Game Of Thrones On Track To Be Most Pirated Show Of 2012; Pirates Still Asking HBO For Legitimate Options

from the blame-matthew-inman? dept

Much like the North, Game of Thrones cannot be held—it's too big and too wild. Matthew Inman warned HBO that they should make their content more accessible or risk driving people to piracy, but that isn't really HBO's style. Now jilocasin points us to the news that Game of Thrones is well on track to be the most torrented show of 2012, and nobody can deny that HBO's foolish subscriber-only distribution is a primary reason for that. Approximately 25-million times have people decided to pay the iron price for the show, and as the comments on Reddit attest, it's often because the gold price wasn't even an option. Others pay for the show but still pirate for the sake of occasional convenience:

Sometimes I just want to fire up an episode and watch it on my laptop immediately and with mobility as I'm wandering around the house, and not worry about streaming/quality issues or finding a disk, setting up the DVD player etc. I am truly lazy.

Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to have great ratings. And the torrent piracy count doesn't include streams, which are also hugely popular, so it only represents a fraction of the pirate world. Why not create new ways to legitimize some of those viewers, especially considering so many of them have said they want to be legitimized? I still contend that HBO-style shows owe a lot to piracy for their cultural dominance, because, if they were actually as exclusive as HBO wants to pretend they are, they would have had a much harder time gathering fans. But HBO co-president Eric Kessler thinks cord-cutting is a fad, so like most characters in the show, he's fighting silly battles while ignoring what's really going on.

Filed Under: eric kessler, game of thrones, piracy, television, torrent
Companies: hbo

ICE & FBI Hatch Ingenious Plan To Make DVD Piracy Warnings Longer

from the that-oughta-do-it dept

Immigrations & Customs Enforcement, still beset on all sides by unflagging movie piracy, has decided to join forces with the FBI in their proven strategy of targeting every pirate's one true weakness: legitimate customers who bought the DVD. Though the Bureau's lengthy anti-piracy lectures preceding every movie have had limited impact to date, this exciting new partnership promises to inject them with new life by making them last way longer. It will also reinforce the weight of the warning by reminding viewers that ICE's Homeland Security Investigations is also watching, not just those sissies in the FBI. In case that doesn't get the message across, the joint FBI/ICE warning will be followed by a second warning from the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which has a less ominous acronym but a much scarier logo:

Ars Technica has answers to all your questions, except for "what's that torrent site called again?"

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

If you're thinking "why the hell would they subject the only people who aren't pirating films to this treatment?" then congratulations, you're not ICE Director John Morton. The only thing more insane would be starting every movie with instructions on how to invent the DVD player. Apparently Morton sees method in his madness, though, much like how shamans see method in their rain dances:

The idea isn't to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It's to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, "Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort."

Well, I guess it is good to see them experimenting with new ways of doing their job. And if it doesn't work, I'm betting they've got some more tricks up their sleeve, like 30-second warnings, 45-second warnings, and possibly even 60-second warnings if they can work out the complex logistics. With law enforcement this innovative, those pirates don't stand a chance.

Filed Under: dvd, fbi, ice, john morton, piracy

If You Think The Cost Of 'Piracy' Is High, What About The Cost Of Enforcement?

from the why-is-that-always-missing-from-the-equation? dept

To illustrate, let’s imagine television show that initially streams online for free with advertising, garnering a million viewers per episode and earning $1 per viewer in ad revenues, for a total of $1 million. A small number who really dislike ads, or have connections too slow for streaming, let’s say 5,000, download pirate copies anyway—but the vast majority watch legally. After building an audience and generating some good word of mouth, the accountants suggest that it might be more profitable to stop the free streaming and instead sell ad-free episodes for $4, in hopes that enough dedicated fans will pony up to compensate for the predictable drop in viewership once the program is no longer free to watch. The paying audience does indeed drop to 255,000, which still leaves the company slightly better off for the switch, but 100,000 viewers decide to keep up with the show (at least initially) by downloading pirated copies. A subsequent price hike to $10, however, turns out to be a money loser. Now the show has only 80,000 paying viewers, while 150,000 are engaged in piracy.

