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NBC Still Down On P2P But Plans To Use It Themselves
Cotton Eye Joe writes "Ars Technica has an interview with Rick Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal who is best known for saying that piracy is a more serious offence than robbery. Cotton still has some strong opinions on P2P, even though the network will be using it for distribution. 'He's convinced that the pirate problem is costing NBC Universal real revenue and that the scale of the problem is so vast as to discourage investment in the carrots, positive solutions like Hulu. "With all that pirated material available, it creates tremendous disincentives to content owners who need to invest in new content," Cotton says, "and that just hurts consumers over time."'"
They give us fact or fiction? I guess an even split.
And each new act of war is tonight's entertainment.
We're still the pawns in their game.
As they take eye for an eye until no one can see,
we must stumble blindly forward, repeating history.
It says they're using P2P. What for? All I know of is them releasing clips on Youtube...
piracy is a more serious offense than robbery.
Huh? And this guy makes how much money every year?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Isn't Battlestar Galactica one of the biggest traded shows on P2P? In that case he is probably getting the subject and Mediasentry-like buddies up and going for the new series premiere next month.
Just my first thought and £0.02
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I love it when spin doctors change the reality of the situation. From an economics standpoint, if there is no supply (e.g. meeting market demands with new product and services - how long have we been asking for newer methods to access and enjoy our entertainment ) then how on earth do you expect demand to come into play?
I have always wanted to buy cool things... I reward convenience with my cash. I reward innovation with my cash. I reward customer service with more cash than if I find a cheaper competing product or service.
If a company didn't respond to market changes in the past, it was called incompetence and the management was fired. These days it seems like the short term desire for quarterly profits blinds people to that.
As I said, you can spin the results any way you want. What makes the money is selling what people want.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
is the lack of quality programming and the massive amounts of commercial breaks per 30 minute episode.
The last things on NBC I watched was Hero's and the Knight Rider Movie. Both of them felt very funny like i was watching 4 minutes of show and 4 minutes of commercials. by the time i got through 2 hours of the Knight Rider movie I was pissed off.
Watching NBC is like listening to Wil liam Shat ner speeeeaak. Ev ery thing is drawn out.
sorry I couldn't keep it up my brain kept fixing the errors.
Cut the ads down to less than 15 minutes per 30 minute episode and people might start watching again.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Happens when the network's "content", which turns out to be nothing other than more disappointing dreck, wastes my time, energy and other resources. That's piracy against me.
Trust me, NBC/Universal, none of your nonsense flows through any of the copper in my house.
Same goes for the other traditional "TV networks" in these United States.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Rick Cotton is also the one who claimed that Piracy hurts Corn growers because -- without piracy -- theaters would sell more tickets and thus more popcorn. Don't you see what you're doing all you P2P users?!! You're hurting the poor popcorn farmer. And his family. Won't someone think of the popcorn farmer's children?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
well you should be 100% behind them using p2p for legal means the right? as they are making the slashdot point, that p2p has legal uses. You can't be defensive about legal P2p, and against companies using it at the same time...
I see no problem with them being anti-piracy, pro-copyright, and pro-using p2p for legal means.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
"and that just hurts consumers over time."
I see no mention of consumers in there. I didn't realize that patents and copyrights were to protect consumers. Please, explain this to me.
This explains why I don't watch TV anymore. There is nothing on worth watching because someone just threw up their hands and said, "Oh well, it's just not worth producing anything of value anymore."
My contention is that if networks produced something worth watching or listening too in a media format the consumer wants, that they wouldn't be facing these issues. If you provide people with a business model that is cheap and easy they won't pirate.
Mod this as redundant because it's been said a thousand times on /. before, but it is an underlying truth which needs repeating.
Homo homini lupus
in the end, he is one more well paid lawyer that is being rewarded handsomely to cling to last centuries business model.
Just place advertisments on the corners of a TV-series episode. I don't mind it there, I even enjoy US commercials that sometimes slip up. I'd rather have it there than wait a year for me to watch on local TV stations.
If the worst that happens is writter's strike level of "new content" then I am all for piracy.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
No, you dumbass... I think you don't understand that P2P was the answer to all the things you did to piss off consumers.
Forcing TiVo to eliminate the commercial skip pissed off consumers.
Using outdated ratings and canceling popular shows pissed off consumers.
Eliminating popular distribution methods (like ITMS) pissed off consumers.
When you alienate enough of them - they fix the problem themselves. P2P is the solution to the problems you created.
TV itself was a gamble when it first came to the public. NBC invested in it. Now they say they won't invest in new mediums because of pirates... give me a damn break. Quit your bitching and listen to your viewers - yes, even the pirates.
