scroll stuffed in behind a Schwarzenegger movie in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi section. The only popular anime on television was the badly americanized Sailor Moon, which even a lot of otaku hated.
Now, with how easy it is to get a hold of videos on the internet, suddenly anime is popular. The casual peruser is no longer limited to one or two cult favorites and Bad American Dubs. You can download and watch stuff that sounds interesting for free, if you have any interest whatsoever. Due to a lack of multi-generation dubs, you don't even have to hit the pause button between subtitles to try and decipher what the last one was about.
Now, due to increased interest, you can find many titles in your local movie rental/sales store, and more come into stock every day. The argument of dubs vs. subs is now moot -- both versions are ususally available on the same DVD. Due to red tape, North America is always a couple of years behind the Japanese market when it comes to anime releases. This is actually is a good thing because it gives the companies a chance to see how well the show will do in NA by watching what is being downloaded and talked about online.
Suddenly, anime is popular, and the companies are making a profit on DVDs even if people originally downloade the fansubbed shows -- because people are willing to pay for a good, legitimate copy of a good product! This is the same reason that North American movie and music companies are losing money due to file swapping; they are not providing enough content that people are willing to watch/listen to more than once.
People will pay money for good content even if they've seen the content before. Hollywood movie/TV makers, pop musicians, and software programmers take note. Even if it's available for free, people will pay money for a product if they actually think it's actually worth it.
I've said it before in relation to pretty much this exact topic (Which is funny, cause i dont know jack about anime).. but piracy can be a plenty effective method of advertising.
.1% of consumers actually know how to download a torrent or queue in an IRC channel, the grassroots effectiveness of piracy from an advertising standpoint will, in many cases, far outweigh the protential fiscal harm.
Think about Photoshop.. Windows.. the list can get pretty big if you want.. tons of hugely successful market standards have become standards because of their widespread piracy. Look at bumfights.. thanks to the sensationalism of their topic, and the widespready piracy, Indecline probably made 10x as much money as they would have if no one had pirated their video.
Piracy is free advertising.. and in an era where maybe..
And, i'm not a total idiot when it comes to this matter.. i'm a filmmaker for a living, my income is (in part) directly tied to people going to Best Buy and buying my videos.
By your argument, they should be extremely concerned with piracy. Online, the pirates control the mechanism for distributing art, NOT the MPAA. Online, Apple, Napster, and others are controlling the mechanism for distributing art, NOT the RIAA. They've (the MPAA) been kissing their racket goodbye even with the increase of movie attendees. The market is certainly there. I can tell you of countless people who went out to buy the CD/DVD simply because they wanted to support the artist even though they had the bootleg.
I've been saying this since 1998. The *AAs are going after internet sharing not because they believe their BS about "protecting artists" but because they believe the internet offers a distribution channel that they don't absolutely control. It would limit their stranglehold on the world mental landscape. It's not just content from other countries but also content that doesn't fit their narrow view of what makes a "hit."
The movie industries and recording industries do still serve some purpose though. They have a massive amount of capitol to help get newer artists started. How many popular musicians do you think could have gotten started completely on their own, with no outside help? They couldn't be able to get the kind of instruments, editing, production, or equipment which may have made them popular in the first place.
.02. I hate 'em too, but playing devil's advocate is fun :D
Just my
Everything is free on the internet. There's no way around that. If you think it through, with unlimited bandwidth, with unlimited connectivity, without 1984-style police states, things will always be free on the internet.
Music/Film execs wring their hands about it is about the same as weathermen complaining that its cold in antartica.
when they realize that they can't stop people from downloading things they will try to use file sharing as marketing. this works great now for little people but when large companies try to do things like this they either are total crap because they have no idea what they are doing or they will get greedy and just screw the whole thing up similar to how people realized they could make money with web advertisements. then they started getting greedy and pop-ups/unders/arounds/ins/throughs and SPAM were developed. now you can't do anything online without being bombarded with ads. especially if you're using IE.
"Without commerical support, we would all be using a 14.4K modem dialed up to a university."
