MPAA, Hollywood, Piracy

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is a non-profit organization designed to “advance the business interests of its members,” which is basically the big Hollywood movie studios such as Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Walt Disney.

But its job over the past few years has been more about (mis)educating the public about piracy, how evil the Internet is, and how each and every one of us is contributing to the downfall of the content-creating movie industry.

Unfortunately the MPAA has employed some rather dubious tactics in the pursuit of this, including blatantly lying to make the specter of peer-to-peer file-sharing look much more scary and damaging than it actually is.

Twisting The Figures

Who would ever have thought the MPAA would twist the figures to fit its own ends, eh? I know, it’s incredible, but it’s exactly what has happened, as discovered by Pajiba, which tears apart the latest figures from an MPAA infographic.

The MPAA claims piracy costs the industry $58 billion every year, which is ludicrous when you realize that the box office is currently worth about $10 billion, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming worth about $30 billion. The figure implies that without piracy every household in the U.S. would be buying an additional 50 full-price DVDs a year.

It gets better: the MPAA claims 29 million adults (13 percent of the population) have illegally downloaded a movie. Which means they would have purchased an extra 200 DVDs every year to make the figures stand up to scrutiny.

Of course, the number of downloads does not equate to lost sales and lost revenue, because someone who downloads a film wouldn’t necessarily have ever seen it any other way. Especially with the crap Hollywood is increasingly throwing out these days.

Conclusions

The MPAA may be doing an important job in reminding us all that piracy is prohibited and harming the movie industry, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing its job well. In fact, it clearly isn’t.

Rather than twisting the figures in ways that can be easily identified, why doesn’t the MPAA concentrate on helping its members forge into the future using the Internet as a source for good rather than treating it as the big, bad wolf determined to kill the industry?

Pandora’s Box has been opened, and it cannot be closed now. Hollywood needs to accept this basic fact or die.

Related Ad

Buy ‘American Film: A History’ on Amazon

Kino.to is the latest website to be taken offline for linking to copyrighted material. This despite previous cases suggesting linking rather than hosting such content cannot be classed as illegal, at least in Europe.

Kino.to Shut Down

Kino.to has been shut down after a series of co-ordinated raids by European police on locations spread across Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Kino.to is (or was) reportedly the world’s largest German-language site of this kind.

The site’s raison d’être is to link to streams of movies and television shows, mostly the German-language versions. Kino is the German word for cinema. There are dozens of sites doing similar on the Web, and they’re not exactly hard to find thanks to Google and other search engines.

Kino.to has been around for several years, and boasts around 4 million visitors-per-day, making it one of the most-trafficked websites in that part of Europe. But that fact has clearly made it a target for the authorities.

Linking Vs. Hosting

The problem is that once again this is a site that links to rather than hosts illegal content. In the U.S. even this has been deemed (probably) illegal, but in Europe the admins behind both TV-Links and the music-oriented OiNK have been cleared of wrongdoing thanks to Section 17 of the European Commerce Directive 2000.

Hosting copyrighted content on a website is always going to get you in trouble, but linking to other sites which are hosting the content instead is a legal gray area. Which is how Google gets away with it.

Anonymous Retaliates

The disparate hacking collective Anonymous has already retaliated against GVU (the German Federation Against Copyright Theft), taking its website down with a DDoS attack. According to GigaOM, it cited its reason for doing so in a YouTube video, stating:

“We believe that running a search engine for videos isn’t illegal… That’s why we immediately reacted by taking down the GVU website… Knowledge is free, and streaming is, too.”

I’d have to agree, as I spelled out in previously. Websites hosting copyrighted content should expect to be targeted and potentially taken offline, but those merely linking to other sources? That doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

[Via TorrentFreak]

The Hurt Locker Hurt

Voltage Pictures, the studio behind The Hurt Locker, which won the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’ at the 2010 Academy Awards, has teamed up with the over-importantly titled U.S. Copyright Group, which is actually the law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver to chase after alleged pirates of its film.

