stories filed under: "downloads"
Legal Downloads Increase In Sweden... But For How Long?
from the over-under,-anyone? dept
A few folks have sent in the news that since the implementation of a new antipiracy law in Sweden, legal music downloads are way up... and we already noted that it appears (loosely) that unauthorized file sharing has dropped. This, of course, has supporters of stricter laws insisting that this is "working." However, that seems unlikely. As we've seen, there's been massive demand for encryption technologies. It's no surprise that music sales would increase immediately following the shift, as many users wouldn't have any other source for music in the short term. But, given a chance to route around the new law, it seems likely that many people will do so. At the same time, now would be an excellent time for smart musicians and labels to play up the fact that their music is available to be freely shared, because you can imagine such a move would get a lot more attention than at other times.Did Miramax Give Torrent Seeker A Free Movie Ticket?
from the odder-things-have-happened... dept
Really not sure what to make of this one, but people keep submitting it, so might as well put it out there to see what people think: apparently, a girl in NY complained on Twitter that she couldn't find the movie Adventureland online to download as a torrent, and Miramax (which put out the film), Twittered back telling her that she shouldn't download it (and, in a slightly creepy way, included the hashtag #fbi). The girl supposedly wrote back: "Okay I won’t, JUST FOR YOU," at which point, Miramax promised her two free tickets to the movie (though, in the end, she supposedly only got one).What's odd is that the reactions among submitters has gone to both extremes -- with one group finding it freaky and suggesting that it would piss off fans of the movie -- while others actually found it oddly humanizing and endearing by Miramax (though... pretty much everyone felt that the whole FBI reference could have been left aside). I'm leaning a bit towards the latter option. As I noted when the Wolverine leak happened, studios are never going to be able to stop unauthorized file sharing, but they might as well figure out ways to act cool about it, and leverage it to their best advantage. It's not clear which side of that line Miramax is on right now... but hopefully it closer to acting cool, rather than acting as a creepy stalker.
Filed Under: adventureland, downloads, movies, twitter
Companies: miramax, twitter
Wizards Of The Coast Learning That Pissing Off Geeks Isn't Such A Good Idea...
from the be-careful... dept
If there's one group online that it's useful to avoid pissing off, it's "the geeks." And one thing that plenty of geeks love is Dungeons and Dragons. Yet, D&D publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has fans of the game up in arms over the decision to stop a bunch of online retailers from selling PDF versions of its games and books, while also filing eight lawsuits claiming infringement for unauthorized distribution.... and I have to admit, I can't recall a story ever getting this many submissions from readers here (perhaps there's a bit of overlap in our audiences). In some cases, the demand to retailers to remove these PDFs has caused those who legitimately bought them (but hadn't downloaded them yet) to not be able to get the product they had purchased. On top of this, Wizards is apparently also looking at employing some sort of DRM for any future digital releases, which also has plenty of people angry.What's amazing to watch is the pushback from the games' biggest fans. They're wondering why Wizards is limiting legitimate sales of its products, and looking to make the overall product worse by limiting it with annoying DRM. As people keep pointing out, piracy is going to happen one way or the other -- but rather than trying to lock stuff down (and, one other aspect of this is requiring all resellers to become "authorized internet resellers"), why not focus on ways to use that content to build bigger and better business models that don't require treating all your fans and customers as criminals?
