Yet Another Study Shows You Beat Piracy Through Innovation, Rather Than Enforcement

from the water-is-wet,-except-to-hollywood dept

Three years ago we released our Carrot or the Stick? paper, in which we explored piracy rates in a bunch of different countries, and looked at what appeared to be most effective in reducing piracy: greater legal enforcement or innovative new services. Time and time again our research highlighted how it was innovation -- in the form of user friendly licensed services (the user friendly part is important...) would lead to a noticeable reduction in piracy (sometimes in dramatic ways). On the other hand, increased legal enforcement appeared to have (if anything) only a temporary effect.

It appears that others are now exploring the same area, and doing quite an incredible job with it. A group of Dutch researchers at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam have just released a Global Online Piracy Study that does an incredible job looking at the same questions with even more thorough data and analysis. They surveyed 35,000 people and looked at situations in 13 different countries (larger than our sample). The conclusions of the report appear notably similar to our own research, which is great to see (as it certainly helps to confirm what we found):

Still, despite the abundance of enforcement measures, their perceived effectiveness is uncertain. Therefore, it is questionable whether the answer to successfully tackling online copyright infringement lies in additional rights or enforcement measures, especially if these will not lead to additional revenue for copyright holders and risk coming into conflict with fundamental rights of users and intermediaries. Instead, it might be sensible to search for the answer to piracy elsewhere – in the provision of affordable and convenient legal access to copyright-protected content.

The report also found the following, suggesting that the trend that we saw clearly demonstrated back in 2015 has continued:

Between 2014 and 2017, the number of pirates decreased in all European countries except Germany.

As with our report that found enforcement actions had little to do with decreasing piracy rates, this report found similar things:

It might be tempting to argue that an increase in the use of certain enforcement measures against obviously illegal platforms has contributed to the decreasing number of pirates in Europe. However, a lack of evidence concerning the effectiveness of most enforcement measures and the strong link between piracy and the availability and affordability of content suggests otherwise: at a country level, online piracy correlates remarkably strongly with a lack of purchasing power. Higher per capita income coincides with a lower number of pirates per legal users.

Moreover, pirates and legal users are largely the same people: demographically, pirates resemble legal users quite closely, although on average they tend to be somewhat younger and more often male. More importantly, for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non-pirating legal users.

That latter point has been shown in over a dozen studies previously, and it's incredible that it still needs to be repeated: pirates are often the best customers.

One interesting question might be why did Germany not see piracy decrease in the same manner as other countries. One reason might be that of the various countries studied, it already had one of the lowest piracy rates (29% of respondents claimed to have accessed some unauthorized content in the previous year). Only Japan was lower at 23%. So there's some argument that there may be a natural floor on this sort of thing, below which you can't go much lower. There are some other potential reasons hinted at within the report, including that the population of Germany is older than in most of those other countries, and it's one of the very rare cases of a country where physical sales of music still is ahead of digital sales. In short: there may be a lot of people in Germany who aren't that internet savvy.

Either way this is a really useful addition to the economic literature on this issue, suggesting (yet again) as we've argued for years, that focusing on greater enforcement has always been a huge waste of time, resources and money -- and comes at tremendous costs to free speech and innovation. Incredibly, that's likely been massively counterproductive to the goal of reducing piracy, since we need that innovation in licensed services to help reduce piracy. Of course, those who live in the world of the legacy industries have spent so many decades living and breathing the idea that enforcement is the only answer that I doubt this particular study will move the needle in convincing them to maybe start approaching things differently.

Filed Under: copyright, enforcement, infringement, innovation, piracy

French Pirates Are Increasingly Buying Through Legal Options

from the c'est-la-vie dept

Do you guys remember Hadopi? This French version of a law designed to kick copyright infringers off of the internet essentially ended in 2016, after all kinds of reports showed the program to be an inefficient, unreasonably harsh failure that actually resulted in more infringement rather than less. Well, this travesty probably seems altogether silly here in 2018, given that Hadopi largely targeted filesharing infringement, while the majority of "piracy" these days takes the form of streaming content online rather than downloading it. Those enforcing Hadopi have no real way to track that kind of "piracy", making the whole thing useless.