The media companies could greatly reduce current TV show piracy by offering them over the web, broadcasting at the same time as regular cable and over the air. Why pirate an hour later when you can watch it now, even with commercials? Of course the cable companies are blocking this since they control so much of the distribution and want their cut of the advertising. On top of that, the cable companies are actually making money off of piracy since so many pirates are spending their $60 a month for Comcast or their competitors. They don't want to see an increase in bandwidth and a drop in their share of advertising and regular cable subscribers. Net neutrality comes in because the cable companies say, "If you go to Internet broadcasting, we'll just destroy your connections; it's legal, haha, and we sure as hell won't let you use P2P to save bandwidth."
So this whole thing is about corporations trying to protect their slice of the pie or at least get as big a slice as possible of the next one out of the oven.
And do you know what I say? F them all.
He said that piracy discourages investors, not P2P.
I'm seen a ton of the usually P2P and "Piracy" comments... let's look at the other part of what they want to do...
Use a P2P network that they didn't build, didn't buy or contribute to, didn't ask permission to be on, all in order to promote their content and make money.
Who are the real "pirates" here ? NBC it seems. Why doesn't someone just build a filter that prevents NBC from placing content on the network ? Shouldn't NBC put money into BitTorrent, or be accused of stealing themselves ?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
P2P is only OK if we can use it to make money and make our quarterlies.
DRM and other crackdowns on how we can obtain, and what we can do with, legitimate digital copies of programming are giving customers massive disincentives to seek these legitimate copies out. Even ignoring price, the best product currently available is the pirated one, so it's no wonder that customers are voting with their mice.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Do as we say, not as we do.
...is a worse crime than serial murdering half a town in another country.
Who cares about crimes that don't affect me? We should spend more taxpayers money on crimes that reduces the sales of my goods.
They should learn from Comedy Central and The Daily Show.
Some of the main points:
1. Other than a Flash player, you shouldn't need to download anything to watch shows (which NBC actually has done fine). Some DRM isn't necessarily a deal breaker, as long as I never notice it.
2. Whatever distributions means you use, it has to deliver the video reasonable without too many problems (which in my experience has been an issue with shows on the NBC website)
3. Put ALL the episodes of a show online, and don't take them down. If you remove them after 4 episodes, then I will be far more likely to turn to alternate methods of getting the shows, to ensure that I can watch whatever episode I want whenever I want to. (NBC currently fails this). If they're worried about DVD sales, just add in some extras and make sure the quality is very good (added value).
4. Some commercials are okay, but if you start approaching live TV levels of commercials, alternate methods of getting the shows (without commercials) look more and more attractive (NBC is okay at this so far)
If they just take care of the four issues, then there is no advantage to piracy (only danger of getting caught, and also a slightly guilty feeling). The reason piracy exists is just because it is more convenient in these 4 issues.
Who's down on P2P (Every last lady)
You down on P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down on P2P (All the ladies)
What?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Economically, it simply does not make sense. Why should customers of a commercial P2P distribution service not only pay for content, but also provide extra bandwidth to help other customers download content? In the simple client-server case, the distributor alone pays for delivery quality by maintaining server farms with large bandwidth. However, in the P2P case (depending on the overlay design), it is very likely that some customers, who pay only the distributor, end up downloading the content from other customers, who do not get rewarded in any way. Bottom line: unless distributors come up with a financial model that is more suitable for P2P (e.g. that rewards participating clients), don't use commercial P2P - you'll be paying for more than the content!
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Actually I completely agree with this idea.
As an advertiser, I'd would probably love the idea of not only getting my advertising on your show but having it permanently embossed in that episode and given out for free so that anyone interested can see my ad. It will sort of be like advertisers on early television and radio.
He is right. Piracy, and thus by definition, P2P has STOLEN so much profit that there is no longer any incentive to create new work. NBC should immediately show us that they truly believe this and cease doing business in a money loosing market. In fact if they do not, the shareholders of NBC should immediately initiate a class action lawsuit, as the NBC executives are clearly harming the financial health of NBC by spending millions of dollars on the creation of new content where there is no incentive to do so.
I don't watch it, so I don't care. Let your hideously obsolete business model die quietly and inoffensively, causing as little trouble to others as possible.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Fab - oh wait - Comcast blocks that. Oh well - too bad. So sad.
Team, they are dinosaurs and just don't know. The next generation (you/us) know better, and are less afraid of merging technologies (I hope). When you are in his position, don't make his mistakes.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
"[The] problem is so vast as to discourage investment in the carrots, positive solutions like Hulu."
