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Film Industry Unaffected by P2P
Another research has proved that the entertainment industry falsely claims that it’s suffering from the piracy caused by BitTorrent networks. The research is titled “Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales”, and was conducted by economics researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College.
It turned out that the politicians shouldn’t be in such a rush to surrender their people’s freedoms in order to prop up the film industry. According to the results of the research, the United States box office returns aren’t correlated to BitTorrent sharing. In addition, it turned out that shorter delays between the United States exhibition and overseas releases cause less file-sharing.
The study proved once again that the film industry still fails to realize that an effective marketing campaign for new releases in the United States would only stimulate demand in other countries. Meanwhile, if there is no legal way to satisfy this demand, significant part of the viewers would choose illegal methods, according to the report.
In addition, the results of the study showed that movie studios has been wasting fortunes policing copyrights, though they could save it by releasing the movies at the same time as the United States. Currently, film studios believe they are saving money by releasing films at what they think is “the right time”, while their timing is still ignored by online pirates who prefer to take the movies from BitTorrent instead of waiting.
Consumers in the United States, according to the report, would mostly choose the box office over piracy. In other words, if piracy displaced box office sales in the country, the researchers would have expected the slope of the returns profile to shift more considerably as peer-to-peer networks became more widely adopted.
At the same time, the scientists who carried out the study couldn’t see an irregular drop in returns of the local box office sales that could fault BitTorrent. All in all, the report indicated that the entertainment industry wouldn’t lose so much money if the studios decided to release its flicks internationally simultaneously. The same position, however, has been voiced many times before, but the movie industry for some reason refuses to consider this option.
Australia Held Secret Piracy Meetings
The Australian government, which has been trying to introduce some kind of censorship for a while now, is reported to currently be engaged in secret meetings with Internet service providers and the entertainment industry in attempt to see if the country can bring in something before anyone notices.
It seems that the Australians have some weird trend in their government, which believes that there are votes with the Christian Right by censoring the web. Despite the fact that every survey in Australia seems to prove it is only a waste of time, a number of governments have been shelving and re-activating the plans.
The main problem is that any online filter is quite easy to get around, so the Internet service providers refuse to control them. Today the suspicions are that the desire for filtering within the Australian government, coupled with the desire of the entertainment industry to lock up users suspected of file-sharing, have somehow formed an unholy alliance.
Local media reported that the Federal Government of Australia has held a number of closed door meetings between the content and telecommunications industries. The idea of the meetings is to invent a way of locking up file-sharers without the need to find evidence. This will, in the meantime, create a precedent where broadband providers have to police their subscribers.
However, the industry observers point out that it won’t be fair at all. The entertainment industry has been trying to sue the Internet service providers into introducing voluntary agreements where the industry could provide a list of their subscribers and the broadband providers would simply cut them off. Fortunately, thus far the courts have sided with the Internet service providers.
The secret meeting is, of course, stacked with the copyright owners, like the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), Foxtel, the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), the Australian Home Entertainment Distributor's Association, the Australian Performing Right Association, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, the Interactive Gaming and Entertainment Association, and the Australian Publishers Association.
Of the Australian Internet service providers Optus, Telstra, the Internet Industry Association, and the Communications Alliance, as well as networking vendor Ericsson have been invited to the meetings.
Tribler Is Fighting with Copyright Holders
It turned out that the consistent threats of the rights holders towards online services, their operators and Internet users despite the extent of their legality and legitimacy can also have positive effect. For example, they stimulate the innovative developers to come up with some new and sometimes amazing ideas to guarantee a free web for everyone. One of such ideas is Tribler.
Thanks to its decentralized design, this service can also be considered an invincible file-sharing application. The software designer explained that the only way to take this service down is to take the entire web down. The development of the service took over 5 years, with this piece of software having experienced 100% uptime since its launch, according to the researchers at Delft University of Technology in Holland.
The thing that sets Tribler apart from other applications is that its technology depends on the true power of P2P, which means that it doesn’t need any intermediate servers – the user’s computer will communicate directly with other computers running Tribler. The client’s creator, Dr. Pouwelse, explained that their key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded data sharing. The developers simply didn’t like unreliable servers and proved that with Tribler they had achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past 6 years. All of this was because they didn’t rely on shaky foundations like DNS, Internet servers or search portals.
As you can understand, the efforts of shutting down worldwide known cyberlocker MegaUpload were the first of their kind in the history of free web. Nevertheless, in case of decentralized applications like Tribler, the founder of copyright consulting company called Morganelli Group admitted that using the full power of the P2P technology could forever change the way BitTorrent is regarded today.
