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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)."
It was a successful operation in the same way as arresting the whole world prevents crime.
I live in Canada, and I'm very proud that we have so many torrent sites (I didn't know that). From all of us who live up here: fuck you MPAA.
"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.
Looks like I'm watching anything I want, when I want, without the MPAA even slowing me down. Wow, even regional restrictions are gone, as I watch shows and movies from all over the world immediately instead of waiting for a Region 1 release. Thanks Open Source software and Hackers like me for inventing the future of entertainment. MPAA give it up and start paying for decent product placement in shows, fuck commercials. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction. --MPAA
Thank God the war on piracy is over!
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".
So in other words, their profits suddenly shot up by some "massive" amount? I mean that's really the only reason to go to the trouble (and cost) of shutting stuff like this down, is to recover some revenue, right? After all, that is the only kind of success that matters to the content producers, is making more money for their effort.
FTA:
Interestingly, recently published research suggests that shuttering Megaupload may have even had a negative impact on box office revenues. In a recent blog post MPAA’s head of research Julia Jenks said the short paper is “not clear or compelling,” but it’s an indication that the Megaupload shutdown might not be all that positive for the industry itself either.
Oops. Spin it, Julia. Spin it round and round.
Better known as 318230.
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
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/11/25/1654201/researchers-find-megaupload-shutdown-hurt-box-office-revenues
Let's cut off our nose to spite our face!
We're number 1!
All others are #2 or worse!
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
If not for all the slashdot coverage, I wouldn't even have noticed.
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.
:) They totally missed the largest streaming sites or link sites entirely.
http://www.solarmovie.so/ (http://www.solarmovie.eu/)
http://www.tv-links.eu/
http://www.vidics.eu/
http://www.movs.eu/
http://www.watchseries.eu
http://www.youtube.com/ (mostly good old stuff, but still a great source for that content)
If you want more just do a Google search for ”some obscure movie or tv show site:eu” and you'll find it on the first page of Google's results. This works for any movie and not just obscure stuff. Humorously it is easier to find stuff this way then Netflix, Hulu, etc.
It always feels like a success when you whack the first mole.. but then 2 of its friends appear later..
Eventually the moles eat you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(referring, naturally, to the banner behind Bush on an aircraft carrier while making a speech about the Iraq war)
It is pretty clear it seems to anyone but you that the evidence so far is that Megaupload WAS NOT being used as a gigantic, unregulated store for pirated content, which is why the case is completely falling over. Sure the shutdown was massive but massive in a bad for the US in-Justice system and, US Foreign Relations. It is blatantly clear both were manipulated via corporate interests through the Vice Presidents office and at the instructions of psychopathic corporate executives a company was destroyed so they could be made a public example. In the great fishing expedition it was expected that evidence would be uncovered to justify the destruction as prior to the destruction the evidence was not there. However us the case unfolds with evidence lacking, the only real investigation that needs to be conducted is one of corruption of the US legal system by US corporations.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
...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...
Some people only wish that copyright infringement had the ability to actually take money away from content creators! Why, if it did, they could download the content over and over until the MPAA, RIAA, and all those other guys died off!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yeah. I thought you could be sued for providing a reference to an illegal download site but it seems MPAA's own rules don't apply to them.
Err... what? The shutdown of Megaupload, especially in the way it was handled, was a massive disaster in terms of legitimacy, due process, and justice, which is why the case is now completely falling over, as you say.
However, to suggest that Megaupload was not used by many as a gigantic, mostly unregulated store for pirated content is utterly ridiculous. Megavideo links of a vast array of television shows and movies were present in essentially every streaming links website, now mostly replaced with sites like videobb and vidbux. Yahoo Answers still has quite a few questions from naive users asking about how to find movies and tv shows on Megavideo, along with numerous answers. Searching for warez and pirated books from prior years will come up with quite a few megaupload links.
Megaupload certainly had legitimate uses, but piracy was a major, major use. That may not have been a legitimate reason to shut it down (and certainly wasn't justification for the way it was done), but I don't think anyone can argue that Megavideo, for example, didn't have much, much more pirated content than, say, Youtube or Vimeo.
