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You Will Never Kill Piracy
scottbomb writes "This is perhaps the best op-ed I've read about the whole SOPA/PIPA controversy. The author challenges Hollywood to re-think their entire business model. It will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears, for now. But sooner or later, they will have no choice but to adapt. From the article: 'Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it's worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won. It can't, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling.'"
Just like modding me down won't kill goatse, you'll never stop piracy. You may sink their ships but we will just equip better cannons on our new ones.
http://takedownpiracy.com/2012/01/another-one-bites-the-dust/
The guy has made it his job to DOS sites with DMCA takedown notices till they shut down
If more people like this start infiltrating private torrent sites, it could cause a major issue
The world has changed but they hasn't and they ain't gonna change because they are still raking in shitloads of $$$ doing what they had been doing for the past century
I'd wager that it'd be like a repeat of what is happening to Kodak - by the time Hollywood decides to change, it'd be way too late
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And nothing happens. While I commend the writer for articulating what is wrong with the current movie industry model, the reality is that Hollywood is hell bent on preserving their business model. For good reason too, most of Hollywood are distributors. The distributors are the ones that pay for the movie, the marketing, and shoving it down the throats of consumers. They're middle men protecting their business. Change the distribution model and you'll hear the sucking sound of Hollywood companies drying up. Studios aren't strapped with tons of cash to pay for hit movies on their own, so you'll have fewer movies being made. No one in Hollywood has any incentive to change the current model, and unlike the music industry that got dragged into the 21st century, or the game industry that has adapted to every new platform to survive, the movie industry consumers lack any desire to force a business model change or adaption. Tthe closest thing to adaption is Netflix and recent price hikes are an indicator that the distributors will kill it before giving the consumers what they want.
...it is that tremendous progress has been made in the field of anonymous file sharing technology. If the folks from the music/movie industry hadn't pushed so hard to prevent piracy, we would still be on Napster. But instead we now have very advanced things like the BitTorrent protocol, equipped with encryption, magnet links, DHT and PEX. And it's not just the geeks who are using these advanced file sharing technologies either, it's ordinary people. All in all quite an achievement.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Sure, they will never make it so that it is completely impossible for a few people to do.
But they have more then enough lobbying power to make the consequences of being caught so severe and the internet so monitored that piracy is so underground that 99% cannot find it and would not take the risk if they did.
It might not help their profit margin to do this as much as they think, but they are mega corporations and they at least have a chance at doing whatever they want.
While they might not be able to do so in any reasonably free and fair society or under current US law, but that will not necessarily stop them.
Hell, I would not bet against them if they launched a coup to physically take over the government and impose a tyranny in the US and put the current administrations heads on spikes outside of the whitehouse.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Studios live on a strong distribution model where they control the vast majority of the content and the distribution channels. Any tool that is viable for "piracy" is also viable by independent distributors as well. While I don't condone copyright infringement I think studios are more interested in their long term viability than to protect their content from "piracy". I expect similar behavior from the major publishing houses in the next couple of years as ebooks break their hold on the distribution channels.
>His solution seems to be "Give everything away for free, then it won't get stolen".
Do you know how I know you didn't read the article all the way through?
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BMO
We have been saying this from within the industry for 5 years. Why are we paying truck drivers to haul blu-rays to store shelves when we could be using the internet to deliver the movies for 1/100th the cost? Not only is putting a blu-ray on a store shelf inherently risky (essentially a master copy of the movie) but it costs MONEY to produce, deliver, and manage, Make the movies cheap, remove DRM, use the technology to help figure out where the movies are going so that you can optimally sell merchandise... seems like a winner to me and to many others but apparently not to the people in charge.
The op ed is missing one quite critical point. The movie industries aren't sitting here fighting piracy because they don't know the way forward. They don't sit there because they are dinosaurs and luddites who have no idea how technology works.
They sit in their 1990s era thinking because despite everything which is changed, and everything which is conspiring against them from the modern age piracy front they are making money. No actually I take that back. They are making a SHITLOAD of money. When you have a magic machine that spits out $100 bills why tinker with it at all? Until the bills stop coming out why mess with it? Someone opposes the machine, don't adapt your machine to them, attempt to crush them.
It's all good an fine to sit here and claim they are dinosaurs for not getting with the times, but lets face it, the vast majority of us would do anything to maintain our status quo, if that status quo involved having a butter polish your shoes using the face of Benjamin Franklin.
If it's possible to make a movie and sell it cheaply online, with no DRM, and still make a profit as the article suggests why hasn't anyone done that successfully?
It's the distribution channel, my friend
Tell me, currently what are the distribution channel for movies, and how do they distribute them?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I missed out on one other important factor ...