But the French government appears to want to see if it can repeat its mistakes all over again, with reports that it will institute a streaming site blacklist, which will be every bit as effective as Hadopi. Making all of this especially odd is that it comes at a time when so-called pirates in France are increasingly turning to legal offerings and spending gobs of money on them.

A new report published by consultancy firm EY reveals that the number of French pirates has dropped by 8%, from 11.6 million in 2016, to 10.6 million last year. The remaining pirates also downloaded and streamed less infringing content than the year before, with consumption dipping 4%.

In fact, it appears that pirates are increasingly “going legal.” This doesn’t mean that they have quit their copyright infringing habits completely, but they are more likely to pay for access too. In the span of a year, the number of pirates without a video on demand subscription dropped by nearly 30%. The result is that more than half of all pirates also pay for a legal movie streaming service now.

The reasons why someone might simultaneously pirate content and pay for it through legit services have been covered here many times in the past. It ends up coming down to some combination of content-availability, not wanting to work through the silos content-providers have erected around what customers want, and reasonable pricing models for that content. What data like this ultimately shows is that so-called pirates are perfectly willing to pay for content if its offered to them in a convenient and reasonable way with few mental transactions needed. You know, how all of commerce works.

And, yet, for some reason the French government has decided to try to censor streaming sites -- which it is guaranteed to do badly -- in the face of this optimistic data. Instead, it should be working with content producers and streaming providers alike to make that content as widely available as possible.

“Netflix has managed to reel in pirate consumers who weren’t signed up with a legal service before. In 2017, there were 20% more pirate consumers paying for a Netflix subscription than the year before,” EY’s report states.

This suggests that the main goal of movie studios and other content providers is to make sure that their work is widely available on legal streaming platforms. Ideally, without any delays and at a reasonable price.

Giving the customer what they want, how they want it, at reasonable prices. What a completely novel and hard to grasp idea.

Filed Under: copyright, france, hadopi, infringement, legal options, piracy

Chuck Palahniuk Apologizes For Blaming Piracy For His Business Partner Stealing His Money

from the it-really-was-stealing-this-time dept

Chuck Palahniuk has long been a personal hero of mine. Back when I fancied myself a fiction writer, I gobbled up his books, engrossed in the characters he was able to create. It was only years later, then writing for Techdirt, that a chip in my impression of Palahniuk emerged when he started his habit of blaming his finances on the piracy of his works. Palahniuk claimed that piracy was responsible for his "dwindling income." This, despite selling a ton of books and movie options, sounded strange -- especially given that book piracy is much more limited than things like music, movies or software. Where was he getting it from?

Well, Palahniuk himself answers that question in a recent blog post on his site. It turns out the idea that piracy was to blame for his money troubles came from the accountant in charge of his royalties at his literary agency. That same accountant, it turns out, has now been charged with defauding the agency out of millions of dollars. Palahniuk now says he knows exactly what dwindled his income and it wasn't piracy.

On the plus side I'm not crazy. For several years my income has dwindled. Piracy, some people told me. Or the publishers were in crisis and slow to pay royalties, although the publishers insisted they'd sent the money.

You may have read about this over the weekend in the New York Post. All the royalties and advance monies and film option payments that had accumulated in my author's account in New York, or had been delayed somewhere in the banking pipeline, it was gone. Poof. I can't even guess how much income. Someone confessed on video he'd been stealing. I wasn't crazy.

If you've written to me chances are that your letter passed through the hands of the accused. He'd collect the mail and forward it to me. He seemed like a good guy. Like a prince of a guy. Like man-crush material. And then he wasn't.