Right.
Dude.
Commercials interests had nothing to do with the internet boom that was experienced in the late 90's. I had a dial-up account with PPP in Windows 3.1 connected to a commercial ISP back in 1992.
Earlier, I dialed into The Well where we had shell accounts back in 1988.
I was already getting 56K dial-up speeds.
And there were no advertisements on the internet.
So let me be one of a long line of people telling you that you're full of crap and have no sense of perspective and have zero sense of history.
High speed internets, continuous connectivity, digital content.
There's no way to keep that content off the net. Think of it this way. When the automobile came out, the buggy manufacturers didn't *ask* for this new appliance. It simply was reality.
They could either ask for legislation to make automobile use difficult or make automobiles themselves.
Life changes. The environment changes. And you've got to adapt. New laws will hold back progress for only a little while. Its like a wave from the ocean. There is no way to resist. You can only deal with the reality of it.
"Why is our government so not on the side of consumers this time?"
For a concrete reason: fear.
Congress is being told by everybody...Alan Greenspan, Record Companies, Industry Execs, Bill Gates, etc that the future of the economy is "Intellectual Property".
So as congressperson, you've got to believe it if every expert is telling you that you need tougher and tougher IP legislation.
It doesn't help when we get the phony "Terrorists use pirated stuff to finance doing bad stuff to America" nonsense. That's the political cover these guys need to screw the common person through ridiculous copyright and patent laws.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
People steal thousands of music albums, tv shows, movies. I just can't imagine any of these people actually paying for all that media. If people were unable to pirate any media, I don't think sales would go up much at all.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
BitTorrent certainly spread Naruto into my house. With 4 teenagers, 3 of them became fanatics for a while. I picked up the Naruto 2 game cube game while in Japan and it was played to death. I also caught an episode on Japan TV. My son moved onto other titles, but they still watch Naruto when they can. As for Anime snobs and Naruto, get over it. Sure it is light entertainment, so what. It is immensely better than DBZ. It sure beats a lot of light entertainment out there. And there are some genuinely funny moments. Two side effects are that Ramen has been addded to the staple diet in our house and one of my kids is now learning Japanese.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Good! I get frustrated when I tell people that I use bittorrent to download Linux ISOs and they say "Yeah, right."
I was starting to wonder if maybe I really was the only person on the planet that really used Bittorrent to download Linux ISOs. Heck, I just grabbed FreeBSD 5.4 the other day. Got a Knoppix CD, Gentoo 2005.0, the Fedora CDs, an Ubuntu CD... all from bittorrent.
Fast, easy to use.. it'd be a shame to see the RIAA/MPAA put a big dent in it.
The artists should pressure their record labels to leave the RIAA. Then again artists are the record label's bitch so I guess that won't happen. Maybe the artists should be more entrepreneurial and open up more record labels and just deal directly with distribution companies. Maybe have non-profit or coop distro companies for a bunch of record labels, and then you'd end up cutting out the RIAA backing record labels.
Any solution that doesn't fix this problem is not a solution.
I imagine most people dl Naruto from usenet not bittorrent and I'm no exception and my verdict on Naruto is: Blah! Boring and tedious, and named Naruto doesn't seem to be the series main star. Action gets blurry to a point that you wonder what is going on. Go watch Bleach, it's much more interesting.
I've been getting episodes of One Piece for a while now. It's being shown on Saturday Mornings right now, but they've changed a lot. Much of the fighting has been changed for younger viewers (Jap. version has a lot of people being killed, American has them be "wounded") and I'm torn. I watch them on TV anyhow, but how does the Fansub ethic apply if it is licesened, but also changed enough to make the plot different?
SAILING MISHAP
You might have noticed its a pain in the ass to keep updated with all the trackers coming and going. This site has a great list of urls to trackers that they sell. http://www.paganda.com/
If you're to lazy to google they have great stuff..
