A recent post on the Last100 blog (part of the Read/Write Web network) written by Guinevere Orvis, an interactive producer with the CBC, talks about how the Canadian television network has chosen to distribute one of its shows using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. 

The idea apparently started after she read about the Norwegian state broadcaster doing the same thing with a travel show.

It’s nice to know that our national broadcaster is open to new ideas, and from the sounds of Norway’s experience, it should be one that they consider repeating. 

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The Internet hasn’t been good for the movie or music industry, at least in terms of providing a new way for the distribution of content which takes away the need for traditional companies.

But does that excuse the movie industry starting to spy on what we do with our Internet connections, and share with others across our network?

Here, Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge looks at the issues surrounding a speech given by Dan Glickman, the chairman of the MPAA:

Glickman’s Spying Is No Game

Hollywood for years has had a fascination with spies. Some are action spies, like the various incarnations of Bond, James Bond, or cerebral spies like Alec Guinness’ masterfully subtle George Smiley. 

All sorts of people have played TV spies, from Robert Culp and Bill Cosby to Patrick McGoohan, Robert Goulet and the fabulous Lady Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.

There have been spies who watch and listen to us without our knowledge. Gene Hackman had a creepy turn as the telephone eavesdropper (technically not a spy, although he spied) in “The Conversation” in 1974. 

Ten years ago Will Smith’s “Enemy of the State” played off of the then-paranoid “fantasy”, now a reality, of the all-hearing National Security Agency (NSA). The current crop of Bourne films shows a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the technical capability to listen and see anything and anyone at any time.

It wouldn’t be an issue if Hollywood’s fascination with monitoring our words and images was confined to fiction. But over the past couple of months, the fourth wall has been broken and Hollywood is now setting itself up to play a new spy game for real. 

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When it comes to the subject of peer to peer and file sharing over the Internet, there seems to be a push of late to tighten up the measures so that even innocent people are going to find themselves mixed up too.

With the French ‘three strikes and you’re out’ measures, and the recently mooted effort in the UK to force ISPs to ban file sharers from the Internet, the authorities are cracking down hard.

Here, Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge discussed the issue, as well as efforts to tenuously link P2P file sharing with identity theft.

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NRK recently took part in a very successful experiment with distributing the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation programme, Nordkalotten 365, via BitTorrent.

A little while afterwards, I was interviewed by the German news web site www.tagesschau.de about the process, and how this could affect distribution of similar programmes in the future.

Although the article is in German, my original conversation with Mr. Wulf Rohwedder is in English. It reveals some of my thoughts about this project so I decided to share it:

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The fight against file sharers, and so called music and movie pirates continues, even though the organisations fighting it must know that they’re fighting a battle which was lost as soon as it began.

Regardless, Instead of working with the technologies and companies involved, organisations such as the RIAA and MPAA, along with the US government seem intent on going down this never ending road of criminalising otherwise law abiding citizens.

One of the biggest groups of people to be targeted is that of college and university students, and here, Art Brodsky outlines the latest legal move on this front.

Higher Ed Bill Passes House With File-Sharing Warning

The House yesterday passed a higher-education bill (HR 4137) that included language requiring colleges and universities to deal with what Hollywood sees as a problem in digital downloads.

The bill, which passed 354-58, said the colleges and universities “shall”, which means there isn’t much room for discussion, “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity” and report on their policies.

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For years the BitTorrent protocol has been blamed for encouraging the spread of pirated television shows, full length movies, and popular music albums. But it seems there may be a bigger picture than that.

In a move completely away from the normal actions and mindset of traditional programme makers, Norwegian broadcasters NRK have made one of their most popular shows available to download for free on BitTorrent.

Nordkalotten 365 is the show in question, and while not known outside of Norway, it proved very popular when shown on traditional television, grabbing 900,000 viewers from a population of just 4.6 million and nabbing almost 50% of the market share.

Available On BitTorrent Clients

The first episode of the series is now available to download through any of the multitude of BitTorrent clients out there, although the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation are recommending the free and open source Miro player for those interested in downloading the series on to their PC

Further episodes of the series, in which hiker Lars Monsen travels alone through the north of Scandinavia for a whole year, will be made available once they have been encoded in to MPEG4.

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The MPAA is rapidly catching up with the RIAA in terms of blindly and blatantly pushing fot their business models to carry on as they are, without taking in to account the new media, and new way of sharing since the arrival of the Internet.

In it’s unswerving aim to stop any illegal activity from taking place with it’s copyrighted materials, the organisation has been going after university campuses, and using statistics to warrant it.

Here, Gigi Sohn discusses the affect of the MPAA data being found to contain falsehoods.

Congress Should Demand MPAA Data on the Cost of Piracy

Yesterday, the Motion Picture Association of America admitted something that many of us had suspected all along – an MPAA-funded study showing that 44% of the industry’s losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students using campus networks was overstated by a factor of 3. 

The MPAA now says that only 15% of its losses come from campus activity. Hollywood has been using that larger number to push for legislation, now pending in the House of Representatives, which would require colleges and universities to filter their networks for copyright infringement.

But why should we believe the 15% claim (and indeed, Mark Luker of EDUCAUSE says that a more accurate number would be 3%)? 

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