And so now Palahniuk says he is close to broke. It's a heartbreaking story, for sure, to have a great author in financial ruin because of the fraud perpetrated by another. But one thing worth calling out here is that piracy has become so prevalent a scapegoat in the copyright industries today that someone as intelligent as Palahniuk accepted it as the reason for not being paid, even when he claims his mental warning bells were going off roughly all the time. This is the danger in industry groups scapegoating piracy as the world's greatest evil. And, frankly, how much daylight exists between Palahniuk's story and that of all those deprived of income through the magic of "Hollywood accounting", through which even the guy who played Darth Vader can't get residuals from Jedi over claims that the movie has somehow not been profitable?

Not much at all, I would argue. It ought to be enough to counter the claims that piracy is responsible for the woes of content creators by simply pointing out that it just isn't true, but we would do well to understand that the industry mantra blaming piracy is in part responsible for artists like Palahniuk buying into the hype and being swindled.

Filed Under: blame, chuck palahniuk, piracy, royalties

It's Thanks To The Pirate Community That Amazon's Attempt To Degrade Its Streaming Service Is Now Public

from the honor-among-thieves dept

It's said that there is no honor among thieves, but it should be obvious that such a blanket axiom is bound to be at least partially bullshit. Still, this mantra gets applied to the pirating community by its enemies, with those that rip and/or view pirated content labeled as ungrateful kid-slobs, simply looking for any content they can gobble up without any payment whatsoever. Any value or benefit derived from this community is denied or ignored, with the spotlight being only on the inflated injury this same community inflicts on unimaginably wealthy companies and studios.

Again, it should be obvious that this is all bound to be bullshit.

In fact, we've discussed the potential benefits to be found within these communities often in the past. Pirate communities can be viewed as a sort of market study companies get for free, serve as a spotlight on under-served potential customers, and not to mention that this community often buys more content then does their non-pirating cousins. None of this is to excuse copyright infringement, of course, but rather serves to remind us that the world is not black and white, and is instead muddled, complicated, and mushy.

Much like Amazon's streaming service the past few weeks, actually. A fact we only really know about due to this same pirating community doing the investigative work for free.

This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.

Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10. Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.

Reports suggest the drop in quality is no small thing. Further investigation has shown that the streaming quality via Amazon Prime has had something like a 50% drop. Given how clear it is that the quality of legitimate services has a direct impact on the public's willingness to engage in piracy, we can only speculate on why Amazon thought that downgrading its streaming quality was a good idea. What doesn't seem to be in question, however, is that it did so on purpose.

With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.

“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday. “Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”

An expert in video encoding that TorrentFreak spoke with took things further into the technical realm, but the upshot is that the stream quality has been cut in half in a way that looks to be an attempt to serve videos at reduced bandwidth. We still can only guess, because Amazon isn't talking. Unlike the pirate community, however.

With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.

“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.

With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.

As of the past few days, it seems that Amazon has made changes on its end, restoring the original quality of Prime's streams. The company is still refusing to provide any kind of explanation as to why any of this happened to begin with, but it seems quite clear that without the pirating community calling them out, Amazon's customer service claims that all issues were at the end-user and not with the stream itself would have been accepted for much longer, if not indefinitely. Without the pirate hobbyists, they would have gotten away with it.

Filed Under: piracy, transparency, video quality
Companies: amazon

The Music Industry Now Wants To Creep Past Site-Blocking Into App-Blocking

from the creepers-gonna-creep dept

With site-blocking now fully en vogue in much of the world as the preferred draconian solution to copyright infringement, one point we've made over and over again is that even this extreme measure has no hope of fully satisfying the entertainment industries. Once thought something of a nuclear option, the full censorship of websites will now serve as a mere stepping stone to the censorship of all kinds of other platforms that might sometimes be used for piracy. It was always going to be this way, from the very moment that world governments creaked open this door.

And it appears it isn't taking long for the entertainment industries to want to take that next step, either. As the debate about Kodi addons rages, and as governments begin to clamp down on the platform at the request of the entertainment industry, several industry players at an IP forum event in Russia have started announcing plans to push for app-blocking as the next step.