Between them they claim to have the IP addresses of 24,583 people who illegally downloaded the movie from the Internet. This is 20,000 more than the 5,000 already threatened with legal action for the same offense a year ago, many of whom have since denied any wrongdoing.

The total number of defendants represents a new record for the number of users indicted in a BitTorrent lawsuit, beating the number involved in the alleged piracy of The Expendables by more than 1,000.

Legal documents seen by TorrentFreak claim that those being targeted are 10,532 Comcast subscribers, 5,239 Verizon users, 2,699 Charter users, and 1,750 Time Warner users.

A Hiding To Nothing

I understand why Voltage Pictures is doing this, but it’s surely a hiding to nothing. Yes, The Hurt Locker only took $49 million at the worldwide box office, but to think piracy was wholly to blame is preposterous.

Furthermore this method of identifying IP addresses and then issuing ‘pay up or else’ warnings to the people connected to them has been shown to be far from faultless. A British company called ACS:Law was hounded out of business for taking a similar approach to alleged copyright infringers.

Lastly, claiming someone owes thousands of dollars for one case of piracy, which is almost impossible to prove beyond doubt with nothing more than an IP address as evidence, is bizarre.

Conclusions

If just 10,000 of those alleged to have committed piracy by downloading The Hurt Locker pay the average demand of $2,000 that’s $20 million. Which is an incredible amount of money, as TF points out, more than the movie made at the U.S. box office. I guess we have our reason for this going ahead right there.

Related Ad

Buy ‘The Hurt Locker’ on Blu-ray on Amazon

Web Video Successes

Many TV series, movies, and the creatives behind them have succeeded despite being online-only affairs. It arguably all began with LonelyGirl15, a viral Web video series which racked up millions of viewers on YouTube.

Since then we’ve had Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog directed by Joss Whedon and starring Neil Patrick Harris, the Norwegian show Nordkalotten 365, and Blank, a movie made available on DVD and torrent sites at the same time.

These are just the tip of a very large iceberg. Other ways online video has helped the creative process is getting filmmakers noticed, as with Federico Alvarez (Ataque de Panico!)and Patrick Jean (Pixels).

Pioneer One

We can now add one more success story to this burgeoning list. Pioneer One has reached its third episode despite being funded and distributed entirely online, and the people behind the innovative series hope to make it to six episodes to round out the first season.

The pilot for Pioneer One was released on the VODO platform, which promotes content released on BitTorrent sites and asks people to donate to the cause. Enough people liked the show that $30,000 was raised to continue production, and two more episodes have since been produced and released.

Writer Josh Bernhard told TorrentFreak:

“I think the idea of BitTorrent as a viable means of distributing content is really starting to break through. BitTorrent has something of a stigma, especially for people in the entertainment industry. When you say BitTorrent, I think a lot of people hear ‘piracy’ and stop listening. But between Pioneer One, Zenith and other projects adopting the same model, it’s going to become too big to dismiss.”

Conclusions

Hopefully the latest round of news coverage will help Pioneer One continue on, with the filmmakers able to raise the funds necessary to finish out the six-episode season. If it happens then it will prove once and for all that it can be done, that there is an alternative to the endless pilots and knock-backs inherent at the networks.

At least if the popularity of the final episodes of Lost on these sites is anything to go by.

Internet Piracy

Assuming you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know that file-sharing is hugely popular on the Internet, and has been for many years now.

The various entertainment industries don’t want people to share content this way, naturally, as it cuts into their profits and loosens the control they have over content creators.

If anything, there has been an increased effort to take these sites offline of late. The most obvious and high-profile example is The Pirate Bay. But the sites have pushed back, refusing to bow to legal pressure. And people generally don’t see anything wrong with piracy.

Lost Finale Breaks Record

Lost finished on Sunday (May 23), after six seasons of plot twists, many of which left the audience more confused than they were before.

According to TorrentFreak, almost 1 million people downloaded the final two episodes of the ABC show in the first 20 hours after it aired. This is a new record for any TV show.