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.
That's true, but if it took money away from them, they'd die off all the same.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
In the news today, the MPAA still can't find its ass, despite utilizing both arms and a road map, in a lit room. Film at 11.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Serious question: Fair enough that they disrupted a lot of traffic, but did it get redirected anywhere positive?
Did sales go up? This is a pretty important question that they don't seem to be answering.
I really don't understand what the hoopla about content is. I stream in Netflix and have a basement full of VHS tapes. I have yet to figure out why any of it was worth saving or why I bother to keep watching. Most television shows amount to " I Love Lucy", "Dragnet" or "The Price is Right" with tweaks. Movies are outright regurgitation of previous works without exception. Who really is getting paid for this? The originators are long dead and the flunkies who worked on these projects are already paid. The studios who made them are already paid, over and over, through advertising , sales (suckers who bother to purchase hard copies that will gather dust just like all my VHS I mentioned earlier). Maybe this is just about lawyers creating a stream of revenue for themselves. Maybe if we sprinkle "Roach-Pruf" around, this will go away.
Silly asses!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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!
Megaupload certainly had legitimate uses, but piracy was a major, major use. That may not have been a legitimate reason to shut it down (and certainly wasn't justification for the way it was done), but I don't think anyone can argue that Megavideo, for example, didn't have much, much more pirated content than, say, Youtube or Vimeo.
Well, by all accounts the shutdown actually HURT box office sales. It was also reported here on Slashdot.
Maybe it was just nerd rage, refusing to go to the movies ever again!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Piracy on Megaupload before shutdown: > 0%, << 100%.
Piracy on Megaupload after shutdown: 0. Infinite reduction in piracy!
Piracy on mediums other than Megaupload Before: unknown.
Piracy on mediums other than Megaupload Before: unknown still, but greater than before.
I really don't understand what the hoopla about content is. I stream in Netflix and have a basement full of VHS tapes. I have yet to figure out why any of it was worth saving or why I bother to keep watching. Most television shows amount to " I Love Lucy", "Dragnet" or "The Price is Right" with tweaks. Movies are outright regurgitation of previous works without exception. Who really is getting paid for this? The originators are long dead and the flunkies who worked on these projects are already paid. The studios who made them are already paid, over and over, through advertising , sales (suckers who bother to purchase hard copies that will gather dust just like all my VHS I mentioned earlier). Maybe this is just about lawyers creating a stream of revenue for themselves. Maybe if we sprinkle "Roach-Pruf" around, this will go away.
Silly asses!
I actually like rewatching old movies.
I'm mid way through copying my 200 DVD's to my home fileserver so it's even easier to watch them. So far, I've run across two that I couldn't copy due to copy protection on the DVD (Wall-E, and some other Disney movie, I think it was Cars). I think there's some Windows software to bypass the protection, but it didn't take long to find a copy online that I could download.
I wonder if my cable company ratted me out for bittorrenting the two movies? Maybe the movie industry will sue me for downloading movies that I already paid for.
I dropped my Netflix disks-by-mail plan and started buying used DVD's from Amazon -- they are pretty cheap, I usually pay $5 or $6 including shipping, so I can buy 3 movies/month for about the same as I was paying for the Netflix subscription.
"Here's the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Everywhere), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China)."
Source:
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-moves-to-the-cloud-becomes-raid-proof-121017/
All they've done is take all free android clones, peoples personal, and legally owned shit, and home vidoes off the net. They've killed many cell phone modding communities with broken links.
Its made it that much harder for a small projects(FOSS types) to host large files associated with them.
In case your wondering, its just as easy as it was before to get pirated material from a site that flaunts its pirate status, "The Pirate Bay"
Rest assured good freinds, you can still get your mindless RIAA sponsored pop music pirate, entirely unabated.
https://thepiratebay.se/search/britney%20spears/0/99/0
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?