And who's fault is that, exactly? Who sat on their heels, clinging desperately to their sinking and outdated business model while new distribution systems were built? Who refused to license content to the new distribution systems? Who, after years of being thrashed by modern technology, finally tried to counter the problem by building DRM encumbered systems that gave the customer far less value than the "pirate" option, while charging much more?
Content owners have, in effect, "trained" the public to be pirates. If a DRM-free system for downloading TV shows and music had existed 10 years ago, most people would probably never have bothered with Napster, and this whole problem would have never existed. If 6 years ago, the content owners had responded to Napster and other P2P technologies with innovation instead of lawsuits, likely software like Napster would have remained a niche product, used by the technically competent (as opposed to, say, my mother). All this senseless talk of "ISP level filtering" only tells us that the content owners have not yet learned the lesson. They are doomed to failure.
> Cotton says, "and that just hurts consumers over time."'"
Rubbish. What's hurting consumers over time is the absolute rubbish material that is being published.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Apparently you didn't get it the first time, so let's try again: P2P is not the same as piracy.
You can pirate over P2P, but then you can beat someone to death with a shovel, yet still people think digging is a great idea.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I worked next door to NBC Headquarters (in Rockefeller Plaza) for five years, hung out with some of their staffers, and even attended their annual Christmas party in 2003. Through all this, I got a bit of a feel for the staff and management at the place. There's probably other /.'ers that can give a more accurate impression, but my feeling was that the rank and file were younger, high-energy folks who couldn't wait to stick their fingers into cool new things and ride the bear.
But the moves management made, and the way senior management was characterized, made them sound like a bunch of old-school power-hungry self-interested sharks who understood little of technology or the way the web was due to undermine their locked-down networks. I won't be sorry to see these dinosaurs eventually get their due. They clearly "don't get it", and likely never will. Hulu is a classic example.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I hope they ditch Hulu in favor of P2P. I have a Hulu account but I'm often tempted to go through illicit channels to get shows that are on hulu because hulu sucks so badly. It has the jerkiest video I've ever seen. I think it's their lame attempt to inject ads into the video stream that causes the problems. You get different ads each time you try to watch something so I assume it pulls ads off of another server and injects them in. This seems to cause major problems with the video stream, often causing it to simply stop for 5 or 10 minutes. It's gotten to the point where I hope for certain advertisers because some seem to work better than others. I don't know if they pull the ads off of the advertiser's server or what, but for some reason, some days when Chevy is sponsoring the show I'm watching, I can't get through the episode, but if I reload it might be sponsored by Toyota now, and it will work fine.
I don't have Tivo but I do try to watch shows when they're on the air. Sometimes I miss an episode and I refuse to continue watching until I'm caught up. Networks need to realize that people who want to watch their shows should be encouraged to do so. Don't fight them, don't frustrate them. If P2P is easier than going through hulu, people will do it. TV, especially network TV is free. People are never going to consider it to be anything else. You might be able to convince the majority that downloading movies without paying is piracy, but not TV. Lost is broadcast over the airwaves every thursday night, why the hell shouldn't I be able to download it off the internet as well? Put it on the P2P networks with the ads intact, I bet most people will happily download that instead of seeking out an ad-free version. I know I'd be happy with the ads if it meant I could actually watch the damn show.
Make the *public* spectrum airwaves limited, renewable, at auctioned market rates. Let's see NBC bid $0 for the spectrum NBC is granted at public expense. Yes, these broadcasters have truly robbed the citizens of the USA by paying far under market rate for the public spectrum they broadcast through.
So every 5 years, the contract is up, just like say the NFL broadcast rights contract for NBC expires, and all companies are free to bid for NBC's spectrum at market rate. Do this to the telecommunications cell phone spectrum as well. No more free (as in millions of times less than true market value) pirated spectrum for the corporations.
If they want RIAA-style War, we should welcome it. And then show them the meaning of being crushed by competitive economic market forces.
And if NBC bids any positive amount greater than $0 for broadcast spectrum, they are nothing but lying hypocrites, proving by their market actions, that incentives to deliver content are alive and well.
So opening the NBC broadcast spectrum 5 year lease covering the period 2009-2013 for competitive bids. Do I hear $1?
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Well, it's not worse than robbery homicide either. But I think what he means is that 1 pirated copy can lead to thousands more. And this is true. I've seen it. There are some pirates out there who "share" their "borrowed" items with, say, at least 10,000 people. If only 1% of these people don't pay the original creators, then those creators will have at least 100 lost sales. That's worse than one shoplifted DVD.
