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Film Consortium Urges ISPs To Dump Ineffective "Six Strikes" Policy For Pirates
An anonymous reader writes: The Internet Security Task Force, a group of businesses working to protect content creators and consumers from the negative effects of piracy, has called for an end to the Copyright Alert System, saying the anti-piracy initiative is not only ineffective but actually makes things worse. The group suggest that it be replaced with a new system based on Canada's Copyright Modernization Act. Mark Gill, ISTF chairman and President of member company Millennium films, says "We've always known the Copyright Alert System was ineffective, as it allows people to steal six movies from us before they get an educational leaflet. But now we have the data to prove that it's a sham." The Copyright Alert System (CAS) is set to expire early July.
From the article:
"The incendiary acts behind the move appears to be the wide-spread pirating of 2014 action blockbuster The Expendables 3, about which Mark Gill comments that it “has been illegally viewed more than 60 million times, the CAS only allowed 0.3% of our infringement notices through to their customers. The other 99.7% of the time, the notices went in the trash"
And how the hell would they know this? It's not like snail mail letters have GPS attached to them so the sender will know you have opened them. How do they have any idea at all in any way shape or form how often these letters were received, opened, read or followed? I smell a rat...
I'm off to find Millenium films at the store. I'm going to physically steal 6 movies and then ask for my educational pamphlet. What a deal... thanks ISTF!
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
The question is then, how much of that 160% growth is US infringement? Is that percentage high enough to merit a change or is this some bullshit number (I'm sure the number is real) but they make no mention if it's 160% growth of US infringers.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
What kind of crazy, Wild West law allows anyone to legally break into a movie studio and abscond with the film masters for up to 6 movies?!!
Ohh, they were doing that thing with the word "steal" again, where they accidentally used it instead of "make a copy in violation of copyright law."
Nothing posted to
as it allows people to steal six movies from us
Holy crap, you mean all this time the pirates could have actually been stealing movies and thus kept the rest of the world from ever seeing them? I guess we're lucky they only made copies.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What does the leaflet say? Our profit is more important than your freedom to communicate?
Oh, that system that they are abusing by sending threatening letters in direct opposition of the purpose of the system and the courts here in Canada? I'm sure they'd love to have that system elsewhere so that they can abuse it all over the place.
a group of businesses working to protect content creators and consumers from the negative effects of piracy
These guys must be doing a great job - I've never suffered any negative effects from piracy.
Even if the emails were going out I'd bet they read like spam in any case, so quite likely either manually or automatically "spam"
Every time I see calls for harsh anti-piracy initiatives, I picture what would happen if equally harsh rules were put in place for some of the dirty IP tricks or outright theft MPAA members engage in. "Oh, your studio got caught taking a copyrighted screenplay submission, rejecting it, then handing it over to one of your own people again? Sorry, your access to distribution has been cut off and you will not be able to produce movies anymore"
From TFA:
Under CCMA there is no limit on the number of notifications that must legally be forwarded to ‘offending’ ISP customers, which has led to a 69.6% reduction in infringements at Bell Canada, with Rogers, TekSavvy, Telus and Shaw all reporting notable reductions in piracy (or, theoretically, greater uptake of VPNs).
I'm willing to bet after the first notification, people just move to a VPN service to hide behind... Fix the inaccessibility issues involving movie and show availability, and I think you'll see piracy drop a lot faster than trying to punish people. People really just don't care, they just want their movie or show, so make it accessible and affordable. Market is just waiting on you guys to fix the issues IMHO.
Some people also don't want to go to a theater with a bunch of other people and pay astronomical prices for a bag of popcorn. On the other hand, some people really like that theater experience. So offer us both, simultaneously, an online release and theater release, so the shy people can enjoy the movie with the need to wait 6 months or steal it.
stopped reading there.
look, don't lie to me that you are helping ME, a consumer.
you look stupid when you lie. and you guys do such a really bad job of lying, too.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
File sharing can't drive those prices up. If piracy results in fewer people going to theaters, the reduction in demand will force prices down. If movie watching suddenly became more popular, prices would not go down, they would go up, especially when theaters are routinely sold out. That's how commerce actually works.
The greatest harm file sharing could do is: reduce the expected ROI on major movies, which in turn results in fewer movies produced, and less money spent on the movies being made (which might reduce their quality). At the moment, the market is awash with more movies than anyone can watch, and the amount of money spent on some of them is ridiculous. So, I don't see that harmful consequence happening at all.
Lying works! We have the DMCA and all sorts of nasty laws on the books. I figure as long as we reward liars and con men with money and political power, we're in for lots more. Seems only natural, Pavlovian in fact. They are not stupid for lying. People are stupid for believing.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
we got off lightly. It was 4 Adam Sandler Movies, National Treasure 3 and the latest film from Sstar Actor Shia Labeouf
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It's certainly not ineffective. If it were, there wouldn't be so many VPN providers in business.
Wait, is this guy claiming 20% of the US population pirated Expendables 3?
And we're supposed to take anything else he says seriously?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I'm not a fan of the new trend of naming legislation by the opposite of its purpose.
E.g. Copyright Modernization Act which is about implementing feudalism.
Internet Rapist Task Farce. There fixed that for you lying, power-hungry, treacherous pukes.
That's what this is really about, litigious companies like Volt Pictures have formed the Voltron of Copyright Trolls and now are complaining that they do not have enough fodder to feed their ambulance chasing lawyers to send out threatening (and misleading) settlement letters too.