Over in Russia, a country that will happily block hundreds or millions of IP addresses if it suits them, the topic of infringing apps was raised this week. It happened during the International Strategic Forum on Intellectual Property, a gathering of 500 experts from more than 30 countries. There were strong calls for yet more tools and measures to deal with films and music being made available via ‘pirate’ apps.

The forum heard that in response to widespread website blocking, people behind pirate sites have begun creating applications for mobile devices to achieve the same ends – the provision of illegal content. This, key players in the music industry say, means that the law needs to be further tightened to tackle the rising threat.

“Consumption of content is now going into the mobile sector and due to this we plan to prevent mass migration of ‘pirates’ to the mobile sector,” said Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of the Music Industry.

Look, all of that is true. Innovation happens often at the margins when it comes to technology, after all, and the technology that powers piracy is no exception to this rule. At the same time, neither the entertainment industry nor the governments of the world have ever, even once, shown themselves to be good or fair arbiters of what tools are "pirate tools" and which are legitimate tools that sometimes are used for piracy. If given the power, both will overshoot the mark, with entertainment groups carpet-bombing their way to collateral damage just to be sure that pirates are obliterated, and governments all too often using this copyright censorship as cover to enact oppressive censorship on matters of pure politics.

In other words, it's not that the entertainment industry is wrong that there is some measure of a problem to be dealt with, it's just that their censorious solution creates way more problems than it solves.

Despite that, the music industry, in particular, is banging its war drum.

The same concerns were echoed by Alexander Blinov, CEO of Warner Music Russia. According to TASS, the powerful industry player said that while recent revenues had been positively affected by site-blocking, it’s now time to start taking more action against apps.

“I agree with all speakers that we can not stop at what has been achieved so far. The music industry has a fight against illegal content in mobile applications on the agenda,” Blinov said.

This is not an arms race that the content industry has shown it is capable of winning. But while they beat these war drums for evermore censorship, the unintended consequences are strewn like bodies all around them. From Blinov's home country of Russia, the government has been laughably inept at separating pirate site from non-pirate site to the tune of a ten-fold blocking of collateral damage sites, all while the government also uses those same copyright laws to shut down political speech and reporters it doesn't like.

And it is in this climate that content companies want to hand even more blocking powers to the authorities? First they came for the websites, then they came for the mobile applications? Whatever comes after that is not something to look forward to.

Filed Under: app blocking, censorship, copyright, piracy, site blocking

MPAA Apparently Silently Shut Down Its Legal Movies Search Engine

from the we-hardly-knew-ye dept

In 2015, with much fanfare, the MPAA released its own search engine of sorts as WhereToWatch.com. The idea behind the site was to combat the argument that people pirate films because there are too few legal alternatives. The MPAA built the site to show where those legal alternatives do in fact exist. Left unaddressed, of course, were questions about how useful and convenient those alternatives were, how users had to navigate through a myriad of restrictive policies for those legal alternatives, and how terrible Hollywood must be in promoting its legal alternatives if the only thing needed to stop all this piracy was an MPAA search engine.

On top of that, WhereToWatch served as something of an excuse for many draconian polices the MPAA was pushing for all along. By being able to point to the search engine as "proof" that all kinds of legal alternatives to piracy were readily available, the MPAA argued that policies such as "notice and staydown" as well as site-blocking were legitimate pursuits. Somewhat predictably and with a heaving helping of irony, WhereToWatch received multiple DMCA takedown notices for its search results, demonstrating how perilous DMCA takedowns have become.

And now comes the news that the MPAA actually shuttered the site months ago.

The MPAA pulled the plug on the service a few months ago. And where the mainstream media covered its launch in detail, the shutdown received zero mentions. So why did the site fold? According to MPAA Vice President of Corporate Communications, Chris Ortman, it was no longer needed as there are many similar search engines out there.

“Given the many search options commercially available today, which can be found on the MPAA website, WheretoWatch.com was discontinued at the conclusion of 2017,” Ortman informs TF. “There are more than 140 lawful online platforms in the United States for accessing film and television content, and more than 460 around the world,” he adds.