Filed Under: copyright, downloads, dungeons and dragons, files, pdfs, sales
Companies: wizards of the coast
So Only When Piracy Gets Really Bad Will Record Labels Change Their Act?
from the just-wondering dept
Google is today launching a free, ad-supported music service in China, with the backing of more than 140 record labels, including the Big 4. The service sounds like exactly the sort of thing that people have been calling for since the Napster days: a search engine linked to a trove of music files, supported by advertising. Google's wanted to add some sort of music search to its Chinese product for some time, as it's been at a significant disadvantage to rivals like Baidu, which have the feature to thank for much of their success. The record labels say this is the first attempt to monetize online music in China, and mirrors moves by some movie studios to compete with piracy there with new products and services, rather than through lawsuits and lobbying. These efforts always give a nod to the rampant piracy going on in China -- acting as if it's a completely different environment than the rest of the world. So is the lesson here that only if piracy, or at least the labels' and studios' perceptions of it, gets "bad enough", will they do something positive, rather than sue people or try to get laws strengthened in their favor? Or is it only because those aren't viable options in China that companies try something different there? The fact that the labels are moving forward with this plan in China, given its reputation as the wild west of copyright infringement, undermine their contention that they can solve the supposed piracy problem with legal or technological means elsewhere. Furthermore, it exposes the reality that what's staring them in the face is a tremendous opportunity, not a problem.Filed Under: china, downloads, labels, music, piracy
Companies: google
No Doubt: Buy A Concert Ticket, Download All Our Songs
from the the-music-is-free.... dept
Slowly, but surely, more bands are starting to figure it out: the music is free. Whether they want to believe it or not, the actual music is free, so you might as well get it out there and then focus on selling scarcities. The latest example (which a ton of you have sent in), is the band No Doubt, who is giving away their entire catalog of music as a download, for folks who buy certain concert tickets. Now, obviously, if someone wants, they could go download all that music already, but effectively the band is admitting that the music is free, and the money is in the scarcity of concert tickets: so if you're going to pay for that scarcity, why not make sure that the fan knows all your music?Filed Under: business models, concerts, downloads, music, no doubt
Jailtime Seems A Bit Harsh For Online Music Store Owners Who Didn't Get All The Right Licenses
from the why-not-just-make-them-pay-up? dept
Most readers here probably know the story of Allofmp3.com -- a Russian website that signed a licensing deal with a Russian music licensing group ROMS. The site was immensely popular because (a) it sold un-DRM'd files (back before that was common) and (b) sold music incredibly cheaply. The recording industry should have taken this as a lesson in how to create a super popular online music store -- but instead it freaked out, and nearly created an international diplomatic incident in threatening Russia with economic sanctions unless it shut the site down. The problem was that since it had the ROMS license, it was legal in Russia. In fact, Allofmp3.com even tried to pay the record labels some money -- which they refused. The record labels, of course, insisted that the ROMS license wasn't sufficient, but no Russian court ever agreed. Eventually the site was shut down, though it lives on at MP3Sparks. However, it's lost a lot of steam because the site has been blocked from accepting most common forms of payment.Law Professor Michael Scott points us to the news of what appears to be a similar offering in Italy -- except that, in this case, the operators of the site have been sent to jail. The only news that I can find on this is from the IFPI site -- which is obviously a bit biased, but it does look like the owners of the site did get a license from the Italian Authors' Society (SIAE), which they believed was sufficient. A lower court agreed, but the appeals court has sided with the record labels.
But here's the kicker: the operators of the site have now been sent to jail for criminal copyright infringement. Already I have problems with most criminal copyright infringement cases -- because, by any reasonable standard, copyright is a civil dispute -- it's an issue between two businesses. In this case, it's even more egregious because it seems clear that the site wasn't just some random guy selling MP3s he had no right to, but had clearly tried to obtain the correct licenses. However, these days, when to do just about anything with music you need to get numerous different licenses (Peter Jenner, back at MidemNet, claimed that you needed 33 different permissions to do pretty much anything with music in Europe, though others disagreed), it seems fairly ridiculous to throw someone in jail for not being able to figure out every single party that has to sign off on something -- especially when you were lead to believe that you had what you needed via the Authors' Society.
