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."
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.
It's not a competition. What they should do is offer Spotify like service for movies all around the world, not just in US, and either ad-supported version or $10-$19 per month paid subscription with perks like PS3 and mobile streaming and so on. After Spotify came around 1.5 years ago people haven't had a need to pirate MP3's anymore. It's actually nicer to use than P2P - that's something that movie industry needs to have to combat piracy (hopefully Voddler will get there). When the service works good and is reasonably priced, you win a lot of customers.
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.
When we argue, we don't argue about what the law is. That's for the courts to decide. We argue about what the law should be. And, as the discussion here shows, it is not at all clear that Warner Bros is morally right in legally enforcing their copyrights against individual file sharers.
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
If you want to argue ethics, lets debate about movie producers and actors with net worths in the 100's of millions sueing single mothers and college kids for downloading a few movies they otherwise wouldn't pay to see anyway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
those would be the interns that end up posting information from these companies on wikileaks showing that they are doing illegal things... ah to the companies that think us geeks care about company loyalty... yeah you pay their cheques... and yeah, we can get cheques elsewhere
They were going too is no excuse, they still have not.
They still violated the copyrights of the XBMC developers and then expect to make money from copyrights. They are hypocrites who believe in copyright when it is good for them and not when it does not suit them. These are not the sort of folks people should give money to.
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's why I'm not worried about this.
The only people who are going to take a job like this are untalented drones of marginal technical ability who can't get a job elsewhere, especially at the . Furthermore, peer pressure is going to be enough to discourage most people (talented or not) from getting paid to turn narc / sell out to the man.
The smart, creative people are going to be on the other side of the fight.
Anyone with half a brain can tell that the copyright cartels are fighting a losing battle, desperately clinging to a business model that has been rendered obsolete by modern technology. P2P would largely disappear overnight if there was a legal alternative that offered a perceived benefit (guaranteed quality, good search, high speed download, brand loyalty, etc) over a pirate source. The studios are unwilling to do that because then they would have to charge prices that are dictated by the market, rather than by monopolistic fiat.
There will always be some people who will take free over speed or convenience, but there are plenty who won't -- just witness Starbuck's ability to sell a quarter's worth of coffee at a 1000+% markup.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Oddly enough, the most exclusive of the darknets are considerably more dangerous to be members of than being part of a large and very public crowd. I personally know one person who went to a halfway house, two who went to jail, and one who plea-bargained out of cell time because they were running servers for an extremely small and exclusive group of copyright infringers. They got taken out so hard because the FBI took an interest based solely on their reputation, and not on any possible damage done to rights holders. It was very much a case of flies and sledgehammers.
Personally, I recommend avoiding invitation-only darknets. First, because they encourage law enforcement to see it as a challenge, and second because that's not how to win the dispute. The only way the assertion that copyright powers are wildly out of control and out of proportion will carry the day is if it's a cultural movement. The entire population has to be involved, and has to stick to it even when some of its members go down.
That's what's happening now. The current situation is basically civil disobedience on an epic scale, despite the resounding lack of large crowds and firehoses. If you retreat to hidden darknets, you're losing.
The rights holders still think they can preserve their rights, and even expand them, and with them their revenues. They're doomed. I've seen what the 11-17 year old crowd is doing, and I've heard how they think. They share. A lot. They're barely aware that the proverbial powers that be don't like it, and they get grumpy when their favorite Youtube video gets taken down because it used copyrighted background music, but they don't for a minute believe there was any justification in the takedown. They literally don't recognize the rights being claimed. I don't see that attitude going away because it's almost completely passive. They are not taking a principled stand. They're not aggressively standing up and demanding the distribution restrictions on Steamboat Willie be rescinded. The decision happens much more subtly than that. Each one of them is just a little snowflake in an avalanche: the avalanche is not their intention - it's their very nature.
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
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.