IP law is ridiculously out of hand in my opinion and it makes me very sad to see most copyright holders in the world stealing from the public. Even though I do somewhat think of myself as an artist, I think the current situation (e.g. life of the creator +70 years) is insane and I do intend to voice my concerns and opinions about these things.
Please, everyone, if you feel as strongly about this as many of your rants on Slashdot make you seem to, please participate in the forum. This is a good chance to get our voices heard and hopefully make some changes...if WIPO will listen, that is...
*by "artist" I am an amateur photographer and I enjoy making electronic music. I do agree with some IP laws, in that I want my work protected (mainly from exploitation by corporations, which is why I use CC licenses), but also I am limiting myself to a 10 year copyright limit before I give my work (as crappy as it may be) back to the public domain (my earlier photos will become public domain in 2007). I wish more people thought like this.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
and because i can listen to the live music for free, it gets me interested in attending their concerts. hell, attending a live show that you love, and then downloading it on BT a few weeks later is fantastic.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
ROFL @ wannabe wapanese!
Damn, I feel sorry for your kids, have you considered putting them up for adoption? At least get them some a psychiatrist.
I'm not sure why they seem to think that bit torrent has seemly created a fansubbing scene, all it's done is made it a little easier to find.
The fansubbing scene has been going on for years, and started long before bit torrent was even first thought of. Heck, I've been in it for almost 3 years now. But, before bit torrent came around it was limited to those of us who knew, or who had the patience to learn how to use an IRC client.
But the post does make a valid point; allowing the public of a region where a show isn't licensed for distrubition to see an unofficial version of the show is excellent marketing. But it's a marketing plan that needs to be regulated; allowing it to get out of hand would ruin a companies ability to sell the series it wishes to license.
I used to work with the fansub group #Anime-Kraze, found on irc.rizon.net or www.anime-kraze.org and while I still maintain a presence, I no longer help out with creating the subtitled releases. Because we are picky about what shows we will fansub, 99% of the series we choose are eventually licensed. Unlike a lot of other groups - for those of you who aren't new to the scene you may reconize the group - #anime-Junkies was notorious for this, they would refuse to stop fansubbing or distrubting a series after the company that owns the distrubtion rights to requested them to. If the company ever requests that we stop, we would. We have about a dozen series that we'll temporarily ban a user from our channel if they are found to have it available for download.
Having helped out with so many different series, having seen some many series from other groups, there are a lot of animes I have purchased that I would never have considered even watching had it not been for the fact that I was able to view them at no charge. Heck, I've bought 5 complete series since December.
The fansubbing communty isn't about piracy, and never will be, it's about taking something we enjoy and allowing others who may not be able to understand the original language, a chance to properly experience it. Not everyone has easy access to imported anime, around here the only place you can rent it is Blockbuster and they have a VERY limited selection, so we provide them the ability to see it.
I don't deny that some people simply download so that they don't need to buy a series, but you'll find that there are far more of us who, once we find a series we love, will buy it happily. And just so you don't go thinking that those of us who sub it are the worst for not buying a series, we're actually the best for it. So many of us that fansub have huge collections of the series we and our friends sub.
that thousands of people around here keep claiming that the music and movie industries should 'get a new business model', yet precisely zero of these people ever note what exactly this mystical business model should be? It is hard to build a business model that can beat free, now isn't it. Naruto or any other anime worth a dime will do perfectly fine abroad without fan-subbing. In the meantime, the majority of those who downloaded and liked it will not purchase it, from my experience. Fortunately, this is only around 70k people, which is much smaller than the anime base. For those of you who download, ask yourself the honest question - what fraction of series that you downloaded more than one episode of did you actually purchase?
Step 1: Spawn more narutards
Step 2: Sell forehead protectors
Step 3: Profit!!!
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Hey, is your name a reference to this audio palindrome (sounds the same if you play it backwards or forwards)?
In a movie that will gross $200M, that money has to go somewhere. I'd prefer $20M go to a Denzel Washington than to a Disney Incorporated. Why? There are few (and seemingly, always fewer) companies that can finance and produce expensive films. And they are expensive even without the actors. CGI artists and teamsters don't work for free (generally).