This comes despite efforts to prevent the episodes from being pirated, or at least the need for fans to get them via the Internet. The finale was broadcast simultaneously (or as near as damn it) in 59 countries around the world. But this doesn’t seem to have done much to put people off.

But why?

So why did this happen?

Primarily because the Lost finale was a TV event, more than just an average episode in the middle of a season. Even those people who haven’t watched the series religiously probably tuned in, or at least downloaded it to see how it all turned out.

But it’s rather interesting that 15 percent of all downloads came from Australia, where the finale wasn’t due to be shown until today (May 26).

Conclusions

Internet piracy is far from dead. In fact, the popularity of the Lost finale shows that just as many people are doing it now than ever have. And this is despite the entertainment industries’ efforts to curtail the practice.

Isn’t it about time this dead horse stopped being flogged? There has to be a better way to proceed than going after the sites and users sharing files.

Related Ad

Buy ‘Lost: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]‘ on Amazon

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is refusing to die. It’s been the largest and one of the most popular torrent trackers in the world for a few years now. But its notoriety and ability to taunt copyright owners meant trouble was never far away.

The Pirate Bay’s legal woes came to a head in February when a three-year investigation into the site arrived in court. By April, the four defendants had been found guilty and it looked as though this was the beginning of the end for TPB.

The TPB Tracker Is Dead

The last few months have seen The Pirate Bay tracker unavailable at various times as copyright owners managed to pressure its ISPs to cut off service to the site. But instead of fighting against it, TPB has decided to roll with it.

As announced in a blog post today, The Pirate Bay has now shut down its tracker completely, and there’s no going back. However, this doesn’t mean the end of the site and the end of torrents.

Decentralizing Power

The Pirate Bay claims that torrent trackers are now unnecessary. In its place comes trackerless solutions such as distributed hash tables (DHT) and peer exchange (PEX).

These methods mean that instead of locating .torrent files from a central repository, files can be found simply by querying other peers in the swarm.

In essence, this removes the central power needed for torrents to be shared over a network. And that has clear (positive) legal ramifications for The Pirate Bay and could make the IFPI and MPAA’s mission to control filesharing an impossible one.

The Pirate Bay is now offering magnet links, hence the new logo as seen above. These simply direct a BitTorrent client to the BitTorrent peers which contain the file in question.

Conclusions

This is a genius move on the part of The Pirate Bay as it appears to throw a very large spanner in the legal victory celebrated by copyright owners earlier this year.

I doubt they’ll give up without a fight but they’re now fighting an activity that is impossible to track and is clearly not going to cease anytime soon.

KickAssTorrents.com is a new player in the torrent search space creating an easy and currently ad-free way to search for music, TV shows, movies, eBooks, and software.

The torrent portal launched publicly back in February 2009 and in under 10 months has quickly become a serious player in the torrent space.

KickAssTorrents has told WebTVwire.com that it receives over 100,000 visitors each day. A quick look at the traffic growth on Alexa confirms this:

[source]

Sweet Usability

Upon arriving on KickAssTorrents.com you’ll instantly notice the clean design, ease of use, and obvious absence of advertising.

Torrent sites have become the underground playhouse for scammy advertisers promising russian wives, instant weight loss, hot girls in your area, and seedy work from home opportunities.

It is a breath of fresh air to see a torrent site that lacks advertising, but the site is still young and KickAssTorrentz could yet be seduced by the promise of ad-revenue checks.

However, right now KickAssTorrents is probably the most friendly torrent search engine out there, and with ThePirateBay having no end of trouble KickAssTorrents is filling in the gap.

The aggressive and tech-fearing rights holders still haven’t quite grasped that taking down one great torrent site will just give birth to another.

KickAssTorrentz is also pushing forward with some interesting innovations and community features such as ajax comments preview, a firefox search plugin and last.fm and imdb integration.

However, legal pressure is still the biggest threat to any torrent site, and the owners of KickAssTorrents, like many other torrent sites, look to be trying to divert attention away from themselves and remain a hidden hand behind the Torrent portal.

KickAssTorrents Interview

I had the pleasure of being able to interview KickAssTorrents and dig deeper into this promising Torrent portal.

