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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."
Unlike Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models"
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?)
"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)
The movie industry shouldn't have to change their business model just because people have decided it's okay to steal things they want and not pay for them.
The sustained assault against the public domain and ridiculous extensions to copyright are stealing from the public. I'll worry about their feelings about thieves once they stop stealing en masse. Just because you decided to put something out doesn't give you the right to eternally control what is done or not done with it. Copyright is a time-limited public burden made to incentivise people to make new works, not to have control in perpetuity over them. The current "time limitation" is an utter mockery of the intentions of the Constitution; I can guarantee you that "time limited" does not mean "extended 20 years every 20 years until Disney decides to fold." I think a lot of people have entirely forgotten that, or never knew it in the first place, since their screeching about "stealing movies," though of course that aspect of it is entirely intentional.
Technically, considering OSS (which you are almost certainly using whether you realize it or not), and the rapidly increasing capabilities of automated music and video production, it's arguable that even that role is coming to a close, since people can and do put out content for free. They certainly didn't avoid making them before copyright even existed, or when copyright was much, much shorter. Heck, some of our most well-known cultural contributions fall into this category. But thanks to this bullshit the days of anything entering the public domain are over, and as such anything they don't profit off will die, and they will control those things they do profit off of forever, if things go their way, all the while pushing for more restrictions and invasive measures to control computers to do their bidding for copyright enforcement and attempting to slowly force everyone into a permanent "rent-per-view' model..
At this point, considering the massive amounts of damage done by the media corporations, piracy is arguably an act of justified civil disobedience. I am aware that you and people like you will rationalize this as "an excuse for stealing," but that's to be expected of people who either do not think of the larger ramifications of this, or have some vested interest in perpetuating control of content, and ultimately control over computers and people in general.