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Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as 'Piracy 3.0' (torrentfreak.com)
After hunting down torrent sites for more than a decade, Hollywood now has a more complex piracy threat to deal with. From a report: Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models" and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0. "Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own," McCoy said. "If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I'll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices."
"Illegal streaming device" = "any box Hollywood doesn't control" - this includes YouTube to a certain extent until Google played ball. From a more prophetic standpoint I think the various devices are turning into de-facto cable boxes and I think Hollywood is looking into making their content available only to exclusive devices - let alone services as they do now. (Although it'll probably end up looking like the DVD consortium where only approved device makers that agree to monopolistic conditions get licensed to stream content) Besides, your format-shifting causes children to starve because you're not paying your fair share to the artists who labor long and hard to bring you quality entertainment. Same thing when you skip over ads you thief! (The making and authorized distribution of this comment supported over 15,000 jobs)