Undoubtedly that piracy is costing the show’s producers something: If piracy were impossible, some unknown fraction of those who download illegally would be willing to pay the asking price. But just crudely using the actual market price at each stage—even if modified by some constant “displacement rate” to acknowledge that not every illicit download represents a lost sale at that price—yields some perverse results. As the pricing strategy for the show changes, the “cost” of piracy rises from $5,000 to $400,000 (even as revenue rises) to $1.5 million (while revenues drop by $20,000). Obviously, something is wrong here.

It’s no great mystery what: The problem is that the rate of piracy, the price of a digital good, and the “displacement rate” (the percentage of the pirates who’d buy at that price in a world of perfect copyright enforcement) are not independent variables. And, of course, the interdependency runs both ways: Pricing decisions are influenced by the knowledge that we don’t live in a world of perfect enforcement, and you can tell plausible stories according to which this might keep prices higher or lower than they’d be under perfect enforcement, depending on your assumptions about the conditions under which a particular audience will substitute the pirate for the legal good.

Returning to our imaginary program, suppose that under perfect enforcement—a zero piracy world—there would be 110,000 paying viewers at $10 per episode, netting the creators an additional $80,000 over what they’d make with their revenue maximizing strategy ($4 per episode) in the world of imperfect enforcement. That’s great for them, if not for consumers, but we haven’t factored in the costs of enforcement. Some of these are likely to be borne by the creators themselves—hiring lawyers to hunt down pirate copies circulating online and the like—but in practice they’re often shifted to taxpayers, in the form of direct enforcement expenditures, or to other parts of the economy, in the form of DMCA compliance costs or innovative services that are deterred entirely. It’s possible that, in this hypothetical scenario, the revenue maximizing strategy for the producers is to charge $10 while externalizing the costs of perfect enforcement, but the socially efficient outcome is to accept imperfect enforcement and let the producers revenue maximize against that background at a $4 price point.

Filed Under: pay tv, pipa, piracy, proip, sopa
Companies: hulu

UK Consumer Ebook Sales Increase by 366%: Publishers Association Calls For Digital Piracy To Be 'Tackled'

from the pesky-facts dept

One of the beloved tropes of the copyright industries is that they are being destroyed by online piracy. Superficially, it's a plausible claim, not least because of the false equation of copyright infringement with "theft", and the lingering suggestion that every time something is shared online, a sale is lost. Of course, as Techdirt's report, "The Sky is Rising", demonstrated from publicly-available figures, the facts are very different: all of the creative industries are thriving.

Here's news from the UK book publishing industry, where things are indeed looking pretty good given the current financial climate:

Consumer e-book sales increased by 366% to £92m [$150 million] in 2011, with sales across all digital formats accounting for 8% of the value of sales of all books, according to the Publishers Association's Statistics Yearbook 2011, published today (1st May).

So before the copyright industries start calling for yet more government crackdowns on copyright infringement, with ever-more disproportionate measures and a concomitant erosion of civil liberties, they might like to produce some independent, peer-reviewed research that backs up their claims about the supposed harm of online sharing. After all, if anything, these latest figures from the UK publishing industry confirm that, once again, the Sky is Rising.

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Filed Under: ebooks, piracy, publishing

Swizz Beatz: Technology Brings Freedom To Musicians; Those Not Embracing It Are Greedy

from the nicely-said dept

I think the only reason why people wouldn't embrace technology is because of greed. And because of the old way of doing business, which is also greed. And then you have people running the business -- no disrespect -- that's 80 years plus. They don't even know how to operate an iPad, and they're making decisions on the younger generation's future.

And my association with forward thinking technology is very deep. And it came up a little bit with Megaupload -- which still, today, is a big misunderstanding of technology. And the day that you mix the old business with the new technology, we'll have a better place. It's actually going to be a time when artists can come out and do 10 million records their first week. Because the technology is going to be so locked in tight globally. You have billions of people, all over the world. Why can't artists that everybody likes do 10 million a week? It's just that the communication and the technology and the old way of doing business is off. But once that catches up, which is going to happen in the next three years, it's going to be amazing.

And the cool thing is that technology equals freedom for the artist. And that's the best thing that could ever happen for artists that work hard and that really want to get their career off the ground.