That is all absolutely true today, though it was also true three years ago when the site was launched. The simple fact of the matter is that the site did little to serve any real public customer base. Yes, legal alternatives to piracy exist. Everyone knows that, just as they know that there are far too many hoops and restrictions around which to jump that have nothing to do with price. The MPAA and its client organizations have long asserted strict control over their product to the contrary of public demand. That is, and has always been, the problem.

On top of all that, the MPAA showed its no better at promoting its site than it was at promoting the legal alternatives to pirating movies.

Perhaps the lack of interest from the U.S. public played a role as well. The site never really took off and according to traffic estimates from SimilarWeb and Alexa, most of the visitors came from Iran, where the site was unusable due to a geo-block.

Look, the basis for this effort was a good one: promote legit movie-watching to customers currently pirating. That's laudable. But Hollywood is in the business of convincing the public to do so every bit as much as the public is obligated to buy Hollywood's products. It's not enough to build a search engine to the current unwanted offerings and call it a day.

You have to actully innovate.

Filed Under: culture, movies, piracy, search engine, streaming, what to watch
Companies: mpaa

RIAA Reports Music Industry Is Making All The Money Just As New Study Says Piracy Has Never Been More Widespread

from the hmmm dept

As much conversation as gets logged on the topic of copyright infringement, or piracy, you may not have noticed that there are not that many arguments against piracy. Certainly there's a volume of voices, particularly those coming from the entertainment industry, but those voices are typically making only one of two claims. The first claim is that piracy is morally wrong. This claim typically devolves into something along the lines of "but piracy is theft", and relies on the intuitive notion that downloading, say, a song hurts the creator of that song by depriving them of income. If there was no income deprivation, there would be no moral wrong. The second claim skips the first part of that equation and simply asserts that piracy harms the entertainment or content industries, depriving them of the income they need in order to create more content. You will notice that, ultimately, there is actually only one argument against piracy: its effect on the income of the content producers.

With as much as entertainment advocacy groups like to pantomime Chicken Little on this topic, you might be surprised to learn that the RIAA recently came out with its 2017 Year-End industry report, in which it gleefully notes both how much money the music industry is making and, importantly, how that revenue is growing rather than shrinking.

In 2017 revenues from recorded music in the United States increased 16.5% at estimated retail value to $8.7 billion, continuing the growth from the previous year. At wholesale, revenues grew 12.6% to $5.9 billion. These increases were driven by more than 35 million paid subscriptions, a 56% growth year-over-year. This is the first time since 1999 that U.S. music revenues grew materially for two years in a row, while gaps in core rights continue to distort the marketplace and deprive recording artists and songwriters of the royalties they deserve.

So, we have two years of growth in music industry revenue in America, even as the RIAA is also still complaining about market distortions and artists not getting enough royalties. The full report notes that streaming revenue is way up, digital downloads are down, and physical product purchase revenue has been mostly flat. Note that this is all for the American market. Nowhere in the full report does it flesh out exactly what the RIAA's complaints about artist compensation are based on, although piracy/infringement is almost certainly the answer.

The problem for that argument, which is again the only real argument for focusing on piracy as some great evil, is that another report just came out from MUSO, a group that tracks piracy, indicating that piracy is more popular in the public right now than it ever has been.

Piracy tracking outfit MUSO has documented the piracy landscape with data from tens of thousands of the largest global piracy sites. In its latest report, the company recorded more than 300 billion visits to pirate sites last year alone. This is an increase of 1.6 percent compared to 2016.

More than half of all these visits (53%) are going to streaming sites, making that the most popular piracy tool. Torrent sites and direct download portals still have a significant user base, but follow at a respectable distance. Most of the pirate visits came from the United States, followed by India and Brazil. Despite the various pirate site blockades, the UK also secured a spot in the top ten, ranked at the bottom with nine billion visits.

A couple of things to note in the report's details. Again, America had the highest instances of piracy by far, nearly twice as much as India, which came in third. Also note that, while streaming sites for television was the most popular method of piracy in the public, pirating music came in second. So, we have two data points. The RIAA says that the American music industry revenue has risen two years running. MUSO says that Americans pirate more than anyone else, that they often pirate music, and that piracy levels are at the zenith and rising.

