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HBO, Netflix, Other Hollywood Companies Join Forces To Fight Piracy (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the powers-combined dept.

New submitter stikves writes: It looks like media and technology companies are forming a group to "fight piracy." The Verge reports: "A group of 30 entertainment companies, including power players like Netflix, HBO, and NBCUniversal, have joined forces today in an effort to fight online piracy. The new group is called the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), and the partnership, while somewhat thin on specifics, will allow the content creators involved to pool resources to conduct research and work closely with law enforcement to find and stop pirates from stealing movies and TV shows. The first-of-its-kind alliance is composed of digital media players, networks, and Hollywood outfits, and all recognize how the internet has paved the way to an explosion in quality online content. However, piracy has boomed as a result: ACE says that last year saw 5.4 billion downloads of pirated films and TV shows." I'm not sure how these statistics hold against real revenue loss (or the imaginary one), however this might be a development to watch for.

23 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Time to cancel netflix by zedaroca · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I canceled cable for this reason. It's morally wrong to finance the fight against freedom on the Internet. And destroying freedom on the Internet is the only way to enforce the their laws.

    1. Re: Time to cancel netflix by thundercattt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I cancelled the day they started the battle vs VPN's and their geoblocking. Kodi has filled the void nicely, I tried to pay for things but some company kept telling me what I could or couldn't do.

    2. Re:Time to cancel netflix by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I canceled cable because most (not all) of what was offered is pure shit.

      Sports, home decorating, sports, celebrity crap, hunting bigfoot, cooking, cooking, sports, cooking, game shows, shopping channel, honey boo boo, ice truckers, reality TV shows, more shopping, more celebrity crap, fishing, golfing, more bigfoot, more game shows....and on and on. It's drivel, replicated over and over and over.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    3. Re: Time to cancel netflix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Only people with money deserve access to culture. Fuck the poor! Long live financial tyranny!

    4. Re: Time to cancel netflix by turbidostato · · Score: 3, Funny

      "And work closely with law enforcement"

      All this is certainly great news.

      Finally a joint endeavour between public and private entities to put an end to this modern day scourge. Once again the waters off Somalia and other hot spots will be peaceful without pirates.

    5. Re:Time to cancel netflix by iampiti · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Come on, you can't seriously define freedom as being able to download Netflix and Hollywood created content. It's just entertainment created by for profit companies. It isn't gonna cure diseases, it isn't gonna help hunger or global warning. It's just enterntainment and nobody is entitled to it.
      Freedom is about net neutrality, freedom of speech, democracy and so on, not about this.
      I do pirate content from time to time but I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm entitled to it. I totally defend the rights of companies to create content with their own money and to profit from it.
      Culture? There's lots of it available for free in public libraries around the world. Also, lots of creative commons content out there.

    6. Re:Time to cancel netflix by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 2

      Come on, you can't seriously define freedom as being able to download Netflix and Hollywood created content.

      This is a red herring. Regardless of your stance on copyright, the issue is not whether one can obtain copyrighted content for free, but rather the collateral damage to the Internet and society as a whole resulting from Hollywood's quixotic quest to eliminate copyright infringement at all costs. Most of the negative effects of this quest are born not by "pirates" but by paying customers—after all, the "pirates" get the version without any DRM while those who follow Hollywood's rules are stuck with obnoxious restrictions on where and how they can view the content they payed for. That's not even considering the pervasive effort to avoid giving the owners of devices administrative control over their own hardware, mostly for the sake of enforcing said DRM (e.g. Netflix recently blocking their app from being installed on rooted smartphones), or the push to conscript ISPs to act as copyright enforcement agents, trolling every scrap of private online conversation for the slightest suggestion of impropriety and banning subscribers from the Internet on the basis of unproven complaints.

      Even if you think copyright is a good thing—and I don't—the measures taken to enforce it have clearly long since grown out of proportion to the supposed offense. Hollywood—the entire content industry—is not worth the collateral damage they are inflicting. So far as I am concerned, if they cannot survive in a post-copyright world, so be it. Let them fail.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  2. It's fine, I just won't watch anymore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I pirate stuff I'm wishy washy about. If I really want something, I'll buy it. Usually I end up buying stuff I pirated.

