MPAA Whacs A Few More Moles, Declares Premature Victory While Making Movie Fans Worse Off
from the good-luck-with-that-strategy dept
The MPAA gleefully announced on Tuesday that it had shut down the main fork of Popcorn Time along with torrent site YTS (and its associated release group YIFY). Of course, if we go back through the history of file sharing, we can find plenty of times when the MPAA similarly declared victory over the shutdown of other file sharing sites -- and not a single one did a damn thing to slow down piracy rates. People just move on to something else. And yet, the MPAA thinks that it did something important here:“This coordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft,” said Chris Dodd, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, in a statement.Dodd is wrong. He's not protecting anything, other than perhaps his own job. Shutting down these sites doesn't decrease infringement -- the infringement just moves elsewhere. It's a giant game of whac-a-mole that the MPAA (and RIAA) have been playing for over a decade, and never seeing any kind of different result.
Dodd also says, "By shutting down these illegal commercial enterprises, which operate on a massive global scale, we are protecting not only our members’ creative work and the hundreds of innovative, legal digital distribution platforms, but also the millions of people whose jobs depend on a vibrant motion picture and television industry.”
We highlighted this just last month with our Carrot or Stick research report, which made it clear that these enforcement efforts don't do a damn thing to slow down piracy, and don't do anything to help content creators or the wider creative ecosystem to get paid. You know what does do that? Allowing more innovation to flow. Popcorn Time was popular not just because it was "free" but because the interface and usability were incredible. The MPAA should be learning from that, in understanding how to help offer better products rather than celebrating shutting it down.
Again and again we've seen that when people are presented with good, convenient and reasonably priced options, they massively decrease their infringing activities. But the MPAA has actually made that difficult by burdening most services with ridiculous requirements (like forcing people to watch a movie within 24 hours, or limiting things so that the market becomes fragmented and people can't find the content they actually want to see). If the MPAA were truly concerned with making sure that revenue was supporting the creative ecosystem it would be looking at what Popcorn Time did right, and creating a legal service based on it. Cheering on the fact that you whac'd another mole, while everyone's already moved on to something else is hardly something worth celebrating.
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Filed Under: copyright, enforcement, file sharing, innovation, popcorn time, takedowns, yify, yts
Companies: mpaa
Reader Comments
The First Word
“It's not about the money
It's never been about the money.It's about the competition and control.
Could they adapt, learn from sites and services like the ones listed and offer something similar? Sure, but that would require them to offer their movies on the terms that the public wants, rather than the terms they're so used to dictating.
If people with essentially zero funding can throw together wildly popular services for movies, Hollywood, with it's billions, could easily craft a superior service, and make an absolute killing doing so. And if all they cared about what the money, you can be sure that they would.
So why haven't they?
Because doing so would require them to give up the control that they cherish, even more so than the money they love so much. No more geo-blocking or release windows, no more DRM infections locking down movies to be watched only on certain devices and in certain ways, no more lucrative licensing deals for 'exclusive access'.
If they could decimate piracy rates such that the overwhelming majority of people were willing to sign up for the 'official' offering(and make no mistake, done right a service like that absolutely would, like Netflix on steroids) then there would be no justification for restrictive laws to 'protect' them, no massive burdens on everyone else to play unpaid copyright-cop.
That services like Popcorn Time exist shows what the *AA's could do, but chose not to, so of course they do everything they can to kill them off. It's easy to convince people that bread and water is a great meal if that's all they know, but after they've experienced what real food tastes like, selling that bread and water becomes a lot more difficult.
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The hydra has already awakened
The MPAA cannot win. The MPAA cannot be allowed to win. The MPAA must be destroyed by any means necessary.
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Re: The hydra has already awakened
There was a single music sharing program called Napster.
Once that was shut down, no other successors* emerged to share music, and then eventually also movies.
* the long list of successors you might be thinking of are a figment of your imagination. Hollywood Accounting whittles that number of successors down to zero.
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Re: Re: The hydra has already awakened
That service is still technically around today, as a streaming service under the umbrella of Rhapsody (having changed hands at least twice), but it has not exactly been a resounding success. (As witness the fact that until I went to look it up, I honestly thought it had flopped in the market and sunk without a trace.)