The "piracy hurts the music industry" mantra just took a credibility hit, no?

The explanation for this isn't difficult to understand. Those that pirate music also buy music, go to concerts, and support the bands and music industry through all kinds of other purchases. They also likely subscribe to streaming services and pirate what they can't find there, or what they discover there. The point is that music pirates are often fans of music and may purchase along with pirating.

In other words, the simplistic attack mantras from the RIAA don't make a great deal of sense alongside the RIAA reporting that the music industry is making gobs of money, and increasingly so.

Filed Under: business models, copyright, music, piracy, recording industry
Companies: riaa

Aussie Rightsholders Look To Feature Creep Site-Blocking To Search-Blocking, Because Of Course They Are

from the not-a-bug dept

When it comes to censorship in the name of copyright, we've made the point time and again that opening this door an inch will cause supporters of censorship to try to barge through and open it all the way. Inevitably, when a population tries to satiate the entertainment industry by giving them just a little censorship, that industry will ask for more and more and more.

A good example of this can be seen right now in Australia. Like far too many countries, Australia began a site-blocking practice three or so years ago. Currently, the Department of Commnications is asking for feedback on the effectiveness of this practice as well as feedback on each step in the process itself. The way it works in Australia is that rightsholders have to get an initial injunction which then winds its way to a site being blocked as a "pirate site." Well, for the largest entertainment industry groups in Australia, the feedback is essentially, "This is great, let's censor even more!"

The most aggressive submissions come from the two companies that have made the most use of the blocking scheme so far – movie group Village Roadshow and TV provider Foxtel. Together the companies have had dozens of sites blocked in Australia by local ISPs but now they want the blocking regime expanded to online service platforms too. Indeed, in the Roadshow and Foxtel submissions combined, Google is mentioned no less than 29 times as being part of the piracy problem Down Under.

“Village Roadshow strongly supported the original site blocking legislation and now we strongly support strengthening it,” Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke writes. “With all major pirate sites blocked in Australia, the front door of the department store is shut. However, pirates, facilitated by Google and other search engines, are circumventing Australian Laws and Courts and opening a huge back door. Australia needs the power to require Google and other search engines to take reasonable steps to stop facilitating searches which lead to pirate sites.”

In case it isn't obvious, these attacks on Google are plainly absurd. Google is a search company and it makes its money by returning the best results for what people are searching. Whether that is infringing content or not doesn't matter to Google. Only the usefulness of its search results matters. It's also not clear why, if the site-blocking through ISPs is as effective as Village Roadshow says, they should also need Google to delist so-called "pirate sites." Aren't those sites being blocked by ISPs? If a Google search can somehow defeat the site-blocking, then the site-blocking isn't nearly as effective as advertised.

But Village Roadshow doubles down with a hilariously wrong analogy later in its submission.

“The analogy for Google is a Westfield Shopping Centre knowing they are getting big traffic to the center from a store that is using stolen goods to lure people and then robbing them!” he writes.

I've never had pain from my eyes rolling so hard until reading that sentence. Still, the people in Australia should be paying attention, because what Village Roadshow and its cohorts want is to extend the censoring of sites it deems to be "pirate sites" to "intermediary service providers", which means search companies and social media companies Suddenly, the sharing tool that is the internet and social media will live at the pleasure of entertainment industries that have never, ever, ever been able to accurately determine what is a "pirate site" and what is just an otherwise useful site with some users that are infringing on some copyrights.

It's also worth noting that search companies had already voluntarily agreed to demote infringing sites in search results. Foxtel, the other large entertainment industry player in Australia, noted as much in its own comment submission, before going on to hand-wave it away as insufficient.

Village Roadshow, Foxtel doesn’t appear to be content with demotion – blocking and delisting is the aim.

“Foxtel strongly believes that extending the site blocking powers to search engines so that they must remove copyright infringing sites from search results would have a substantial impact on reducing piracy in Australia,” the company says.