Filed Under: file sharing, greed, piracy, swizz beatz
Companies: megaupload

Google's Fiber Makes MPAA Skittish. Why Does Hollywood See All Technology In Terms Of Piracy?

from the negativity dept

One of the points we're always trying to make about piracy is that it has less to do with people just wanting everything for free and more to do with people rushing to embrace the possibilities of new technology. The industry has been slow to offer products that take advantage of these possibilities, and when they do they usually cripple them and charge too much for them, because they refuse to acknowledge the impact of better distribution systems on the market. Instead of recognizing that technological capabilities dictate how they should distribute their content, they think they get to dictate how far people should utilize technology. So piracy moves in to fill the gap, offering people the sort of comprehensive, on-demand service which they know is possible but which can't be bought at any price.

An anonymous reader points us to a perfect example of the technophobic attitude that has become so ingrained in Hollywood. It starts with a story in Bloomberg Businessweek about Google's pilot project in Kansas City, where they are laying fiber to bring super-high-speed internet to the community. With 922 Mbps download speeds already available in nearly a thousand homes, the topic of piracy was inevitably raised:

[Google spokeswoman Jenna] Wandres stresses that Google Fiber isn’t meant to empower pirates: “We hope higher speeds will actually make it easier to deliver and download more authorized content,” she says. Nonetheless, Howard Gantman, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, notes that piracy is always a concern of the entertainment industry. Google Fiber “could be a great opportunity for consumers whose access to creative content is often hampered by slow speeds,” he says. But in South Korea, “the home entertainment marketplace was decimated by digital piracy” enabled by the widespread availability of high-speed Internet.

For one thing, the statement about South Korea is incredibly flimsy. The Korean music industry thrives on high-speed internet—it grew into an economic powerhouse while the country had some of the highest and earliest broadband penetration rates (and digital piracy rates) in the world. Smart Korean entrepreneurs have figured out how to succeed in the new market. Moreover, claiming that "home entertainment" as a whole was damaged by broadband is just hubris from an industry that thinks only its own products count as "entertainment".

It seems like every Hollywood statement about new technology follows the same format. "This new thing is great, but... piracy!" The problem is that they refuse to act on the first part until someone gives them a bulletproof solution to the second part—and since such a solution does not and never will exist, they ruin every attempt at a new service with ineffective restrictions and DRM schemes. Ars Technica picked up the story and spoke further to the MPAA spokesman, getting yet another "great, but..." response:

"We want to reinforce that higher speeds could be a great opportunity for consumers, and that's the bottom line," Howard Gantman, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, told Ars on Friday. "There are problems that can, in terms of [an] increase of digital piracy, come with that, but we are hopeful that efforts can be made... to address digital piracy."

Someone should tell Gantman that it's not "the bottom line" if you go on to add caveats and addendums. It's also interesting that he thinks blazing fast internet only "could be" good for consumers—maybe because he knows Hollywood "could" (but won't) offer them a service that fully leverages the technology. Really what's amazing about this is that the MPAA thinks anyone cares about its opinion of fiber broadband, as if the public is going to stop and think, "Gee, I guess I'll just have to wait for faster internet access while Hollywood develops better piracy controls".

The fact that the MPAA can't get through a single statement about something as clearly positive as faster internet without bringing up reservations about piracy doesn't bode well for Hollywood's future. The studios should be getting ahead of the new technology, and making sure that everyone who gets hooked up to a new fiber network is immediately greeted with a well-made, well-priced movie service that gives them a chance to test out their speedy new connection. Instead they're probably going to watch the technology develop with caution, wait for pirates to beat them to the punch, then arrive in the market with an inferior product and complaints about how they "can't compete".

Filed Under: fiber, kansas, piracy, south korea
Companies: google, mpaa

Tor Listens To Authors And Readers And Ditches DRM

from the ears-wide-open dept

Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time. They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.

Filed Under: drm, ebook, piracy
Companies: tor

RIAA Keeps Trying To Spin Hadopi's Clear Failure Into A Success Story

from the how-sad dept

Filed Under: file sharing, france, hadopi, piracy
Companies: riaa

Hollywood Still Trying To Kill The Golden Netflix Goose

from the incredible-mistake dept

Filed Under: hollywood, licensing, piracy, streaming
Companies: netflix