Without central location Tribler would make tracking people so much more important. At the same time, the consulting company admitted that this approach hasn’t been too effective earlier. They claimed that the crusade against a normal person has had very little effect because there are millions of people. If it was the central location, it would make for a very easy lawsuit. The service is already available online, but it seems to suffer from its popularity – the site sometimes welcomes new visitors with the apologizing message.
Industry’s Attempt to Shut ReDigi Failed
The motion of the music industry for a preliminary injunction ended up ditched. ReDigi, the first online seller of used digital music in the world, was launched in 2011. Unsurprisingly, the copyright issues that the site stepped right into arouse once the music industry found out about its existence.
Now, the recent news tells the story of a victorious ReDigi service against music label Capitol Records. The latter had accused the site of representing a “clearinghouse” for copyright violation as it allows visitors to buy and sell music that has been previously purchased on iTunes. Two weeks ago the opposition filed a motion of the victorious brief on the preliminary injunction.
In response, ReDigi held up the argument of the “first sale doctrine”. The latter grants the service a right to resell digital music. However, the recording industry insisted that the only method to move music around was to create copies upon copies without actually knowing for sure that originals were being deleted.
Meanwhile, search giant Google allied with the new service in proving why the lawsuit the recording industry filed against ReDigi can’t be regarded as a healthy one for the Internet business. Although the U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan originally dismissed the search giant’s attempts to meddle in the case, he ultimately had to admit that a court ruling favourable to the music industry in this case, which “raises much of technological and statutory issues”, could have created a dangerous ground for the future.
Indeed, the oncoming lawsuit reveals a number of mighty important aspects that could interest not just the music and movie industries and newly emerged business models, but the music consumers and media giants as well.
Disagree with RIAA? - A criminal!
The CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America has concluded that everyone who complained about the entertainment industry’s cunning plan to control the web is a criminal.
Cary Sherman has written in the New York Times that the campaign that was launched against the new copyright bills SOPA and PIPA was unfair. He insisted that Wikipedia and other opponents had fed Internet users with misinformation about what the bills really meant. Those have been claiming that SOPA and PIPA led to online filtering which would have put the United States on a par with such countries as China.
Cary Sherman pointed out that it wasn’t really the case. Perhaps, he means that online filtering in China was effected by the state, and the same would have been about these bills if they were enforced by the entertainment industry. Sherman emphasized that there was actually no difference between what was being touted in Stop Online Piracy Act and what happens when a US court, upon an accurate review of evidence, has ruled something to be unauthorized and when the authorities close down a shop fencing stolen products.
In response, industry observers point out that Sherman seems to be missing the fact that the bills in fact didn’t involve any evidence or courts at all. Indeed, the new legislation says that an individual could lose their online connections simply on the say so of the entertainment industry.
Cary Sherman claimed that although some of the opponents of both bills were undoubtedly worried about the way the legislation would be interpreted, most of them were people who believed that the creative content should be free. He wondered how many of the opposing e-mails were from the same users who had previously attacked the websites of the Department of Justice, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and many other outfits supporting anti-piracy laws in revenge to the recent seizure of a cyberlocker giant MegaUpload within the frames of an international digital piracy operation.
Sherman believes and wants everyone else to believe that it was hackers like the worldwide-known group Anonymous who engage in real filtering by stifling the speech of people with whom they disagree.
MPAA Called Google “Internet Owner”
The Motion Picture Association of America admitted that it didn’t get the Internet and therefore needed to talk to its owner – Google! Indeed, representatives of the MPAA have had to admit that the idea of the web is too fly for them, so they had to negotiate with its owner (somehow, it turned out to be Google) or just close it down.
The second boss in the MPAA, Michael O'Leary, claimed in the interview that the worldwide web’s owner Google has both out-manned and out-gunned Hollywood. O'Leary explained that the Motion Picture Association of America has been undergoing a process of education about this new fangled web so it could get a greater presence in the Internet environment. The MPAA representative also said that the current fights with everyone about uploading content to the Internet were all about the insecurity that Hollywood has about the web.
Michael O'Leary admitted that it was a fight on a platform it wasn’t quite comfortable with, and that’s why he and his colleagues were gathering against, as they say, "an opponent controlling that platform". This means that rather than trying to understand the new platform and get experience of the many entertainers who do understand the web, the MPAA pushed to regulate that which they fear.