I strongly suspect that the RIAA, et al., remember this experience - and that the relative failure of working-with-them payment-required Napster is why they don't bother trying to partner with newer services and transform them into cooperative, fully-legal ventures; from their perspective, it probably looks like they already tried that, and it didn't work at all.
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The MPAA's Whac-A-Mole is a winning strategy
(maybe their whacking-bat will break?)
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Re: The MPAA's Whac-A-Mole is a winning strategy
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Re: Re: The MPAA's Whac-A-Mole is a winning strategy
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It's not about the money
It's about the competition and control.
Could they adapt, learn from sites and services like the ones listed and offer something similar? Sure, but that would require them to offer their movies on the terms that the public wants, rather than the terms they're so used to dictating.
If people with essentially zero funding can throw together wildly popular services for movies, Hollywood, with it's billions, could easily craft a superior service, and make an absolute killing doing so. And if all they cared about what the money, you can be sure that they would.
So why haven't they?
Because doing so would require them to give up the control that they cherish, even more so than the money they love so much. No more geo-blocking or release windows, no more DRM infections locking down movies to be watched only on certain devices and in certain ways, no more lucrative licensing deals for 'exclusive access'.
If they could decimate piracy rates such that the overwhelming majority of people were willing to sign up for the 'official' offering(and make no mistake, done right a service like that absolutely would, like Netflix on steroids) then there would be no justification for restrictive laws to 'protect' them, no massive burdens on everyone else to play unpaid copyright-cop.
That services like Popcorn Time exist shows what the *AA's could do, but chose not to, so of course they do everything they can to kill them off. It's easy to convince people that bread and water is a great meal if that's all they know, but after they've experienced what real food tastes like, selling that bread and water becomes a lot more difficult.
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Re: It's not about the money
As it stands, the MPAAs are happy to have their movies in every brick and mortar store they can manage. You don't need to go to a video store to buy the latest movies on DVD or BD. You can buy them in pretty much every big box store as well. Wal-mart and all the competing *marts. Costco and all other wholesalers. Most book store chains, and electronic stores sell movies as well. Large pharmacy chains like CVS? They've got a few movies on hand to sell as well. Grocery stores pretty commonly have a small selection of movies for sale somewhere in them. Even convenience stores like 7-11 sell movies. It's possibly more challenging to find a retail chain that doesn't have some of the biggest DVD releases of the year for sale than it is to find one that does.
The only reason for them to not pursue the same strategy with streaming, and get as much of their stuff on as many streaming services as they can manage, is the difficulty inherent in getting all streaming services to do things the way the MPAA wants rather than do the thing that's best for the streaming service.
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Re: Re: It's not about the money
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Re: It's not about the money
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Re: It's not about the money
Example, when Disney puts videos "in the vault" (aka, makes them unavailable at retail for a while) and them brings them back out for a sales cycle, it's not done for the pure exercise of control, rather it's done for the purpose of making the most money and yes, controlling the distribution to do so.
Control is the power, but money is the scorecard. You can't have one without the other. Otherwise, it's like an NBA game where both teams compete for who has the ball the longest, and not for who scores the most. A zero zero tie at the end of it all would rending the game meaningless.
Geo blocking, release windows, and all those other things have everything to do with making money AND meeting the laws of different countries and areas. It's also about meeting the economic realities of those areas. Talk with your local government about restrictions on movie distribution, on local "rating" systems, local labeling, local language version requirements, and even local ownership of the distribution system. That will give you a bigger idea of the problems involved. Meeting those requirements in order to get a full same day worldwide release is a real challenge, there are just so many different rules and regulations to meet.
Blaming the studios for local laws is just plain stupid.
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Re: Re: It's not about the money
Also, funny how studios and governments are desperately working to synchronize how long their copyright terms last - but when it comes to making legal access to copyrighted works easier, it's hems and haws all around.
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Re: Re: Re: It's not about the money
So strong copyright with a tax on sales of products (even if it's just a VAT / GST / Sales tax) is good. It's not hard to get agreement to make money.