What caused the very recent, sudden and powerful jump in traffic for KickAssTorrents at the end October 2009?

It happened because of a number of different factors. From the inside we started a new marketing campaign, re-launched our blog, made a lot of small changes, etc.

From the outside we got recognition from the torrent community, landed on few top lists, got some good reviews, became listed on torrentz.com and torrent-finder.com and here we are. And yeah we became the default search engine for Vuze.

What do you believe it is about KickAssTorrents that sets it apart from other Torrent sites?

Skill + Creativity + Work. All the popular trackers are old and really lack usability, most of the new trackers/torrent search engines lack creativity and just intend to copy the existing trends.

We instead tried to create something more interesting. Our developers used latest search technologies and our designers did their best to make the site both easy to use and good looking.

We also added various features like direct http download of selected torrents, last.fm and imdb integration, customizable user area and many small things like ajax comments preview. And of course we constantly improve KickAssTorrents to make it even better.

I saw some potential evidence that the owners of KickAssTorrents are based in the Ukraine. Is this true? If not where are the owners/company based?

We prefer to say that the owners are based online. During our work KickAssTorrents was intended to be a torrent search engine of tomorrow, and in future the country where you are based is irrelevant.

The biggest threat to any Torrent site is legal issues which can result in the site been taken down. What are you doing to protect yourself from this?

We have a disclaimer concerning copyright issues and we are open to communicate with any copyright holders. But we will remove content only if these companies or individuals provide enough legal basis for removal and most important a properly filled DMCA request.

I noticed there were no adverts on the site which is rare for a torrent site. Why have you done this and do you intend to continue this no-ad policy?

We removed ads to make the site more usable and less annoying. And yes we plan to continue this policy. We are simply not interested in fast ad-money, our goal is to establishing a good torrent site.

What role do you see P2P file sharing having in 10 years time and how do you envisage rights holders and P2P networks could work together?

In 10 years time P2P file sharing will be popular, huge and wireless. If not there will be some other new type of file sharing.

As for right holders the ones who are interested in profit and not in legal issues, will change their copyright policy and work together with P2P networks.

I mean look at the news, this band released their music on BitTorent, this company shared a special version of their game through file sharing network.  In few years this will be normal and for copyright holders P2P networks will become an ally and not an enemy.

Torrent Sites

What are torrent sites used for? Many of you would have answered that it’s pretty much all pirated content being shared via torrents. And while there is a lot of copyrighted material being shared illegally on them, there is also much that is legal and copyright-free.

There are very few companies and organizations who have taken advantage of the technology as a way to distribute content thus far. But VODO is one of these, allowing and encouraging filmmakers to use torrent sites to seed their features and get them out there being watched.

NRK and Blank

In January 2008 we looked at how the Norwegian broadcaster NRK was utilizing torrent sites to distribute a show called Nordkalotten 365. The experiment worked, with multi-platform distribution making the show a success outside of its native Norway.

Earlier this year we saw filmmaker Rick L. Winters and his company Annodam Productions choose to distribute Blank via torrent sites at the same time as releasing it on DVD. Donations were asked for but not mandatory.

VODO

VODO, a British organization which endeavors to help budding content creators find an audience, is taking a similar approach. It releases features on torrent sites such as Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Miro, and Vuze and lets the rest fall into place.

VODO requests a donation (VODO stands or VOluntary DOnations) if you download a feature from a torrent site. There’s also the option to subscribe to the site itself in order to gain access to more films and fund new projects which will end up being made available for free on torrent sites.

VODO’s founder is Jamie King, who enjoys a certain amount of notoriety for his pro-piracy Steal This Film documentaries. Us Now and In Guantanamo are the two features currently being promoted via torrent sites.

Conclusions

This kind of effort isn’t going to either interest or affect Hollywood but independent filmmakers are a whole other kettle of fish. And VODO, along with NRK, Annodam, and the like are proving that torrent sites aren’t the bid, bad wolves they’ve been painted as.