It's the government
From
* Copyright laws (change from bad to worse)
to
* Tax rebates (for producers, distributors, et al)
to
* Revolving door (former politicians becoming lobbyists)
to
* Politicians lining their pockets (with PAC contribution from Hollywood)
Why should Hollywood allow any other people to make money from alternative mean of movie production / distribution ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
He also rationalizes that downloading is okay because it's not like you actually stole a physical object - so it's not really stealing, right?
One of these things is not like the other:
Which is why we charge people with theft, rather than copyright infringement. Calling it "theft" is meant to shut down an argument against the copyright system, by equating a copyright with a form of property ownership. Copyright has never been a type of property, it exists only to benefit the public, and at this point it is not clear that copyright is the best way to ensure the public's access to art and science.
People are not going to stop using their computers to copy things; we need to accept that and move on. If we really want to save copyright as a system, then we need to punish violations the same way we punish parking violations: a small but annoying fine for each violation. Gone are the days when only people with specialized industrial equipment could possibly commit copyright infringement; the law was not designed to deal with mass numbers of people having copying equipment in their homes. If we are not talking about updating the law, then we are having the wrong conversation.
Personally, I think the whole copyright system should be scrapped, and the industries that were built on copyrights should either adapt to the new world and its new technology or die like other out of date industries. We should be using the Internet to ensure that creative work is never lost, that it never goes out of print, that it is never buried as part of an effort to maintain a corporate image, etc. A lot of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists; why are we not giving any of them any consideration?
Palm trees and 8
We are making the mistake that many losers in many conflicts have made: We think our enemy is stupid and not seing the obvious.
What if they are?
Imagine that Hollywood is as smart as us and knows everything we know. And still they are doing what they are doing. Why would it make sense?
One, it gives them time. They may know they need to change business models, but like all humans, they are risk-averse and they need time to adapt, to test out various strategies, to find the most profitable approach. At the same time, they want their revenue to continue coming in. Delaying the inevitable is sometimes a smart move, if you can use the time inbetween.
Two, making everything else illegal guarantees that they can take down the competition before it emerges. Many of the illegal online services like Napster or Megaupload were toying with the idea of going legit, because they realized that you can only get so big and so much exposure before the guys with the guns come knocking. A legal service that competes with the studios (instead of working with them, like iTunes) could emerge out of those. Can't have that, better to shut it down while it's still clearly on the illegal side.
There are probably more good reasons. Don't assume they are stupid without proof.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Neither, actually. The truth is that for all the noise, piracy hasn't hurt the movie industry in any demonstrable way (best three box office years in history? 2009, 2010, and 2011, despite record piracy and a bad economy.) However, they can use it as a pretense to maintain/raise prices in the face of falling costs, and as a scare tactic to push through advantageous legislation. There is no reason for them to actually want to win this war - they are making far more money "fighting" it than they would gain if it stopped.
They are not stupid; they are businessmen.
http://www.popmatters.com/images/news_art/t/the-day-recorded-music-revenue-per-capita-feb-2011.jpg
I'd much more blame the "indestructible" CD then piracy. A LOT of the industry's revenue, especially the boom that came with CDs, was people re-buying music they already owned on yet-another-format.
Vinyl wasn't useful in cars (boom of 8 track), 8 track wasn't that useful walking around and self-destructed over time (boom of cassette tape and Sony's Walkman), all of them wore out over time and/or broke easily from being dropped.
Enter the CD... Never wares out, much more durable, as portable as most anyone would ever need, and for 99% of people sounds better then anything that came before. BOOM, there's a HUGE spike in CD sales as everyone is re-buying everything they ever wanted to keep on CD (along with new music sales, of course).
Enter digital...
It's everything the CD was and then some. But there's a problem... Unlike every other format change in the history of recorded music, no one is going to re-buy music they already have on CD as digital. They're just going to rip their own CDs. As a result the industry is left with only new music sales...
It isn't about piracy - It's about the Music Industry losing the ability to re-sell you the same music over, and over, and over. It's about the Music Industry's ever expanding back catalog no longer translating to automatic ever-expanding re-sales. The Music Industry spent a hell of a lot of money to make copyright effectively never-ending, explicitly to protect that re-selling revenue stream...and now the carpet has been yanked out from under them.
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That huge drop in sales? That's called market saturation. Most everyone that wanted a Beatles or Stones recording already owns it...on a format they will effectively never replace again.
It's about the Music Industry thinking, wrongly, that they were in the business of selling toothpaste. Then waking up one day to realize they really are selling cast iron frying pans. You'll always need to buy more toothpaste...but you'll never need to buy another cast iron frying pan.
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