    But whatever, no more pirating means a lot less buying. Saves me money!

    1. Re: It's fine, I just won't watch anymore by thundercattt · · Score: 2

      That's how I am too. We remember growing up in the 80s/90s movies were fantastic. You watched them and watched them again. Now, I see a new on theater movie and it's 50/50 if it's going to suck (closer to 75/25). So, I watch it for free, if it is memorable then I purchase.

    2. Re: It's fine, I just won't watch anymore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hint: Everybody remembers what they grew up with as fantastic. It's got a lot more to do with being 15 and not 35 rather than the actual content.

      You are entitled to your opinion, but your above statement is easily refuted.

      Go watch Lawrence of Arabia and tell me there's no difference in content. Just because you don't acknowledge there were truly great movies made in the past doesn't mean it didn't happen. What's next, are you going to claim the 19th century produced no great music ? Just because you have the taste of a Philistine doesn't mean the rest of us do, sonny boy.

  3. That's remarkably LOW downloading by gurps_npc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Less than 1 download per person. If this was a food try before you buy) , that means not everyone took one.

    Sounds to me like people are most likely trying to get reasonable service that is not available for sale, rather than pirating.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:That's remarkably LOW downloading by gurps_npc · · Score: 2

      No, it's about racists that think China doesn't have internet access. More than 1/2 of China has internet access, although most of them use mobile platforms. (https://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/01/16/chinas-internet-population-numbered-618m-end-2013-81-connecting-via-mobile/) To get numbers like that it means that even rice farmers get the internet.

      India has similar numbers.

      Basically, the population of most countries is currently in large cities and people living in large cities get the internet. It is cheap compared to it's benefit.

      --
      excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  4. They've already been fighting piracy for years... by cunina · · Score: 2

    ... with an utterly brilliant and highly effective system: make shows and films so god damned awful that no one will bother to pirate them

  5. Copyright gets no respect in this country by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and thats because the social contract has been nullified. The deal was that we give them a temporary monopoly and in return they add to the public domain. Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse suspended public domain indefinitely, and thus have reneged on their side of the social contract. Why should we continue to uphold our end of the bargain?

    This is why no one has any respect for copyright, nobody feels the slightest twinge of guilt bypassing your paywalls & getting your content for free. Perhaps someday you'll be able to get society at large back to the table to discuss a new contract, but i doubt it.

    Until then I guess you'll just have to keep suing your customers, thats a sure way to win back their loyalty.

    1. Re:Copyright gets no respect in this country by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To be fair, it's not just the U.S. It's the Berne Convention that established long international copyright terms (minimum of 50 years after author's death). In some ways, the U.S. arguably just brought its copyright terms up to the "international standard" in recent decades. I agree with you that such lengthy terms are preposterous and almost completely negate the original concept of "public domain."

    2. Re:Copyright gets no respect in this country by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Who do you think pushed for the convention to have such long copyright terms? It just lets the media companies save face by saying "No, we don't want this long copyright, but international law requires it so pity us" and the novice person takes that at face value rather than looking into who wrote those sections of international law. Simple misdirection and sadly it works. We increased international standards as a workaround to directly increasing them here as doing so would have been too politically unpopular. Now it's 'sorry, out of our hands'.

    3. Re:Copyright gets no respect in this country by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 2

      The deal was that we give them a temporary monopoly and in return they add to the public domain. Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse suspended public domain indefinitely, and thus have reneged on their side of the social contract. Why should we continue to uphold our end of the bargain?

      This is a common argument, but a lame one. The vast majority of content that is illegally shared online is very recent, often less than a year or two old. It would have been covered by copyright even in the original form with just a few years of protection for the rightsholder.

      The erosion of the public domain and repeated extensions to the length of copyright protection are real problems and should be fixed, but they are a very issue.