Actors earning that $20M soon become producers - if they so choose. This means dozens more people that can readily finance big films and hundreds that can finance small films.
You wouldn't suggest that I still pay $10 a ticket and the talent gets less money.
Yes, but why should you take away my right as a creator to control how my creations are distributed?
Yes, there are some, but I guess they are very minority, at least, according to my observations.
This is a self-selection fallacy. The people who CAN afford to pay but CHOOSE not to are the ones least likely to feel proud about it. But a person who already has downloaded a show but buys the DVDs anyway is more likely to tell all her friends, almost as bragging.
Survey respondents have a well-known bias towards socially acceptable answers.
You gotta be kidding right? This just shows how little you know about the creation process of Motion pictures...it takes buckets of cash just to go into development of a pict...plus signing on talent to attach to a project to even get that ball rolling/schedules and locations to be lined up months in advance. Also 35mm film isn't cheap (unless you can beg cutts n butts of rolls from a studio buddy:) and DV is just as expensive in long run also unless your running a 'cray' with edit requirements being almost equal to manning a shuttle mission. Only now is Linux allowing us to reach ability to even edit dailies on the fly at location on DV--Ubuntu has freed me from BIG money in software (or at least the trouble of booting it plus worry)--and with a little more tweaking CinePaint, Blender, Kino, Gimp hybrid + sound apps is allowing us to say screw FinalCut...et al. These inovations plus file-sharing and parent is right. Big studeo's better be looking to their hole cards because once again it's just like Linux in general, cannabis laws, or file-sharing...it's pretty dang hard for goverment and Neocons to regulate things they don't understand in first place. Instead of jerking off public with scare bs all the time they should be doing some homework. Facism is never going to win...it can only keep delaying the inevitable. Peace, steve
It's called [b]TV[/b]. And even better. it doesn't require an Internet connection of any sorts!
Some People are using Bittorrent due to a lack of a well thought out distribution system. While it may not be the majority, a good number of people are using Bittorrent to download movies or television that is unavailable to them otherwise. As a case in point, consider foreign language movies: If you live in the US, you cannot legally purchase and play movies in Italian, French, German, Czech, Russian, Japaneese, Mandrin, ... Why is this? It is because the powers that be decided that DVD players must be region encoded. Yes we can purchase (crappy) DVD players that *can* be region unlocked, but it's questionably legal. If you wish to study a language that is not spoken in your "region," there is very little video content that you can legally view. What is the result? Illegal piracy of foreign video product. This is a direct result of an ill thought out distribution scheme.
In short, many people use Bittorrent illegally because the content desired is unavailable any other way.
mysql - gained commercial support years after is was extremely popular. The project was successful, and then commercial interest started, not the other way around.
php - Rasmus was unemployed for a long time when making php4. That didn't make php any less succesful. After the success, maybe some bussinesses might be contributing, but they didn't contribute to success.
linux - Well, I wouldn't know where to start.
blender, the 3d modeling package, ailed as a commercial entity. The community saved it, by getting together and buying the sources, and making a free project. After that, there are some commercial entities that contribute money.
The trend you are seeing is that commercial entities do give money to free software or open source projects, but usually _after_ they are succesful.
Of course, you have Eclipse, that IBM funded with a very explicit objective, and is now a great free tool for developers. But those are not the most common cases.
- Exhibiting the qualities, traits, or characteristics that identify a kind, class, group, or category: a typical suburban community.
- Of or relating to a representative specimen; characteristic or distinctive.
- Conforming to a type: a composition typical of the baroque period.
Please see definition one.There are numerous online dictionaries to help you with those SAT words you don't know.
Most anime-oriented tracker sites do not carry series like Gundam Seed Destiny and Naruto. Some of the biggest and most popular tracker sites for anime follow this policy.
Got anymore nits to pick, in true slashdot style?