Filed Under: copyright, downloads, italy, jail, licenses
Companies: ifpi
IFPI Says 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal
from the but-then-they-would,-wouldn't-they dept
The IFPI, the international equivalent of the RIAA, has put out new stats claiming that only 5 percent of all music downloads in 2008 were legal. The group estimated that 40 billion tracks were shared illegally last year, or an average of almost 30 songs for every internet user worldwide. The IFPI says it arrived at that estimate by "collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period," so it's not really clear just how accurate it is -- and of course, the higher the figure, the better, as far as the IFPI's efforts to get governments to be their copyright police are concerned. The IFPI says that global music revenues fell by 7% last year, blaming the drop on falling CD sales, which a 25% increase in digital sales couldn't overcome. The IFPI says piracy is the biggest challenge it faces; given the stats, the real challenge seems to be record labels' inability to move past its legacy business model and adapt to consumers' changing desires.It's hard to give much credence to the IFPI report, given the way it plays with statistics. For instance, in the press release for the report, the IFPI tries to pin the blame on piracy for a downturn in the "local music sectors" of France and Spain. It backs this up by saying that new French and Spanish artists accounted for a smaller percentage of album releases in 2008 than they had before. What about established French and Spanish artists? And does a lack of new local artists have more to do with downloading, or problems with labels in how they do business, and find and promote new talent? Furthermore, when the album is declining in popularity compared to singles, and new artists more likely to take advantage of this by targeting the singles market, is this even a legitimate metric for this purpose? These IFPI stats should be taken with a large grain of salt, and their intended purpose -- to further the group's goal to get governments and ISPs to prop up record labels' outmoded business models -- should be considered.
New York The Latest To Propose Taxing iTunes Downloads
from the for-no-reason-at-all dept
Earlier this year, some politicians in California, which is struggling with massive budgetary problems, proposed adding a tax to iTunes downloads. Now, Governor David Paterson in New York is proposing the same thing. There's no functional reason for this, other than the fact that the state desperately needs money, and so it's trying to add taxes to just about anything it can find. Of course, back in the old days, the point of a sales tax like that was to contribute to gov't-funded infrastructure (roads and such) that allowed folks to go and buy something. There's no such rationale for taxing internet downloads. It's a blatant money grab and Paterson seems to have no problem admitting that.Filed Under: david patterson, downloads, itunes, new york, tax
Hollywood Removing Hit Movies From Apple, Netflix
from the stupidity-knows-no-bounds dept
Some days you just wonder if entertainment execs wake up in the morning planning to shoot themselves in their collective foot. The latest display of entertainment exec short-sightedness is that the Hollywood Studios have apparently forced both the Apple iTunes store and Netflix's download store to remove certain movies just as they're getting close to being available for TV. As you probably already know, Hollywood makes a lot of money through a "windowing" system, where they release movies in different formats at different times: theaters, special locations (airplanes, hotels), DVD, cable and finally network TV. Of course, they're working on adding some more tiers to this as well, but apparently they convinced these online download stores that they need to kill certain movies as the timing reaches where the movies can appear on TV.The studios' myopic reasoning is that TV broadcasters pay a lot of money for those rights, and they don't want to piss them off: "It wouldn't make any business sense to do it any other way," claiming that allowing the videos to be downloaded via these online stores would kill some of its biggest money makers. Of course, this makes no sense. The movies are already released on DVD and the studios don't prevent Blockbuster or Netflix from offering the physical DVD for rent, so why do that with the download version? If people really want to download these movies, they're more likely to just go get them from an unauthorized site, rather than bother to watch the network broadcast version (which, given recent MPAA statements, they'll probably try to prevent you from recording via your DVR anyway). If TV networks have been willing to pay good money for the broadcasting rights all these years while DVDs and unauthorized downloads have been available, are they really suddenly going to stop paying because legal downloads are available? Unlikely.
So what are we left with instead? A bunch of consumers really pissed off at the movie studios yet again. One of these days movie studio execs will discover that business models are much harder to implement when a large percentage of your customers hate you.
Filed Under: competition, downloads, movies, release windows
Companies: apple, netflix
