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."

Comments

as usual, piracy fears are nonsense.

[rogoshen1]

You know, if these hollywood types were to be believed; the feds should encourage people to pirate CP, since that would put them out of business.

But really the average pirate fits into a few categories

1. they weren't going to buy it anyways. revenue lost: 0.
2. they want to buy it, but you refuse to sell to them. revenue lost.
3. they did buy it, but you make it more convenient to use a pirated copy (unskippable bullshit menus, insistence on optical media) revenue lost: 0 (unless you truly expect people to buy it more than once?)
4. they would buy it, but it's priced too high. revenue lost: debateable. it's just as much the industries fault for not pricing their product appropriately. But easier to blame the pirates.

Piracy makes for an excellent boogeyman, since anytime revenue numbers don't meet expectations they can blame pirates. Anytime congress needs to be pestered to get more favorable laws and such for your industry, pirates can be blamed.

side note: piracy is not the right word, nor is theft. if i download something from TPB, i'm not *stealing* from anyone. I'm not depriving anyone of their copy of said item.

Side note 2: how much innovation has been the direct result of 'piracy' over the years? How many times have we heard of some start up that started out using less than legit software, only to become billion dollar companies (and then immediately turn around join the BSA or similar?)