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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.
...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.
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 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
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?