You are twisted, but don't bother twisting my words into a rhetoric of your personal fantasies. All you said is that someone belongs in a cage for peddling some bits and bytes. If you can't see how that's different than taking off with a physical object out of a store, then I'm sorry to break it to you, you shouldn't be trying to call anyone stupid. Somewhat ironic that you try to appeal to an ability to reason considering the entierty of the first paragraph you wrote. Lets see how this analogy of yours stands, shall we? You threw it out there, prove it. Stripping away all the real bullshit, it's about making it a crime to perform common, readily available, private household activities -- whose only percieved damage is a lack of debatably potential future revenue of a business model behind the times -- demonstrated to be a false assumption too many times to count. So try again on what it is that *I* want, because you're certainly looking in the wrong direction.
I'm a huge pirate, I literally pirate at least 4+ tv shows or movies daily (not necessarily by myself, but other people in my household who I've provided access to.) I also regularly download other things that are otherwise considered illegal (e.g. last night I downloaded a bunch of Cisco IOS images for a net simulator, as well as a training manual.)
Yet I have not once ever relied upon megaupload for piracy, even while they were in their heyday.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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.
Well another way to look at it (and I AM a pirate btw, a very serial offender too, see my last post) is that when you shoplift from a store, all you're really doing is depriving them of profit. In the end, every buyer will be able to purchase their goods anyways, and the store in most cases will be able to re-stock the item before it is completely gone (I used to work retail, we regularly did cycle counts to proactively identify stolen property.)
And no I don't shoplift. The main reason I pirate is because I'm tired of the existing distribution model, which sucks balls. Either having to wait forever for a release (new releases take forever on netflix) or dealing with my cable provider's DRM, which prevents me from using MythTV. Besides, NOTHING commercially available is anywhere near as nice as XBMC with a properly done HTPC is for a home theater experience. That, and ordering and ripping blu-rays into XBMC is more complicated and time delayed than simply entering the name of the movie into couchpotato and having a blu-ray rip of the movie be available one hour later.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
So, Let's continue...
However, to suggest that The Internet was not used by many as a gigantic, mostly unregulated store for pirated content is utterly ridiculous. Website links of a vast array of television shows and movies were present in essentially every streaming links website, now mostly replaced with other sites. Q/A Websites still have quite a few questions from naive users asking about how to find movies and tv shows on the Internet, along with numerous answers. Searching for warez and pirated books from prior years will come up with quite a few website links.
The Internet certainly had legitimate uses, but piracy was a major, major use. That may not have been a legitimate reason to shut it down (and certainly wasn't justification for the way it was done), but I don't think anyone can argue that The Internet, for example, didn't have much, much more pirated content than, say, TV or Movie Theaters.
If the DMCA, safe harbor provisions are meaningless, then we're all fucked.
So what if I go into a store pick up the last copy of the latest release movie. I then wander around the store, carrying the disk, no one else can buy it. After this I get a phone call from my partner saying they've downloaded the film. So I go and put it back on the shelf, don't have to buy that now.
What's the difference? The store has deprived of the ability to sell that last copy of the movie for 90 minutes. So as you suggest I should pay a rental fee right? Everything is awesome right, no one has been deprived of anything that they rightfully deserved.
The difference is, the store permits you to carry around their copy as part of the cost of running a store. They take the (small) chance that items picked up won't actually be purchased. The cost to them of you carrying it around for 90 minutes it minimal (probably zero in most cases, since they have enough stock to "float" the supply while you stupidly carry it around). For the last item, you could potentially cost them a sale, but if it is a sell-out item, then they will probably sell it shortly after.
All of which is irrelevant, because they are willing to lend you the movie while in the store as part of their business cost. That is their choice. That in no way extrapolates to any conclusion that stealing a disc does not result in lost income, or that downloading a digital copy does not deprive anyone of their copy, or that digital piracy is not the equivalent to theft.
It doesn't matter what Megaupload was being used for, any more than you are responsible as a landlord for your cannibal tenant. What matters is: did Megaupload violate the law? It appears they did not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.