Slashdot Mirror
Warner Brothers Hiring Undercover Anti-Pirates
An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak reports that Warner Brothers UK is hiring college students with an IT background to participate in an internship that will pit them against pirates on the Web in an effort to crack down on illegal digital distribution. The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content, ensnaring users in incriminating transactions, issuing takedown requests, and causing general frustration amongst the file-sharing population on the Internet."
Where are all the anti-anti-pirates?
Rather than exploit the free publicity and growth of revenue, they fight against the rising tides with their swords. If the movie and music industries collapse, it will not be due to piracy, but anti-piracy.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I want some serious action to encourage the development of the completely anonymous protocols.
Keep pushing, studios.
Sounds like a sweet deal! I'll just copy that to my USB hard drive...
What would Brian Boitano do?
Better hope /b doesn't get a list of those interns. It would be really awful if someone were to leak a list of the chosen interns, post it to 4chan, and then have them torture and harass them until they curl up in the fetal position, crying.
Why is this an issue? Warner Brothers does have a legal right to enforce their copyrights. While I would prefer they focus on those that are profiting from unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, they also have a right to issue take-down notices. What would be unethical would be: uploading copyrighted material and then suing anybody who downloads it. Clearly, if WB themselves are freely distributing it, then they are implicitly granting permission for it to be distributed freely.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The entertainment industry keeps pouring money into anti-piracy and they keep getting further behind. The millions of dollars the industry spends on these campaigns bring in absolutely zero in increased revenue. If the industry took the position that file traders don't matter and that people who buy movies and music are the ones that do matter, they could then spend this money reaching out to people who will buy and bring in increased profits. Continuing to invest in the people who aren't interested in buying is only going to increase costs and drive paying customers away.
Well, it might work in the short term. All content protection, whether through DRM, laws, takedown notices, or any other mechanism is fundamentally founded on the principal that "we're smarter than you are", which in the long term is always an untenable position merely because of the scale involved. For every one person they employ to defend their copyright, there are a thousand people looking for ways to break whatever measures they put in place.
For example, it is possible to design a P2P system that does not rely on trackers (e.g. the DHT scheme that TPB uses). With such a system, content is not hosted anywhere that can get a takedown notice. Combined with onion routing (crypto), you can also make it highly infeasible to determine who is actually seeding the content, nearly guaranteeing that anyone you attack is an innocent victim, thus making the courts take progressively more negative attitudes towards your attacks. Put simply, the harder they try to clamp down on P2P, the greater the security measures that will be put in place to thwart it.
You cannot compete with P2P by attacking it. You can only compete with it by providing a better experience (or at least a comparable experience) through legal channels for a price that the market is willing to bear. Start by reducing the price of Blu-Ray movies to the same price as their DVD counterparts. That alone will take a huge chunk out of P2P.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This to me reads as "Warner Brothers is ripping off intelligent college students"
Keep your shitty check. If you want to pay people to do your dirty work, you better pay them a damn good wage.
I dont know of any US or UK mercenaries who work for minimum wage.
When fighting nature, either nature always wins or everyone loses. In this case, they are fighting artistic and entertainment nature. Art and entertainment need to be free and need to be shared. It is an important part of what it means to be a human being. What big media is doing is wrong in the sense that they think they can control and limit and even "bottle up" art and entertainment to maximize their profits.
What people are doing with their collecting and sharing is natural human behavior. It doesn't feel like a "crime" to most people to share because it's quite natural and it's everywhere.
And please, I have heard the arguments before "but people wouldn't create if there were no money in it!" Pure nonsense. Fan films and other amateur work if littering the internet like never before. People love creating and building and showing off. They don't do it for money. They do it for attention or as an outlet or just to make people smile. Yes, there are many who are attracted to the media market because there is a lot of money to be made, but that's not why the TALENTED people do it... just the greedy ones.
When you pirate a movie, you don't have to contend with ads, previews or screens you can't force your way past. When you legitimately buy a movie, you are forced to watch previews, get stuck waiting for the FBI warning and often times contend with other annoyances.
Perhaps shafting your legitimate clients isn't the best way to do business?
http://www.allometry.com
anti-anti pirate-pirate-pirates?
(Look, Natasha! Is moose and squirrel!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My grandmother told me, that when the Nazis took over Luxemburg (our country), there were people who collaborated with the Nazis. They were called “Gielemännchen“ (yellow mankins), and often wore yellow rain coats. Everyone hated them.
Wanna know what happened to them when the Nazis were gone?
They were brutally killed by the villagers. Every single one of them. Often in cruel ways and with blunt objects.