The cause of piracy is not the content having no value it is a disagreement between the content producers and consumers over what that value happens to be, namely that the content producers overvalue the goods compared to consumes resulting in the situation where consumers feel that the content producers are price gouging and thus have no desire whatsoever to pay the asking price.
There are other causes as well, a good example is content providers not providing the content in the format that the consumer wants, applying unfair restrictions that cause inconvenience on some legitimate products and limit legitimate use like watching it on your laptop instead of your PC etc etc.
So the solutions boil down to providing consumers with what they actually want, provide consumers with a product which they feel is value for money, and don't make it difficult for consumers to use products in legitimate ways. Do these things and piracy will decrease, sure some people don't actually care but most people are more than happy to pay for quality content at a reasonable price point. Fail to do these things and you have a seriously flawed business model which is going to slowly bleed money and die.
And there should be no reason to assume a problem, had that been what he actually said in TFA:
"It's obvious that peer-to-peer is capable, and in fact may in the future be a significant mode of efficient transport of legitimate content. But today, in terms of that consumption of bandwidth, it's overwhelmingly pirated content. There's probably a percentage of pornography mixed in, but one is not talking about legitimate content." - Rick Cotton, NBC Universal's top lawyer
This kind of statement stinks of "lawyer looking to smear." Break the logic down. Currently any P2P user is a pirate, or a pirate/pornographer, except for the "overwhelming" minority.
I may be reading this wrong, but it looks like the only thing that can possibly save P2P from its ghetto is GE/NBC. Once they start distributing with P2P (by borrowing your bandwidth) in the future, the tubes will be safe again.
Well done NBC. You kept the homefront safe.
What power has law where only money rules.
"Break the logic down. Currently any P2P user is a pirate, or a pirate/pornographer, except for the "overwhelming" minority."
Yes, that's exactly what he meant, and he's probably right, for most values of "overwhelming." There's no way of knowing, but my educated guess is that 95% of BitTorrent content swapping is unauthorized.
"P2P good, piracy bad" is by no means a contradiction, and it is we Slashdotters are usually quick to point out that P2P != piracy.
"I may be reading this wrong, but it looks like the only thing that can possibly save P2P from its ghetto is GE/NBC. Once they start distributing with P2P (by borrowing your bandwidth) in the future, the tubes will be safe again."
Well, he's correct. Until a really big owner of content (think GE, Disney, Universal, etc.) starts getting heavily invested into P2P distribution, P2P is going to be largely pirated content. The ratio will be changed by an elephant jumping into the pool. It remains to be seen if GE's going to be that elephant.
But, I think you've sorta foreshadowed the Slashdot reaction when the time comes, with your "borrowing" aside. If NBC starts distributing their stuff via P2P and padding it with ads, the standard Slashdot reaction will be something akin to "they think they're going to use MY bandwidth to distribute THEIR content? FUCK THEM!". There will also be a similar reaction on Digg, except that it will be also include "TPB FTW!!!!!11!cos(0)!!."
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Customers want access to all of the shows from any country with few if any commercials and they want to be able to play it on a tv with a variety of software.
Studios
want to protect their OTA, cable, and satellite business and advertising dollars
want to protect their syndication money
want to protect DVD sales
The "standard" of one commercial per break for TV on the web is ok. I have no issue with watching tv shows this way compared to P2P commercial-free versions. The issue comes with when and what content is available, country restricted viewing, restrictions of what viewing software is or can be used, limitations of that software(compatibility with different setups).
TV studios are conservative when it comes to the web as a new money source.
The reason that Congress set up copyrights was to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. And why would they want to promote that? Because that's good for the country as a whole. If there is more science and "useful arts", our lives are improved. If there were no copyrights or patents, then there would be less progress in the arts and science, because people wouldn't be rewarded for investing in them. And less art, for example, is bad for all of us, including "consumers".
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
OK, I will by more microwavable popcorn when I watch my DVD rip on my 30' computer screen.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
Indeed, people who have been held hostage or had a gun pointed at them often find themselves unable to go back to work. Some of them have all sorts of problems after then.
How this guy can compare some online copying to a crime where a suspect threatens to kill people is beyong me.
I think you misunderstand. Robbery is when you steal directly from a person. i.e. Take something from them in their presense. Burglary is when you steal from them without their being present. Both are illegal, but robbery is considered much more heinous (and the punishments are much more severe) because there is an implied (and often real) act of assault.
What's so inflammatory about NBC saying piracy is more serious crime than robbery is that copyright infringement doesn't involve ANY physical harm. Victims of robbery suffer physical and emotional trauma — on top of their financial loss. That's the difference. That's why statements like that are so callous.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..