Tag Archives: piracy

Pirates Beware: DVD Anti-Piracy Warning Now Twice as Fierce | Threat Level | Wired.com

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This Wired article looks at the additional anti-piracy warnings that are to appear on US DVDs. Like DRM, this is an attempt at preventing piracy that affects legitimate customers but not pirates. DVDs will now be twice as annoying before you get to watch the film you’ve paid for, unless you have a pirate version which will load immediately.

Hollywood and the federal government have partnered to create updated and even more annoying anti-piracy warnings that will be included in new home-release DVDs and Blu-ray discs beginning this week, the government said Tuesday.

The new warnings now have three scary logos intended to deter those who might violate copyright law by making a back-up copy, ripping a movie to a tablet-friendly file, uploading it to a peer-to-peer network or make illegal copies to send to military service members in Iraq.

via Pirates Beware: DVD Anti-Piracy Warning Now Twice as Fierce | Threat Level | Wired.com.

The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record | TorrentFreak

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This article provides some good analysis of why a massively-downloaded CAM copy of The Avengers didn’t stop the film from having the biggest opening weekend of all time.

A week before its premiere in US movie theaters, a camcorded version of The Avengers appeared online.

Immediately thousands of fans jumped on the release and according to figures collated by TorrentFreak, in the days that followed it was downloaded half a million times. While this may very well be a record for a “CAM” movie, it failed to exceed the download numbers of several other movies that were available in higher quality.

Record or not, the movie’s distributer Disney must have been terrified by this early release. However, this weekend the suits at the studio were able to breathe a sign of relief, or rather, start popping open the Champagne.

With more than $200 million in box office revenue, The Avengers had the most successful first weekend in movie history. It broke the record set by Harry Potter last year by more than $30 million, despite the “massive” piracy.

via The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record | TorrentFreak.

The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media | Technology | The Guardian

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The Guardian looks at how internet users rallied to combat legislation like SOPA that restricts online use for the benefit of media institutions:

Stark points to a study by Musiksverige (Music Sweden), an industry association, that found music piracy in Sweden fell significantly after the introduction of Spotify, a streaming music service. “It shows what we have said all along: people want to reward artists for their work.”

Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder, agrees. “I’m hopeful right now. These are not soundbite issues, they are complicated. If you look at the work that Reddit’s community did investigating Sopa, you can see that there is a lot of thought going into these issues in the community. Like a lot of rights, I think we took our right to a life online for granted until it was challenged. I think we are on guard now.”

Media execs are on guard too. Many look to the music industry and fear they may be next. Since the peer-to-peer filesharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the US have dropped 53%, from $14.6bn to $6.9bn in 2010. The digital world is a lot less lucrative than selling DVDs.

Last year the movie industry made $30bn at the box office worldwide. Ed Epstein, author of The Hollywood Economist, calculates box office revenue accounts for just 10% of a hit movie’s money. The rest comes from cable and satellite channels, pay-per-view TV, video rentals, DVD sales and digital downloads. All that extra cash comes from sources that Hollywood once railed against, and pressed Washington to crack down on.

via The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media | Technology | The Guardian.

Warners’ “Disc to Digital” scheme

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Another example of how behind the times the film industry is from Craig Grannell. The LA Times reports that Warners are launching a programme called ‘Disc to Digital’ in an attempt to cut piracy. This will allow DVD owners to bring their DVDs to a shop and pay to have them converted to a digital file.

As someone with a large collection of DVDs, this seems poorly thought out to me. Why would I want to load them into my car, drive somewhere, unload them all, hand them to a shop and pay when I could just download Handbrake for free and have my digital copy within a few minutes? How much would it cost? I could quite imagine the situation where paying the shop to rip a copy costs more than buying the DVD from Amazon.

It’s just odd that Warners would come up with a costly and cumbersome solution to a problem solved long ago by free software.

Dear Hollywood, nostalgia is not a business model – Ideas@Innovations – The Washington Post

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Post-Oscars blog post from the Washington Post about the state of Hollywood and the internet.

The problem with the entertainment industry is not the Internet or overseas foreign pirates — it’s a nostalgia for a past that will never return. Unfortunately, nostalgia is not a business model. The relentless pace of business in today’s digital world means that you either innovate or get out of the way.

