Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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More on piracy from The Guardian:

At the last Consumer Electronic Show, the British market intelligence firm Envisional presented its remarkable State of Digital Piracy Study. Here are some highlights:

• Pirated contents accounts for 24% of the worldwide internet bandwidth consumption.

• The biggest chunk is carried by bittorrent (the protocol used for file sharing); it weighs about 40% of the illegitimate content in Europe and 20% in the US (including downstream and upstream). Worldwide, bittorrent gets 250 million UVs per month.

• The second tier is made by the so-called cyberlockers (5% of the global bandwidth), among them the infamous Megaupload, raided a few days ago by the FBI and the New Zealand police. On the 500 million uniques visitors per month to cyberlockers, Megaupload drained 93 million UVs. (To put things in perspective, the entire US newspaper industry gets about 110 million UVs per month). The Cyberlockers segment has twice the users but consumes eight times less bandwidth than bittorrent simply because files are much bigger on the peer-to-peer system.

• The third significant segment in piracy is illegal video streaming (1.4% of the global bandwidth.)

There are three ways to fight piracy: endless legal actions, legally blocking access, or creating alternative legit offers.

I think this is the interesting point – creating alternative legitimate ways of getting digital content cuts piracy.

Compare the difference in US and EU internet traffic:

US – Netflix takes the largest chunk

EU – Bittorrent takes the largest chunk

via Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Dangerous Minds | Kiss your free movies and music goodbye: Is the era of digital piracy over?

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In light of the Megaupload closure, Richard Metzger believes this is the end of the era of the cyber-locker.

If you’ve been illegally downloading movies, music, software, e-books, pr0n or anything else from the Internet’s various file sharing cyber-locker services like Megaupload or Filesonic—and you know who you are—then I hope you got your fill, because you can pretty kiss those days goodbye.

After the arrest in New Zealand last week of German-born Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (AKA Kim Schmitz), several—most—of the file-sharing businesses are opting to close suddenly or greatly modifying their business models

via Dangerous Minds | Kiss your free movies and music goodbye: Is the era of digital piracy over?.

How Twitter saved event TV | Technology | The Guardian

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This article on how Twitter is bringing back ‘event TV’, providing the watercoooler where shows are discussed, is worth a read for media students.

The phenomenon is too new for any official research to have been carried out, but anecdotal evidence suggests I am not alone in finding that Twitter has become embedded in my TV viewing (non-) life. Social networking sites – especially Twitter, because it is designed to exchange real-time responses among a loose group of people – are restoring a sense of excitement to television.

Event TV was thought to be dying as channels proliferated, people timeshifted their viewing and audiences fragmented in a way that made the viewing figures of yesteryear (21.6 million to find out who shot JR, 28 million every time Eric and Ernie popped their Christmas hats on, 32.3 million for the 1966 World Cup) seem like the fevered dream of an overstrained ITV exec. “Watercooler moments”, whereby people gathered the next day at work to talk about a particular attention-snagging programme or plot twist, were deemed to have vanished. Now they are back. The only difference is you don’t have to wait until the next day to share your amazement, vent your spleen or bemoan the death/betrayal/surprisingly good profiteroles of your favourite character, singer or #gbbo contestant.

via How Twitter saved event TV | Technology | The Guardian.

Was Megaupload bad for the creative industries? | Loz Kaye and Frances Moore | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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Last week Megaupload, a high profile ‘file locker’ that allegedly hosted much pirated content, was been closed down and the operators arrested. The Guardian asks representatives from the Pirate party and the IFPI what harm the site caused.

The accusation against Megaupload was that it caused £300m in lost sales. But there’s no concrete evidence for that, or that shutting a site down will result in finding even a portion of that £300m. It’s claimed that the controversial Digital Economy Act will bring £200m yearly into the creative sector, but where is this money going to come from while incomes are squeezed?…We all – pirates and artists – have an interest in a properly functioning and free internet. Last year 70% of the total volume of British music sales were digital. The BPI would do well to remember that its future income is dependant on the very people it is currently antagonising.

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The problem with piracy is that it kills investment in culture – not just the financial investment of a music or film company, but the creative investment of the artist and creator. It takes time, toil and money to make that track or album that will inspire audiences across the world. That is why we have copyright, which is founded on the principle that those who create have the right to choose how their works are exploited.

via Was Megaupload bad for the creative industries? | Loz Kaye and Frances Moore | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Burglars as consumers: Not worth nicking | The Economist

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The death of physical media continues apace as The Economist notes that burglars no longer bother to steal DVDs and CDs, which are now only taken in 7% of burglaries when other items are stolen.