Michael O'Leary for some reason strongly believes that the opponent in question, who controls the platform, is Google. So, as he sees it, the search giant not just controls the web, but it also leads the defense of its product. This point of view may explain why the entertainment industry was putting so much effort into closing down the search engine.
All of this sounds stupid for any Internet user. Not only this indicates that despite having studied “Internet for Dummies”, Michael O'Leary still hasn’t realized that nobody controls the Internet, but he also refuses to notice that the search engine came in late to the recent protests again new copyright legislations SOPA and PIPA. Moreover, this can also explain why the movie industry wants to negotiate with the search giant – it simply believes that it is talking to the web’s doorkeeper.
Nevertheless, even if the movie industry managed to make an arrangement with Google, there’s no indication that the rest of the web will follow or won’t adapt.
Holland Will Ban Torrent Trackers
The Dutch government has announced its future plans, which appeared to include fighting file-sharing in cooperation with the ISPs. The draft of new legislation, scheduled to enter the Dutch Parliament by this summer, would force all broadband providers to deny access to any violating online service. In case the ISPs fail to comply, they would be demanded to pay a €10,000/day fine up to a maximum of €250,000.The money will be transferred to BREIN – the Dutch anti-piracy outfit.
Recently, a Dutch court ordered two of the country’s ISPs, ZS4ALL and Ziggo, to block access to The Pirate Bay by the 1st of February. While Ziggo is going to comply with the court’s decision, it will at the same time file an appeal. Industry observers, including consumer and privacy advocates, have already released a warning, saying that the suggested law doesn’t actually differ from the online filtering applied in China and Iran.
Aside from this, BREIN is going to file complaints against some other Dutch Internet service providers (UPC, KPN, and T-Mobile) over the same matter. The two already targeted broadband providers, plus these three, will allow BREIN to target more than 80% of the Dutch market. Although the suggested anti-piracy bill doesn’t incriminate Internet users for file-sharing (because of some home-use exception for end users), uploading unauthorized content is illegal.
By enforcing such legislation, the country’s government is hoping to point Internet users towards legitimate sources of movies, music and other kinds of digital content by simply cutting out their access to unauthorized services.
Thanks to the current anti-piracy legislation of Netherlands, which is not very strict to the infringers, the Netherlands is believed to feature a higher use of illegal websites and file-sharing services than any other European country. A research was recently carried out by the International Federation of the Phonographic. According to its result, around a quarter of European online users are involved in illegal file-sharing. At the same time, some companies in the Netherlands, such as Considerati, have their own estimations of the piracy rate, saying that is as high as 40%. Well, we’ll see what kind of law will finally survive in that country.
File-Sharing Services Fear Seizures
It seems that the entertainment industry may finally win thanks to American police co-operation. Information storage websites started to pull their file-sharing services due to the fears that the authorities will seize domains and arrest owners.
A number of large file-sharing services, including FileSonic, FileServe, and Uploaded, have abruptly stopped sharing of entertainment content and other software right after the American Justice Department shut down MegaUpload.
Now the file-sharing sites’ owners fear of being arrested like the founders of MegaUpload. Everyone knows that cyberlockers allow Internet users to easily upload, store and share big files on their servers in the Internet cloud. The type of content usually uploaded to the web includes films, music, gaming applications, program instruments, and multimedia presentations. However, the problem remains: file-sharing services can’t invent an effective method to prevent pirates from using the service.
Recently, FileSonic started establishing formal distribution agreements with musicians who would have shut out the large record labels while giving content creators more cash. But such contracts would be frozen if the government was to pursue copyright violation actions against FileSonic. The service is based in the United Kingdom, and it seems that it is doing its best to get rid of unauthorized content. Last month, it started scanning user uploads in order to stop illegal files from going on the website.
The alarming fact is that action isn’t being taken due to the cyberlockers’ fears of a civil lawsuit, as well as the fact that the entertainment industry started using the FBI and police as their weapons of choice. If a founder of a file-sharing service gets arrested, they could face jail sentence for ages while extradition hearings and the final case is heard in court. In case of being extradited to the United States, it could appear much worse.
Anyway, it looks like the content industry effectively has been given police authority to enforce its flagging business model. It might have been OK if the United States only meant to enforce its corporate law on its own citizens, but it keeps trying the same tricks in foreign parts. Indeed, the US authorities could list the IP address of any UK file-sharer and demand him to be extradited to the US for sentencing. Bad news for the whole world, then…
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