So beware, if you dare to collaborate with the enemy. Cause they might not be there, when we come for you later.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That makes sense if someone is willing to pay $100 million for the first copy of the movie. A more reasonable suggestion would be that once a movie starts to profit, they allow free copies to be distributed. Even then, there is an issue of making an overall profit as some movies fail, and what the level of 'enough profit'. I am completely against many of the claims and practises that the *AAs perform (download != sale, poor profits given to recording artists), but they release a product under a set of conditions. If you don't like those conditions, don't get the product. Eventually free market forces will allow the studios that make the best use of the Internet to profit and the rest will catch on. Yes they have a near-monopoly on the industry and they advertise particularly well, but people lived perfectly well before Avatar came out, so if you don't want to pay to see it, you don't have to see it right away. Wait until the movie is showed with advertising for free or don't even see it at all.
If the papers they sign state that they are responsible for their own actions, it would get WB out of any counter-lawsuits for thing done.
Curiously, this would leave the WB "employee" liable for any sharing of WB material that they participate in while attempting to entrap others. Let me think, how could that be useful to WB... I see, wait six months after you hire your tranche of stooges, fire and then sue them using the evidence they supplied (thinking this was about others). Win the cases and then point to the stack of precedent you have amassed when you go after future cases. Sweet ;)
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
You can't compete on price with P2P. How do you undercut "free"? But that doesn't mean you can't beat P2P. You only have to offer more, not (as it is now) less. And the first step towards that is to know your audience.
If the (quite successful) "metal box" releases should give a hint, it is that movie enthusiasts are willing to pay for their product if the product is to their liking. In other words, stop selling the movie. Sell the "experience". Sell the "exclusivity". Sell your customers the feeling that they got something great, something they wouldn't get if they just copied the movie.
The movie is not just a disc to insert into the player. The movie is also a box that will rest on the customer's shelf while he's not watching it. He will actually see that box a lot more than the movie, because it will always be there in his room, on his shelf, on display. Sure, they could make their own "presentable" cover. So you have to also instill the feeling that not having the "real" thing is phony, that they would sink in their friends' esteem if they did that. Teenagers are notoriously short on cash, yet they buy TCGs and Warhammer figurines, despite both being easily replaced by cut-out cardboard DIY cards and play tokens. Why don't they do it, why do they buy the overpriced cardboard and plastic? Because it would not be accepted by their peers if they did that. You have to do the same for movie enthusiasts! It just isn't cool to have a DIY cover on your DVD box!
To achive that, you have to make that cover something your customer will want to show off. That needn't be more expensive than the cheap looking nondescript plastic covers you use today. Get creative! You employ an army of PR goons, have them work for their money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"I was young, and I needed the money!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company
The MPPC was preceded by the Edison licensing system, in effect in 1907–1908, on which the MPPC was modeled. Since the 1890s, Thomas Edison owned most of the major American patents relating to motion picture cameras. The Edison Manufacturing Company's patent lawsuits against each of its domestic competitors crippled the American film industry, reducing American production mainly to two companies: Edison and Biograph, which used a different camera design. This left Edison's other rivals with little recourse but to import foreign-made films, mainly French and British.
Since 1902, Edison had also been notifying distributors and exhibitors that if they did not use Edison machines and films exclusively, they would be subject to litigation for supporting filmmaking that infringed Edison's patents. Exhausted by the lawsuits, Edison's competitors — Essanay, Kalem, Pathé Frères, Selig, and Vitagraph — approached him in 1907 to negotiate a licensing agreement, which Lubin was also invited to join. The one notable filmmaker excluded from the licensing agreement was Biograph, which Edison hoped to squeeze out of the market. No further applicants could become licensees. The purpose of the licensing agreement, according to an Edison lawyer, was to "preserve the business of present manufacturers and not to throw the field open to all competitors."
Many independent filmmakers, who controlled from one-quarter to one-third of the domestic marketplace, responded to the creation of the MPPC by moving their operations to Hollywood, whose distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and covers the area, was averse to enforcing patent claims.[citation needed] Southern California was also chosen because of its beautiful year-round weather and varied countryside, which could stand in for deserts, jungles and great mountains.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
No movie makes a profit in Hollywood. If you don't believe go look at the many, many, lawsuits. Titanic cleared over a billion and they STILL tried to claim it as a loss.
It takes hours for me to torrent a movie-sized file (i.e. a distro CD). I would rather pay a few dollars for a better download rate, better quality movie, etc.
But it's hard to justify $30 / movie for legal downloads, which is what the big distributors would like.
Oh, that's just creative accounting. Why pay taxes on a profit when you can claim it as a loss and still get the money?
I am become
I appreciate your optimism, but I don't think the people being hired for this are really in any position to make demands about how the industry carries out their business. If you tried you'd probably be let go.
If a pirate and an anti-pirate collide, do we get a large release of energy, and could this be a way of powering the planet. No more need for fossil fuels...
Be aware that such annihilations usually produce large amounts of dangerous DRM radiation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc.
The proposed law, which will become law shortly after April 6th on current plans, will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this.
The relevance to this story is that the UK students that Warner is recruiting might well uncover the "filesharing incidents" that would feed into this heavy handed enforcement mechanism.