When it comes to the other stuff, the politics kick. The politics of keeping jobs local. The politics of making the sales happen through a local company so you can properly tax them. The politics of preservation of local culture, language, and the like - and the politics of forcing outsiders to work in that language and provide content in that language. It's about the politics of morals and ratings... and yes, for the politicians, it's the politics of control.
They are very quick to agree to ways to generate new tax revenue, they are very slow to agree to release control (and potentially release tax income). It's why there is a big push all over the world for companies to be forced to collect and remit sales tax local to where the buyer is, and not the seller.
It really is all about the money. Agree to a global 20% sales tax (example) of online goods that must be remitted to the government local to the buyer, and you would find many barriers would drop much more quickly.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: It's not about the money
Incorrect. The other things are also possible without copyright. It's just not possible to stop someone else form making sales. But, public domain and other open products sell all the time.
"So strong copyright with a tax on sales of products (even if it's just a VAT / GST / Sales tax) is good. It's not hard to get agreement to make money."
Then why does the availability of products differ so wildly between regions where this agreement exists?
As to your false addressing of global distribution, well there are many things in play. One of the chief factors is that studios have built a business model based around treating different countries in different ways. These made sense in the past, where expensive physical prints and bulky VHS tapes were the main ways to consume their media. They maximised their revenue by selling off licencing to different distributors, pricing different markets in different ways, etc.
All well and good, but these no longer make sense. A customer in the US can be serviced at the same time as a customer in China, an Aussie viewer can view at the same time as one in the UK. There is no *technical* limitation - and the audience knows this. Which is why the studios have been flailing while popular services like Netflix have to navigate a labyrinth of different regional rights to be able to offer people what they want.
Of course, there's other issues to consider, ranging from taxation and local language needs (though this doesn't excuse refusing to offer an original language version to those who want it) as well as censorship, etc. But the basic problem is that the studios who demanded DVD region codes and then whined when people were importing superior copies from different regions are still refusing to adapt to a world where people seeing their ads in one country will still want the product that the studio only offers in another.
As ever, you fail on the very basis of your argument. Yet you expect everyone to swallow your tripe whole.
"Agree to a global 20% sales tax (example) of online goods that must be remitted to the government local to the buyer, and you would find many barriers would drop much more quickly."
It's amazing that you think that tax, not licencing, is the issue. But, you do come up with whatever fiction allows you not to admit the corporations you defend are at fault.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: It's not about the money
No, no, NO!! A thousand times NO! Copyright emphatically does not define ownership. It is merely a temporary monopoly privilege that has been extended to the point where it's almost perpetual.
It has NEVER been considered a property right by anyone but maximalists and those people are incapable of reason.
By their logic, I made this post, I own it. Well you'd better not copy or paste any of my words without getting my express written permission, Whatever.
TD readers who agree with me may do so as, when, and where required.
Is this reasonable? No. Is this fair? No. Is this the kind of behaviour I'm calling out in this comment? You betcha! There's the problem. Let's deal with it without getting all hysterical about it. Personally, I'd start by excising from any further discussion the notion of property rights over copyrighted material.
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Re: Re: It's not about the money
That's truly hilarious coming from you.
Blaming the studios for local laws is just plain stupid.
Cause they don't try everything in their power to change other laws in their favour. Yeah, right.
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Re: Re: It's not about the money
Restrictions that, given the interenet, a global economy and universal availability of credit cards that pay for stuff in any currency, become entirely meaningless as soon as you remove geo-restrictions and put the purchasing decision and responsibility back where it should be - in the hands of people instead of governments.No, that would be pretending the studios' lobbying arms had nothing to do with those laws...
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Re: Re: It's not about the money
Restrictions that, given the interenet, a global economy and universal availability of credit cards that pay for stuff in any currency, become entirely meaningless as soon as you remove geo-restrictions and put the purchasing decision and responsibility back where it should be - in the hands of people instead of governments.No, that would be pretending the studios' lobbying arms had nothing to do with those laws...
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Re: It's not about the money
Let's face it; the current situation sucks for consumers, is hopelessly complicated, involves lots of very expensive lawyers and has so many other bad points it would take an age to list; BUT... for all the constant whining from the **AA about how "piracy" is "killing" them, it does make a s**t-ton of money
So I think it's not so much control as fear. The studios can keep doing things exactly as they are and make a f**king enormous pile of cash, spending a fraction of it to keep buying new laws to prop up a business model that would fall over in a second in a free market. (And there's no real evidence so far of that methodology failing any time soon).