And

It’s clear that the business model of Hollywood is built around scarcity, while the business model of Web-based companies is built around abundance. How the leaders of these two industries handle the vast dichotomy between these two models will tell you a lot about the future of video entertainment. During last night’s Academy Awards, the Hollywood message was distinctly one of scarcity, and it went something like this: It is only a few unique individuals, trained for generations, who can create this magic on a consistent basis. Anyone who has spent more than a few hours on the Internet knows otherwise – that the world is full of uniquely talented people, crowdfunding their ideas, embracing off-the-shelf digital tools and experimenting with innovative new formats for film.

via Dear Hollywood, nostalgia is not a business model – Ideas@Innovations – The Washington Post.

Right versus pragmatic – Marco.org

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This piece by Marco Ament is another good contribution to the debate on piracy triggered by last week’s The Oatmeal comic.

Not all piracy represents lost sales: many pirates would never have paid, and would rather go without whatever they can’t easily pirate. That’s not a market worth worrying too much about, because there’s not much anyone can do to stop it, and any attempts to slow it down usually just limit, inconvenience, frustrate, and anger the paying customers.

And

Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.

The pragmatic approach is to address the demand.

Right versus pragmatic – Marco.org.

Piracy roundup

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There have been several interesting contributions to the piracy debate recently, too many to give each one an individual post. This Oatmeal cartoon has been circulating widely on Twitter and elsewhere, encapsulating the commonly held view that piracy is worsened by the fact that it can be very difficult to legally buy digital content in some cases, an argument also recently expressed by Matt Gemmell. An older Boing Boing post is also relevant here, about how much more frustrating it is to watch a legal DVD copy than a pirate one due to unskippable anti-piracy messages and trailers.

Reasoned responses have come from Andy Ihnatko and Craig Grannell who both make a similar point – that difficulty in buying something doesn’t mean we are entitled to steal it – whilst acknowledging the point The Oatmeal post makes.

The essence of the argument is as follows:

  • Pirates – media institutions make it too hard to buy digital content, by making it more expensive than DVDs, not available in all regions at the same time, not compatible with a wide range of devices, or simply not available at all. Piracy would be reduced if it was easier to be a legal consumer.
  • Non-pirates (if we are sticking with the established nautical metaphor, is this the navy?) – we are talking about entertainment products here, not food or medicine required to save lives. Difficulties in easily obtaining a media product legally does not mean that we are therefore entitled to steal it instead. It is possible to simply wait until it is available, buy a DVD copy or just go without.

Finally, reports yesterday also said that The Pirate Bay may well soon be blocked in the UK, much as Newzbin2 was, as attempts to censor the internet in order to protect the interests of media institutions continue.

Hang The Pirates — But Start With The Movie Moguls And Record Execs « Nosey Parker

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This piece by Al Parker of the Toronto Sun is well worth a read for anyone interested in the MegaUpload shutdown:

Law enforcement agents smash their way into a private building with sledgehammers and crowbars as part of a broad organized crackdown on “pirates” and “outlaws” who are brazenly flouting U.S. copyright and patent law, supposedly costing the legitimate copyright and patent holders a fortune in lost — “stolen” — revenue.

The legally mandated enforcers cause extensive, malicious damage and confiscate equipment, files, material and money that are the legal property of the building’s owner, who is charged with a variety of offences related to the alleged theft of intellectual property in the form of motion-picture films and technology.

Having shut down the business of the building without the necessity of a guilty verdict in court and having appropriated private property, again without a court finding of guilt, the enforcers leave the victim of their legally sanctioned invasion to pick up the broken pieces of his life.

Sounds a lot like Kim Dotcom (nee Schmitz), the Internet tycoon currently sitting in a New Zealand jail waiting for the U.S. government and its Hollywood backers to finally, slowly (the U.S. won’t actually produce documents for another month) get around to filing a formal extradition request on copyright infringement conspiracy charges.

But it’s not.

The victim could have been Carl Laemmle or William Fox or one of the dozen other independent producers who were later glorified as the founders of Hollywood. The legal enforcers were hired thugs representing Thomas Edison’s motion picture trust, a monopoly combine that controlled almost all aspects of movie technology, production and distribution in the U.S. before World War I. And the time was 1910 — more than 100 years ago.

Hang The Pirates — But Start With The Movie Moguls And Record Execs « Nosey Parker.

The Sky is Rising: report shows that entertainment industry is thriving; anti-piracy laws are about profit-maximization, not survival – Boing Boing

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Whilst we face a radically changed internet in order to try and limit piracy, this Cory Doctorow post links to a report showing how entertainment revenue has risen during the period it is supposed to have been harmed.

The Sky is Rising: report shows that entertainment industry is thriving; anti-piracy laws are about profit-maximization, not survival – Boing Boing.