“These sorts of crimes are regarded even by criminals as the preserve of the desperate,” says James Treadwell, a Leicester University criminologist. Burglars are generally drug-addled, unskilled and opportunistic. Yet they are capable of making economic calculations. And their behaviour reveals something about the state of the media business. Hollywood and the record labels believe they can hold off the threat from technology, both legitimate and illegitimate, and maintain the value of their products. Britain’s burglars disagree.

This doesn’t mean your music’s safe, however – computers are the things most likely to be taken.

Burglars as consumers: Not worth nicking | The Economist via Boing Boing

Digital Exhibition – David Bordwell

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I’ve often wondered how the various processes of digital cinema exhibition work. We live in an age when new gadgets arrive almost every day, and sink into obsolesence and incompatibility with alarming rapidity. David Bordwell is producing a fascinating series of posts on this, with four so far. These are lengthy and technical reads, but fascinating stuff, and would provide excellent material for a case study for A2 Film Studies or Media Studies. Timely stuff, as we hear of projectionists being made redundant throughout the UK.

Hands off British film, Mr Cameron | Peter Bradshaw | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Peter Bradshaw is on form as he writes about David Cameron’s statement that lottery funding should be directed towards mainstream films:

The sheer audacity is staggering. He says he wants to “build on the incredible success of recent years”, but one of his administration’s most sensational acts of party political grandstanding and spite was to cancel the UK Film Council – a creation of the Labour years – just when it was delivering not merely critically admired work but precisely those commercial hits of the kind Cameron professes to yearn for.

Could there be any better example of the classy, Brit-heritage smash than The King’s Speech, a film which would not have existed without the UK Film Council’s support? And yet just when this movie’s producers were taking their Oscars away in a wheelbarrow, the Film Council was in the process of being wound up. It was the equivalent of David Cameron rushing on to the field at the final whistle of 2003 Rugby World Cup, calling for silence, and announcing that the coaching system was all wrong, and Clive Woodward and Jonny Wilkinson should be given their P45s right away.

I suspect Cameron now realises the UK Film Council move was one of his government’s silliest blunders. It wasn’t broke – so he broke it. Now he’s returning to the fray, with some choice rhetoric about getting our British movie industry to up its game to rival Hollywood, a rhetoric he has learned from the Blair-Brown administration which, in fact, really did care about boosting cinema.

But it’s not just a case of taking the “commercial”-looking projects and throwing money at them for higher returns. It doesn’t work like that. Producing movies – any kind of movies – is a gamble. As the great screenwriter William Goldman said: nobody knows anything. The UK Film Council got it pretty wrong in the early years of its existence in chasing, and being seen to chase, commercial hits. It resulted in some embarrassing dross, chiefly about mockney gangsters.

Are we destined to go through this again? The UK Film Council was not perfect, and it certainly had its critics, but its successes were coming through the pipeline because it was always keen on self-scrutiny and research, always trying to get the balance between supporting crowd-pleasers and critical darlings. Because these go together, and the distinction is never clear in any case.

The challenge is to make good films, and to make as many as possible and to raise the statistical likelihood of success as high as possible. It may sound naive, but not as naive as this implied image of hearty commercial films starved of cash by lefty arthouse conspirators.

via Hands off British film, Mr Cameron | Peter Bradshaw | Comment is free | The Guardian.

BBC News – UK films urged to be more ‘mainstream’ in new report

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This BBC article has a good range of opinion on the types of film the British industry should be producing. The Ken Loach interview on the BBC site is worth watching.

The British film industry should back more mainstream movies, a report is expected to recommend next week.

Ahead of a visit to Pinewood Studios on Wednesday, Prime Minister David Cameron said the film industry should support “commercially successful pictures”.

His comments come before the publication of Lord Smith’s review into the government’s film policy on Monday.

The main criticism of Cameron’s view is that it can be hard to predict what films will actually be successful until they start showing in cinemas, as argued by Mark Herbert:

Mark Herbert, chief executive of Warp Films, which has made films including This Is England, Submarine and Tyrannosaur, said it was impossible to predict which films would be commercially successful.

He said the company’s biggest commercial success had been Four Lions, a comedy about inept suicide bombers.

“It took £3m at the box office, won festivals, did brilliant business in Germany and France and is up there with big studio films in terms of DVD sales.

“Yet nobody backed that. There was no public money in that. When I was trying to raise the money, I had very experienced funders and producers saying ‘Nobody will go and watch this film.’”

He also pointed out that black and white silent film The Artist was making more money per screen than any other film currently on release in the UK and is favourite to win best picture at the Oscars – but would not have looked like a hit on paper.

“You can imagine people saying ‘Who’s going to watch a black and white silent film?’ But they are, and people are loving it,” he said.

This is a key issue to consider for AS Film students. It’s worth reading the whole article.

via BBC News – UK films urged to be more ‘mainstream’ in new report.