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
everyone knows that scarywater and animesuki are the most popular anime torrent sites online and get a lot more traffic and show a lot more anime torrents
and many fansub groups dropped naruto when it licensed
your just mad because he schooled you
Step two, examine the top ten results. Note that scarywater and animesuki feature prominently amongst these results.
Step three, count how many of them allow Naruto to be listed.
Step three-point-five, count how many explcitly say in their policy that they do not track Naruto torrents.
Step four, fuck off.
Thank you, come again.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
The remainder of your post is not only offtopic, but it's outdated.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Correct.
I run a ranch (which seems to have little to do with what we are talking about), but the concept is the same -- I had a year where I had a hay crop ruined.
So, I went to my accountant and said "hey, my hay was ruined, can't I count that as a loss?".
He said "NO! Only hay that is sold is counted. You can't count something that MIGHT have sold."
This is exactly what the Content Providers want you to believe - that you can count something that MIGHT have been sold.
In other words, they are BS'ing us (anyone surprised?).
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
mysql - gained commercial support years after is was extremely popular. The project was successful, and then commercial interest started, not the other way around.
php - Rasmus was unemployed for a long time when making php4. That didn't make php any less succesful. After the success, maybe some bussinesses might be contributing, but they didn't contribute to success.
linux - Well, I wouldn't know where to start.
blender, the 3d modeling package, ailed as a commercial entity. The community saved it, by getting together and buying the sources, and making a free project. After that, there are some commercial entities that contribute money.
that was my point. Open source applications usually stop being developed after a certain point, mainly because the original creator lost interest or doesn't have the time to work on it anymore. I was just trying to point out that there aren't any popular/large open source projects that have no commerical support.
Why the anonymous post? It has generated an interest in another culture. What's a Wapanese?
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
or not looking at the right places?
been playing with irateradio, apparently has around 50K songs - all different styles. It feeds you things based on what you rate other songs.
This is the distribution I have so far
(rating of either get rid of, or 1 to 4 stars)
get rid of 262
1 star 72
2 star 71
3 star 26
4 star 6
so 60% not interesting at all, given you are throwing out multiple music genres you don't like that is going to be high (and higher to start with)
but if presuming you could select genres (approx the 1 star or higher songs), more like radio, then have over half worth listening to again (which is what I called 1 star songs - program called them yawn - got over half you'd listen to again.
Far from 'shit' like I might hear if I turn on the girlie pop station.
In most cases, as people have said here, getting a record contract means you will end up OWING money with no rights.
Not Free SF Reader
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver11.htm
Not Free SF Reader
that was my point. Open source applications usually stop being developed after a certain point, mainly because the original creator lost interest or doesn't have the time to work on it anymore. I was just trying to point out that there aren't any popular/large open source projects that have no commerical support.
I knew that was your point, but it still isn't true.
It's true that most important free software products do have commercial support, but they do have commeercial support, _because_ they are succesful, not the other way around, like you say it is.
It's true that one developer might lose interest in his software project, but that's when the community kicks in.
Commercial entities don't support projects in risk of dissapearance, they fund already succesful projects that are actively developed, only to have the power to help the project advance fast enoughfor them.
I knew that was your point, but it still isn't true
then show me a really popular open source project (as popular as mysql or apache) that has No commerical support. I haven't found one.
This is because projects that don't get commerical support eventually stop getting worked on.
Alright, now I'm feeling more like I am being trolled.
You are trying to establish a cause-effect correlation.
With your way of thinking, I could prove anything.
You can prove for example that without Microsoft, every major computer improvement wouldn't have become a success.
Then I could say... well, they didn't improve anything, they just took already succesful products, and either bought them out, or just used their strength to gain market share.
Then, using your line of argumentation, you could say: nonsense! name one major computer bussiness that is a success, where microsoft has nothing to do! Without microsoft intervention, no technology can be invented. Searching was invented by MSN, consoles wouldn't be powerful if it weren't because of the compatition by XBOX, the Internet wouldn't exist, and person computers wouldn't be widely used.
I hope you understand why I refuse to argue with you if you refuse to drop that kind of creative reverse logic.