"It is no more wrong to call piracy theft than it is to call it the same if you tap into your neighbor's cable so that you can get cable without paying for it."
There's a big difference between tapping a neighbor's cable and pirating a movie off the Internet. An unlicensed cable connection generally involves one connection/source, your neighbor's. But if you want to download from the Internet the same number of movies you could watch from an unlicensed cable connection, you can choose from more than one source, from the various file-sharing sites to torrents uploaded by thousands of different individuals.
To summarize the difference:
Illegal cable connection: one source (your neighbors).
Internet movie pirating: many sources (unless you're the sort who watches only one movie)
These guys don't seem to grasp they're in an arms race that they already lost.
Between VPNs and cyberlockers exactly how do these clowns think they're going to stop anything? People selling heroine on the internet are rarely caught and as we can see despite the DEA expanding their efforts against it, that is expanding geometrically.
These people think that they're going to have more of an effect against people pirating the latest movie than the DEA is having stopping people from selling heroine? They're just so f'ing ignorant.
The movie industry and the music industry need to have whatever portion of their business deals with such things slashed and burned... and then replaced with people that actually understand the technology.
Yes yes, if they can start hauling 14 year olds into court they might get people afraid enough to change their behavior. But it will also be a huge PR problem because they'll look like assholes whatever the morality of piracy is... and to make matters a great deal worse, changing behavior does not mean making anyone actually stop. It just means "change".
A torrenting VPN can cost as little as 5 dollars a month. With that you pretty much buy immunity from this stuff right there.
What is more, people might start pushing torrents through some sort of Tor based anonymizing system... which if it works could see the additional costs set to zero though at the price of slowing down whatever the download was because you're pushing so much f'ing garbage around.
Then you have cyberlockers which are everywhere. You can download most things through them as it is and if the torrenting networks get iffy then be shocked and amazed when everyone just starts going to cyberlockers as their first resort.
And that's just what exists RIGHT NOW. They start messing more substanively with the torrenting networks and god knows what people will come up with.
If the people running the movie studioes and music studioes understood the dynamic elements to what they were dealing with the LAST thing they would want to do is hit the whole system with a hammer and force a paradigm shift.
If they were smart, they'd go softly softly and collect lots and lots of data and try to subtly change consumer buying and pirating and viewing patterns without triggering a freakout response that could make the system a million times less manageable than it is right now. They can at least track things as it is now. If they smash the system they might not even be able to estimate what is going on.
And another thing which is endlessly irritating is the consistent conflation of Pirates = Paying customers. Some content creators might not care on the rather spiteful logic that if you didn't pay for it than I don't want you to have it. But on a purely dollar and cents calculation, a pirate that wouldn't have bought your content in the first place is irrelevant. Seperating out A from B is complicated but you can get a clearer notion of what is going on if you cut people off from a pirated copy and see how many of them resort to buying. The numbers are generally a good deal lower than the pirating population.
The pirating population shows you how many people would consume your product if the price were set to ZERO. Any fool with any knowledge of supply and demand is aware that if you increase prices on elastic goods that fewer people will buy. You could for example charge a thousand dollars for the latest super hero movie and SOMEONE would buy it. But the number of people that would buy it would be nothing like the numbers when the price is set to 20 dollars. And those numbers would be nothing when compared to if the price were set to ZERO.
Always when they talk about their lost profits they assume that X Pirates = X paying customers
Thus
Loses from piracy = X pirates * current retail price.
Which is idiotic.
If the movie industry wants to get more people to buy their content, they might consider lowering their prices. Already they've been forced to do thi
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If: "Dear Charter Internet Customer:
Charter Communications ("Charter") has been notified by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, that your Internet account may have been involved in the exchange of unauthorized copies of copyrighted material" = a strike. I have 8 against me for something you can view on youtube.
If: "Dear Charter Internet Customer:
Charter Communications ("Charter") has been notified by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, that your Internet account may have been involved in the exchange of unauthorized copies of copyrighted material" = a strike. I have 8 against me for something you can view on youtube.
-Might be a dupe having a bit of a /. connection problem.
Hang on, there are negative effects to piracy? I'd say a solid 90% of the stuff I own I pirated before buying it legitimately. Until the write a law that allows me to get my money back on media that sucks, I don't see there being any negative effect for the consumer on piracy.
But ... but... but then I'd have to pay for it! I'm entitled to you paying for my protection! I've bought enough politicians to say so!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Naja, MIEFPTDSLAFARPTP isn't quite a catchy acronym.
But the idea itself is sound. maybe find a better way to phrase it that TV anchors can pronounce.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What is up with their name? They have nothing to do with "internet security."
If I saw that name out of the context of this article, I would think they were something like CERT..
End of line..
Muahahaha, how quaint!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Theft of services" is fancy lawyer for 'failing to pay for services'--from US Legal:
Theft of service is defined by state laws, which vary by state, but typically define the crime as knowingly securing the performance of a service by deception or threat, diverting another's services to the actor's own benefit, or holding personal property beyond the expiration of rental period without consent of the owner. Intent to avoid payment may be presumed under certain circumstances, such as failure to pay for an applicable rental charge within 10 days after receiving written notice demanding payment.
Thus, it is theft of services being talked about in the classic question "If you force a sex worker to have sex with you, is it rape or theft?" (I am inclined to go with 'both.')
So what's the working, lawful source for the film Song of the South or Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night? If a work's copyright owner does not make the work available to the public, what "value" are infringers "stealing"?