The MPA, Hollywood, and the entertainment industry as a whole have scored a victory of sorts over illegal file-sharing in the U.K. But it’s a plaster being used on a gaping wound, and a waste of both time and money in the longterm.

Newzbin2 Ruling

This week saw a British judge rule that BT had just 14 days to block all access to Newzbin2, a website which indexes content, both legal and illegal, available through Usenet. This follows on from an injunction having been sought in June by the MPA (Motion Picture Association), the international counterpart to the MPAA.

In July the court ruled in favor of the MPA, and this week’s ruling gives the ISP a set time limit to block its users from accessing the site. Furthermore BT is being forced to cover the whole cost of doing so, and has to keep adding URLs and IP addresses leading to Newzbin2 to a blacklist at the behest of the MPA.

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Movie piracy is all bad, right? No good can come from it, right? If a movie makes it onto BitTorrent (as all movies invariably do) then it seriously harms its potential to make big money at the box office, right? Hmm, maybe, maybe not.

Welcome to Hollywood

Hollywood is against movie piracy, and rightly so. It represents people watching content without paying for it. Which is clearly wrong.

If everyone did the same then there would be no Hollywood and no new movies would ever get made. But not everyone does do it, and those who do don’t necessarily stop going to see movies in theaters or stop buying them on DVD and Blu-ray.

Proof of this can be seen in the list of the Top 10 Most Pirated Movies recently compiled by TorrentFreak.

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Hollywood is struggling to transition from the past to the present, to a time when the Internet was but a sci-fi wet dream to a time when it’s integral to our everyday lives. And the MPAA is struggling to tell the truth.

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.

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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.

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Despite winning an Oscar for its incredible portrayal of working under pressure in the Iraq war zone, The Hurt Locker wasn’t a huge hit at the box office. The studio blames piracy for this, and is seeking to claim some of its alleged losses back from those it believes were involved.

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.

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A new political sci-fi drama titled Pioneer One is living up to its name by pioneering a new way of being funded and distributed. Funded entirely by public donations and distributed entirely by BitTorrent, Pioneer One is an amazing success story.

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).

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Several file-sharing sites have been forced offline or forced to seriously limit their offerings in recent months thanks to the efforts of the MPAA, RIAA, and the like. But any hopes the industry has of killing the practice off appear to be nil.

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.

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