OR, they could take a chance and embrace the real world and competition. Sure, given their massive lead over any competition likely in this scenario, everything points to them making even more s**t-tons of money with even minimal competence... but what if they don't?
Until laws stop being purchasable, I think "A bird in the hand" is going to win hands-down every time.
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Re: It's not about the money
"It's never been about the money."
"It's about the competition and control."
No, it's about money. To even suggest the MPAA's actions in any regard are motivated by anything other than Movie studios' ability and attempts to maximize profits is nonsensical. Movies are cost intensive undertakings at the major studio level. Regardless if one agrees with the accounting process or not actors, directors,writers and all associated with producing a film get paid. Many involved in motion picture work are unionized and must be paid a set per hour rate. It has always been about the money.
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Re: Re: It's not about the money
"Movies are cost intensive undertakings at the major studio level."
If you ignore investors, independent movies, etc., then sure.
"Regardless if one agrees with the accounting process or not actors, directors,writers and all associated with producing a film get paid."
Depends on the film, how creative the accountants are and whether the person in question was foolish enough to defer points. You don't have to look far for people getting screwed.
"Many involved in motion picture work are unionized and must be paid a set per hour rate."
...and get paid that set rate up front, regardless of whether their union film is a low budget movie that never makes a dime or a mega blockbuster that makes someone hundreds of millions. Those people are almost irrelevant to the overall conversation. If they're union, they get paid, that's the point of a union. The guys wasting time and money on the unwinnable mole whacking are not the same people.
Besides, your points here seem to address the cast and crew, not the studio level. The producer pretending that Empire Strikes Back never made enough of a profit to give royalties to cast members is thinking thing out a little differently than the guy who spent a few days in a stormtrooper outfit. That person is willing to give up a little of his obscene revenue to ensure that he keeps control.
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Winning is possible!
I'm sure that if the MPAA tries hard enough, they can make it so difficult to watch new movies that no one does it.
That could count as a win, right?
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Re: Winning is possible!
New movies have become such an incredible blend of stale, over sensational, exhausting, predictable, expensive, unpleasant, lonely (heaven forbid I watch a dvd WITH someone, I'm inducing piracy!), irritating, time consuming, abusive affair that I make due with independent entertainment creators on youtube.
Lets plays, independent history and theology discussions, tutorials for how to write, knit, make games, fan or hobbyist created animations, original or derivative music and kinds of entertainment you simply don't see anymore (I hopemight
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Re: Re: Winning is possible!
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selfishness
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like the war on drugs
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Yify wasn't in New Zealand
The NZ papers have been fed the figure of 277 000 downloads for a local film (what we do in the shadows), but even that film appeared on yify after it's US DVD release, which was a good 2 months before a local release
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What usually happens, was displayed with the original Napster. They shut down Napster and whack-a-mole had a dozen other sites up and running within a couple of months. Instead of one site, there were multiples. Every time one site goes down the hydra happens again.
Were it not for this control business, the entrainment companies could have done very well with file sharing. I doubt you could find one site among the multitude that would not give their left nut to be legal and licensed. The pirating is a creation of their own making, filling a void they refuse to.
I would remind everyone that at one time there was the sneaker net, one that left no IP behind to trace. It still exists only now instead of a few tapes transferred, someone brings their USB storage device and offers several terabytes to their friends.
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How do you think Microsoft or Apple would deal with something like the Popcorn app competing in its own ecosystem? Yep, they'd buy it for a billion dollars.
If you can't beat 'em, then join 'em. (Unless you're retarded.)
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so he is overstating the 'commercial' bit, obviously, because as far as i remember, YTS nor YIFI were commercial at all! there may have been a small income to offset the site fees, but nothing to make a living off! Dodd is full of his usual shit, just so when he goes back to his friends in Congress he can get yet another law implemented that removes more privacy and freedom by increasing surveillance just to try to stop the advance of progress!!
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just launched as a new place to see the latest shows
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Say what?
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Whether they're innovative or not is questionable, but there probably really are hundreds, which is part of the problem.
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