Tech Dirt said it best with its reason for why VODO is such a good idea, suggesting it’s because it helps “filmmakers who recognize that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their efforts than piracy.”

[Via NewTeeVee]

Piracy Peaks

The people who run the big media companies clearly have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is, or at least was maybe a decade ago.

While piracy has always existed in some form or another, the popularizing of the Internet and the trend for file-sharing saw the “problem” get a little out of control as far as those in charge are concerned.

If It Don’t Work, Don’t Fix It?

The problem is, rather than embrace the new technology or even trying to fight piracy by offering innovative and fair alternative means of obtaining digital copies of movies, television shows, music, games, etc. they try to maintain the status quo. Even though the horse bolted a long time ago.

The latest attempt at locking the stable door is to change the terminology used from “anti-piracy” to “content protection” and to push even harder against illegal file-sharing. Because that will clearly work.

New Faces, Old Ideas

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the trade body of Hollywood whose mission it is to look out for the interests of the film studios under its protective wing. In terms of Internet piracy, it has several people assigned to the task of stopping it happening. And they have clearly been doing a fantastic job.

According to CNET, the studios have realized the current strategy isn’t working, and so the MPAA has let three people go, including Greg Goeckner, the MPAA’s general counsel.

Unfortunately, this isn’t in order to usher in a new way of doing things. Rather than a roster of proactive measures such as offering new, improved, and reasonably priced ways of offering movies to people over the Web, the same old reactive measures will be enforced. Just more harshly.

Conclusions

This latest chapter in the life of the MPAA is both sad buy hilarious at the same time. Changing the name of its efforts is absolutely pointless. And it still hasn’t figured out the undeniable truth that piracy is here to stay.

Some will argue its efforts have been mildly successful – with the victory against The Pirate Bay the most obvious example – but do those people seriously think for one moment that the people who used to use TPB have stopped downloading movies from the Web?

How long is it going to take for both the MPAA and the movie studios it serves to stop fighting a losing battle and look at how to take advantage of the very system and practice it is currently desperate to stop?

After The Pirate Bay lost its high-profile court case, the end was nigh. And the founders took the easy way out of the situation, agreeing to sell the property lock, stock, and barrel.

The Acquisition

The people behind The Pirate Bay agreed to sell the site at the end of June for $7.7 million to a Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB. GGF planned to turn the site into a legitimate business, working with rather than against the same media companies who fought TPB just month before.

However, CNET reports that the acquisition is far from complete, with Global Gaming’s financial affairs coming under scrutiny. Trading in the company’s stock was halted on Friday morning and there are even questions being asked about possible insider trading.

All of this means GGF’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay is anything but clear. The deal was meant to go through by the end of August but that time scale looks very optimistic at this stage of proceedings.

The Torrent Copy

Meanwhile, fans of The Pirate Bay have been making sure they’re not going to be left high and dry if and when the acquisition and legalizing of the site goes through. TorrentFreak reports how an anonymous user copied the site in its entirety and has now made it available as a torrent in its own right.

It’s a hefty 21.3 Gb file and contains the code for the site and all 873,671 torrent files The Pirate Bay was listing at the time the copy was made. This effectively means that The Pirate Bay will live on no matter what GGF do with it.

The Alternatives

Assuming you want to move away from The Pirate Bay and use an alternative site, Gizmodo has listed the top 5 Web sites where torrents can be obtained.

There is Demonoid, which boasts a good community and high-quality torrents. However, you’ll need an invite to join the site. Then there is Mininova, which is actually the biggest torrent site in the world. The only downside is the copyright filter which is slowly being integrated, meaning the chances of obtaining pirated content through the site is lessening all the time.

ISOHunt is another alternative, as are BTJunkie and EZTV.

Unfortunately for those people keen to download and share files on the Internet, the choices for doing so are becoming few and far between. Even some of the sites listed have had trouble staying online and the chances are they’ll eventually be taken down or sold just like OiNK, Suprnova, TorrentSpy, and The Pirate Bay.

So the advice has to be to enjoy them while you can.