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MPAA: the Impact of Megaupload's Shutdown Was 'Massive'
An anonymous reader writes "The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success. In a filing to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the group representing major movie studios says the file hosting and sharing industry has been massively disrupted. Yet the MPAA says there is still work to be done, identifying sites that make available to downloaders 'unauthorized copies of high-quality, recently-released content and in some cases, coordinate the actual upload and download of that content.' Here's the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Sweden), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China)."
"The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has declared that the Megaupload shutdown earlier this year has been a great success"
Never mind the fact that the shutdown itself was conducted illegally, and that thousands of legitimate users and businesses were harmed.
Fuck you MPAA. You're the boy with his finger plugging a hole in a dike, and the water's pouring over the top.
It was destructive to legitimate file sharing too.
And illegal, very illegal.
We all owe the MPAA a hearty thank-you for telling us where we can steal their movies in the post-Megauplod era.
The MPAA's original paper: http://de.scribd.com/doc/115644694/NOT-Motion-Picture-Association-of-America-Final
They brag about how much money they are making and speak in passing about the "massive" impact of closing down Megaupload. The one thing that seems to be conspicuously missing is any estimate of how much more money they made due to the reduction in "piracy".
Or this more in depth analysis which concludes:
"We find that the shutdown had a negative, yet insignificant effect on box office revenues.This counterintuitive result may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay."
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2176246
Also in the same way that Return of the Jedi didn't actually make a profit according to the LucasFilms...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Hollywood accounting would make Al Capone roll in his grave.
This provides a really good opportunity to measure a decline in piracy against an increase in ticket and DVD/Bluray sales. If they aren't talking about how much more money they're making, I think we can safely assume that the mantra that piracy != lost sales is true.
...pirated content, and that does take money away from content creators.
Please provide sources showing loss of revenue from piracy. PS. I'm an actual content creator, indie game developer, so if I was bias...
You forget that the "MPAA, RIAA, and all those other guys" are NOT the content creators.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Before the takedown, we all thought that. Me too. After the takedown, the US and NZ governments' behaviors indicate that once they saw actual evidence, it didn't point that way. They no longer think Dotcom is a crook and apparently either intend to acquit him or get the charges dismissed.
Content racketeers.
Perhaps what constitues as 'piracy' is 'legitemate use' to begin with? How can *so many* people be labled civil criminals? How can it be that the majority of the world is in the wrong? How can anyone even begin to justify jail for songs and music? Songs and music.. the very thing that separates us from the rest of the species around us. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It is incredible that we are even on this path at all, but then again there's that war on drugs, that thing people call 'voting'. I'm not so much amaized that it was suggested, no, I'm far more amaized that it was surrendered. And I drown in this ocean of gullibility without recourse save for death. Great!
I'm sorry, but every new release sites have more than 4+ mirrors anyway. When megalupload went down, another came up to replace. Also, they are actually listing the next sites they gonna abuse their power to shut down? Let's do something against that and make sure it don't happen.
No, it's technically not the exact same thing. When you walk out of a store with the CD, you are depriving the STORE of their personal property (the CD). There actually is a difference, both morally and ethically: "piracy" does not deprive anyone of their property, only the revenue from the sale.
I'm not disagreeing that both should be crimes. But the financial and civil penalties of the latter (copyright infringement) are actually HIGHER than the former. And that's not right, either.
The example I like to use:
I will offer this advice to the entire media industry, free of charge, no royalties asked, in the public domain, no nonsense, no copyright, you're free to use it. Forever.
... well, can do nothing more than they did a decade ago because of crippling DRM.
How to Single-Handedly Obsolete Piracy and Earn Record Profits without Criminalizing your Customers and Building a PR Track Record Worse than Beelzebub's: provide video files in MPEG4/DivX/whatever reasonably universal format, without DRM expropriating our computers, for a reasonable price, offer fast download speeds (at least fast enough to stream) and offer it worldwide.
That is actually a lot simpler than it sounds; certainly a whole lot simpler than all that lawyering, backroom meetings and trying to figure out how to expropriate every computer in the world.
Not only will you have millions, possibly billions-with-a-B, customers who can't give you enough of their money, but you will be opening the door to scads of businesses who will make products that increase the value of your products and have customers begging to buy more.
This is evidenced empirically by history: look at how unencumbered VCRs, CDs and MP3s exploded with infinite third-party possibilities and compare them to DVDs which
Why is it so hard for these people to embrace technology? Why is every technological progression in history perceived as a threat? Is there a fundamental disconnect between them and their customers? Are they just stupid? Overly stubborn, technologically xenophobic dinosaurs? Too lazy to rework their business model? Too greedy about short-term profits too realize the long-term effects? What is it???
"I don't take issue with the shutdown since Megaupload"
Irregardless of the legalities or the morality of what MU was doing, or not doing, the shutdown was a miscarriage of justice. MPAA is saying here, that the end justified the means. In effect, it doesn't matter that all parties to the shutdown FAILED to prosecute MU for anything, and they FAILED to prove that MU was doing anything. It only matters that Hollywood is making money.
Step down a little, from huge international servers, to your own home town. Do you have a problem with the mayor sending a swat team to crash your door down, confiscate your computers, and haul you to court because - ohhhh - maybe you published an unflattering picture of the mayor? Or, your kid is a "terroristic bully who has hacked my child's facebook account"? Or, you published an editorial opposing the mayor's plans for an "emminent domain" project?
Remember, what goes around, comes around.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Usually the store will want to be compensated for the time the copy is not available. This is called rental. In the case of copying on the internet, the original copy is still available at all times.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
So are these the same thing?
a) taking your brain away and bringing it back 90 minutes later
b) making a copy of your brain
It's not like you're using your brain much anyway. So no difference right?
The excuse for "intellectual property" was that it would serve as an incentive to the creation of new works; it was supposed to enrich culture and technology for all by eventually becoming public domain. But the constant copyright extensions mean their very purpose was subverted: instead, it now hinders everyone's access to a massive cultural trove. That's why people can't see piracy as wrong: if anything, it performs that duty now!
Circumcision is child abuse.