      This is why no one has any respect for copyright, nobody feels the slightest twinge of guilt bypassing your paywalls & getting your content for free.

      A lot of people don't even understand copyright. They just assume that if they can get something for free online, that's OK. They'll even rip off more positive content providers who don't want to use DRM, and tell them that if they don't want people to just copy all their stuff they shouldn't deliver it as standard video/audio files. (Seriously, I've been involved with some of these businesses and seen the mails. People really do this.)

      Until then I guess you'll just have to keep suing your customers, thats a sure way to win back their loyalty.

      And yet someone who pirates all your stuff isn't your customer, and statistically the friends they will badmouth you to if you do take legal action against them are also unlikely to be your customers. Customers pay you money in return for your stuff, you see.

      The penalties for copyright infringement are grossly disproportionate in some cases, IMHO, but they certainly can provide a degree of compensation to rightsholders whose material is widely distributed in violation of those rights.

      All the anti-copyright arguments about how "I was just sampling but would have bought it anyway if it was good", or "I'd have bought it if you just provided it through a more convenient channel", or "If you sue me then you'll just be attacking your own customers and then they won't buy from you in the future"... don't mean a thing when a judge rules that your savings now belong to the lawyers from Big Media.

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
  6. Re:Stealing? by x0ra · · Score: 2

    it's the same good old argument the RIAA has been making all these years... all these "billions" lost is sales that would never have been made to begin with.

  7. Easy way to stop piracy by hawguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Want to stop piracy? Then make all content available everywhere. Don't make me sign up for Netflix, Amazon Video, HBO Now, Hulu, and a half dozen streaming providers just to watch the content I want to see.

    If you make it easier to pirate content than to purchase it legally, you're going to lose the battle.

    And don't nickel and dime me, don't make me pay $3.99/episode for a show that will cost $20 when all 20 episodes come out on DVD, stuff like that is what make people decide to click on the torrent instead of the "Purchase" link.

    1. Re:Easy way to stop piracy by Baron_Yam · · Score: 2

      >Want to stop piracy? Then make all content available everywhere. Don't make me sign up for Netflix, Amazon Video, HBO Now, Hulu, and a half dozen streaming providers just to watch the content I want to see.

      I have previously predicted that the current streaming providers will become the new studios, and regional services will offer single points of access and billing to customers, becoming the new cable companies.

      I believe there will be a market for companies that set up shop doing nothing more than having a local cache of the most popular items and pass-through streaming of the less-requested ones, as well as providing centralized billing and technical support.

      It will require Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Hulu, and a half dozen other streaming providers to give up on attempting to monopolize the world's eyeballs and instead accept that they will be competing with each other... but ultimately I think it'll happen.

  8. User experience and quality first by daffy951 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would say they should focus on providing the same quality as pirated material on all markets at the same time.
    They can never provide better quality, since what they provide will be copied. But make sure all customers with good enough connections can stream/download as high quality as possible, for a fair price.
    Don't geo block. The ones who get blocked will get it some other way.
    No need for big investments in DRM. What can be seen & heard can and will be replicated. Accept that. You're just making it annoying for legitimate customers, while the pirates enjoy DRM free versions from torrent sites.

  9. Re:Alliance blah,blah,blah by BlueStrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Like just about every other "alliance" of large corporations, they give themselves some bullshit name to window dress the fact that they are looking to screw people over one way or another.

    In another day and age, back before crony-capitalism passed the tipping-point and jumped the shark, they had another name for a group of leading corporations in an industry working together to control a market, set prices, and lobby for laws.

    A "cartel".

    But, that was before the money and resources the corporations offered those in power made them realize that "cartels" are really "alliances" in many cases and are now a good thing.

    Strat

    --
    Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
  10. Stealing shit by JonnyCalcutta · · Score: 3, Funny

    How do you steal shit? Do you take it directly from the bowl or get in from the treatment plant in bulk? Its just not a crime I've heard of before, although nothing surprises me anymore. What do they do with the shit once they've stolen it? Is there a good market? So many questions!