Tag Archives: copyright

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?.

Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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This Cory Doctorow article looks at the difficulties in obtaining high quality legal downloads of films. It seems that it remains much easier to illegally download, and the quality will probably be better too. He also casts doubt on the industry’s claims of lost earnings through piracy.

ORG’s study Can’t look now: finding film online investigated the lawful availability of downloads for “recent bestsellers and catalogues of critically acclaimed films, including the top 50 British films” and what they found was that the claims of the lawful market for movies are as evidence-free as the piracy claims they accompany.

Here’s what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn’t available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally).

And while recent blockbusters fare better, it’s still a patchwork, requiring the public to open accounts with several services to access the whole catalogue (which still has many important omissions).

But even in those marketplaces, movies are a bad deal – movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher when downloaded over the internet versus buying the same movies on DVDs. Some entertainment industry insiders argue that DVDs, boxes and so forth add negligible expense to their bottom line, but it’s hard to see how movie could cost less on physical DVDs than as ethereal bits, unless the explanation is price-gouging. To add insult to injury, the high-priced online versions are often sold at lower resolutions than the same movies on cheap DVDs.

via Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

BBC – Newsbeat – Illegal UK film downloads up 30%, new figures suggest

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This Newsbeat post includes a video piece and links to other piracy-related articles considering music as well:

The number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30% in five years, new figures suggest.

That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.

Film industry bosses say it is costing £170m every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The research also shows a big rise in TV shows being pirated online.

via BBC – Newsbeat – Illegal UK film downloads up 30%, new figures suggest.

Judge to music industry: ‘Worth trillions? Forget it’ • The Register

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Who says the music industry is greedy and overvalues their own importance? Well, one US judge has suggested they may be being a little ambitious by claiming that their losses due to piracy exceed the entire global GDP:

Judge Kimba Wood revealed that the record companies, seeking statutory damages against the music-sharing service, are seeking damages predicated on the “number of direct infringers per work” – leading to a damages claim of as much as $75 trillion dollars (according to Wikipedia, total global GDP is around $69 trillion)”.

via Judge to music industry: ‘Worth trillions? Forget it’ • The Register.

LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will – Boing Boing

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Whilst the music industry are blaming lost sales purely on piracy, a couple of LSE economists have some quite different conclusions to draw:

Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection, a paper by the London School of Economics’ Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng, is an eye-opening look at the economics of file-sharing and music. The authors argue that an overall decline in consumer entertainment spending is to blame for the music industry’s downturn, supporting their assertion with (for example), research showing that entertainment spending declined by 40 percent in households that didn’t own computers (who probably weren’t downloading!) over the period of overall decline for the industry.

Their conclusion is that copyright enforcement won’t bring back consumer spending on music — but it will strangle new business models built on file-sharing, robbing the next generation of musicians without paying the current generation.

via LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will – Boing Boing.

Global recorded music sales fall almost $1.5bn amid increased piracy | Business | guardian.co.uk

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Figures show a significant decline in music sales, with the music industry blaming this on piracy.

Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn (£930m) last year as digital piracy continued to take its toll on the industry, with the UK losing its mantle as the third-largest music market after “physical” sales of CDs collapsed by almost a fifth.

However, other sources are not so quick to claim that a decline in such sales can be solely attributed to piracy.

via Global recorded music sales fall almost $1.5bn amid increased piracy | Business | guardian.co.uk.

Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services – Boing Boing

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Until Apple launched the iTunes store, it was much easier to pirate music than to legally download it. This post looks at how illegally downloaded TV shows are currently preferable to legal alternatives for many people:

“Piracy is the Future of Television” is Abigail De Kosnik’s Convergence Culture Consortium paper on the many ways in which piracy is preferable to buying legitimate online TV options. None of these advantages are related to price — it may be hard to compete with free, but it’s impossible to compete with free when you offer something worse than the free option.

via Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services – Boing Boing.

Pirating the 2011 Oscars – Waxy.org

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Following on from yesterday’s AS Film lesson, the data for piracy and the 2011 Oscars is out, with an excellent post at waxy.org. It is interesting to see how the situation changes each year, with studios taking anti-piracy steps such as watermarking screener copies, and pirates working round this. For example:

For the first year, the first high-quality leak of a film — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — was a PPV rip, most likely from a hotel’s new movie releases on pay-per-view.

There is a Google spreadsheet containing all the data that shows the full picture.

One prediction: The end of the DVD screener is near. This year, Fox Searchlight distributed three screeners with iTunes — 127 Hours, Black Swan, and Conviction — to all 93,000 voting members of the Screen Actors’ Guild, marking the first time a major studio’s used Apple’s service for screener distribution.

Voters get the additional convenience of being able to watch films on their computers, Apple TVs, iPads and iPhones, while studios save the time and expense of distributing physical media. If this experiment’s successful, it seems likely other studios will follow.

via Pirating the 2011 Oscars – Waxy.org.