“Search engines already remove URLs from site indexes to comply with local laws and product community standards and therefore, technologically Foxtel understands it would be a relatively simple exercise for search engines to comply with Australian blocking orders.”

Creep, creep, creep. That is how this works. If you open the door an inch, they will come barging through. And it's worth repeating again that the entertainment industry has never been able to be accurate in its accusations. So what Village Roadshow and Foxtel are really asking for is broad power to censor sites from most of the common internet platforms and search engines that most people use when they have not shown the ability to treat that kind of responsibility with care. And, indeed, they actually want the bar to be lowered as to what is a "pirate site."

While none of the above is particularly new in the global scheme of things, it’s interesting to note that even when agreements are reached and new legislation is formed, rightsholders always keep pushing for more.

That’s clearly highlighted in the Foxtel submission when the company says that the threshold for determining a pirate site should be lowered. Currently, a site must have a “primary purpose” to “infringe, or to facilitate the infringement” of copyright. Foxtel sees this as being too high.

So a site should be considered a pirate site even if the purpose of the site isn't to be a pirate site? Cool. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Filed Under: australia, copyright, piracy, search blocking, site blocking

The Rise In Streaming Video Exclusives Could Annoy Consumers, Driving Them Back To Piracy

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

By and large, the added competition being levied upon the traditionally apathetic pay TV industry has been a good thing. Though it has taken a decade longer than it probably would have in a healthier market, the rise of streaming competitors has forced incumbent cable companies like Comcast to up their game and at least consider lowering prices, improving abysmal customer service, and offering more flexible video options.

Granted many pay TV execs seem intent on doubling down on the dumb ideas that cause cord cutting in the first place, but it's indisputable that we're finally seeing some evolution in the traditionally stubborn sector. Pay TV sector executives that believe cord cutting is a fad that magically ends once Millennials procreate are increasingly being marginalized, as are executives that believe they can milk the dying traditional TV cash cow indefinitely without repercussions.

That's not to say that the new streaming frontier isn't going to be without some pretty notable problems. Studies suggest that by 2022, nearly every broadcaster, cable channel, and their mother intend to offer a direct to consumer streaming video product. That includes Disney, which later this year will be pulling most of its most popular content from services like Netflix and Hulu (Star Wars, Marvel films, Pixar titles) and exclusively hosting them on its own, new streaming video platform.

On its surface this improved level of competition is most assuredly a good thing. But as we've noted previously there's a problem brewing here that most executives and analysts don't seem particularly keyed into. Namely, that once you've cordoned off each broadcaster and content-creator's product into countless walled silos -- each requiring their own subscription -- you've not only countered the biggest benefit of the streaming revolution (lower prices, greater flexibility), you've opened the door to customers getting frustrated and returning to piracy.

It's pretty rare that I see research firms point out this potential pitfall. For example, The Diffusion Group's study noted that while they predict every broadcaster will offer their own streaming service by 2022, this could simply increase the number of annoying retrans and carriage feuds (and the annoying blackouts and price hikes that result) between cable companies and broadcasters:

"These are early signs of an emerging media tribalism," argues Berkley. "Major networks will increasingly reserve their best titles for their own direct-to-consumer services, which will help drive total network DTC subscriptions close to 50 million by 2022."

Berkley warns, however, that DTC strategies come with great risk, especially for TV networks. "The legacy model is built upon decades of comfortable relationships between networks and operators. If networks extract too much high-value content too quickly, channel conflicts are inevitable."

Said "conflicts" could prove particularly interesting now that we're doing away with net neutrality (for, you know, "freedom" or whatever). We've already watched as companies like Viacom blocked entire broadband IP ranges from accessing content during programming disputes with cable operators. News Corp also blocked Cablevision customers during a similar feud. These bad ideas are a two-way street, and without net neutrality protections in place, there's a universe of new, creative ways cable operators and broadcasters can hamstring one another in direct competition, annoying consumers.

Less talked about by analysts is the fact that customers might find piracy a better, simpler alternative if they're forced to subscribe to thirty different services (at $8 to $20 per month, per pop) just to access the movies and TV shows they're looking for. Like CBS did with the new Star Trek: Discovery series, each player in this game wants to hide their best content behind an exclusivity paywall. But customers are already confused and frustrated by constantly shifting licensing deals impacting title availability, and may find piracy to be the simpler alternative to having to navigate an ocean of exclusivity silos.

Again, the rise of streaming competition and lower-priced, more flexible TV services is a good thing. But if many of these companies aren't careful, it wouldn't take much to shoot this progress squarely in the foot via exclusives or other anti-competitive behaviors emboldened in the wake of federal apathy on net neutrality. The end result could be progress in name only, with customers finally shaking off one bad idea (bloated, expensive bundles of over-priced channels), only to find themselves forced to subscribe to a dozen caveat-laden streaming services just to get the content they're looking for.

Filed Under: content, content silos, copyright, exclusives, piracy, silos, streaming

Photographer Tutorial Company Reacts To Pirates By Screwing With Them Hilariously

from the free-laughs dept

When it comes to content producers reacting to the pirating of their works, we've seen just about every reaction possible. From costly lawsuits and copyright trolling, to attempts to engage with this untapped market, up to and including creatively messing with those that would commit copyright infringement. The last of those options doesn't do a great deal to generate sales revenue, but it can often be seen by the public as both a funny way to jerk around pirates and as a method for educating them on the needs of creators.

But Fstoppers, a site that produces high-end tutorials for photographers and sells them for hundreds of dollars each, may have taken the creativity to the next level to mess with those downloading illegitimate copies of their latest work. They decided to release a version of Photographing the World 3 on several torrent sites a few days before it went to retail, but the version they released was much different than the actual product. It was close enough to the real thing that many people were left wondering just what the hell was going on, but ridiculous enough that it's downright funny.

Where Fstoppers normally go to beautiful and exotic international locations, for their fake they decided to go to an Olive Garden in Charleston, South Carolina. Yet despite the clear change of location, they wanted people to believe the tutorial was legitimate.

“We wanted to ride this constant line of ‘Is this for real? Could this possibly be real? Is Elia [Locardi] joking right now? I don’t think he’s joking, he’s being totally serious’,” says Lee Morris, one of the co-owners of Fstoppers.

People really have to watch the tutorial to see what a fantastic job Fstoppers did in achieving that goal. For anyone unfamiliar with their work, the tutorial is initially hard to spot as a fake and even for veterans the level of ambiguity is really impressive.

Beyond the location choices, there are some dead giveaways hidden in subtle ways within the "tutorial." As an example, here is a scene from the tutorial in which Locardi is demonstrating how to for a 'mask' over one of the photos from Olive Garden.

If that looks like he's drawn a dick and balls over the photo on his computer screen, that's because that is exactly what he's done. The whole thing is a Onion-esque love letter to pirates, screwing with them for downloading the tutorial before the retail version was even available. By uploading this 25GB file to torrent sites, and going so far as to generate positive but fake reviews of the torrent, Fstoppers managed not only to generate hundreds of downloads of the fake tutorial, but its fake actually outpaced torrents of the real product. The whole thing was like a strange, funny honeypot. The fake apparently even resulted in complaints from pirates to Fstoppers about the quality of the fake product.

Also of interest is the feedback Fstoppers got following their special release. Emails flooded in from pirates, some of whom were confused while others were upset at the ‘quality’ of the tutorial.

“The whole time we were thinking: ‘This isn’t even on the market yet! You guys are totally stealing this and emailing us and complaining about it,” says Fstoppers co-owner Patrick Hall.

You have to admit, the whole thing is both creative and funny. Still, the obvious question that arises is whether all the time and effort that went into putting this together couldn't have been better spent figuring out a business model and method in which more of these pirates were flipped into paying customers rather than simply screwing with them.

Filed Under: developers, fstoppers, photographers, piracy, trolling
Companies: fstoppers