Speaker: ACTA: Don't sell us down the river
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Okay that's is. Cheers. Now having that drink Russell suggested ;)
On a Monday morning? I didn't realise things were that bad!
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On a Monday morning? I didn't realise things were that bad!
So goes the life of the mind...
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On a Monday morning?
I'd say he fully deserves it.
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And sorry for the tangent, but I don't think "piracy" is the biggest problem facing an industry where it's not impossible -- just unlikely, fingers crossed -- that a bloated money sink like Avatar (500 million and counting?) could be the highest grossing film of the year and still end up in the reality-based red.
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Ditto. Thanks Peter.
Film and television have specific issues, and you've covered some of them very eloquently.
There are similar and related sentiments and issues that DO apply to the music industry- and books will have similar overlap and issues of their own (8 gigs to download every book ever published!?) -
But then you have to look at the fact that illegal downloading is more than likely to be actually slowing the uptake of new distributors entering the market because the margins for new entrants into digital distribution are being hurt by those downloaders. So piracy is actually partly to blame for these exorbitant prices.
That could be true. But the experience in music was that consumer piracy drove innovation. The MP3 format was a technical footnote until users started trading in it in 1994, and I don't think there can be any doubt that the illicit trade hastened the introduction of legal and functional music download services.
I have somewhere a copy of a strategic presentation given to British major labels in the late 90s. It's almost psychotically aggressive -- all about owning and controlling all means of distribution, shutting out new entrants, etc. The one thing it didn't envisage was customers as distributors. Then Napster happened.
Those companies did try the end-to-end strategy -- they formed cartels behind two big online services, and turned out to be really lousy retailers for themselves. Steve Jobs had to save their asses, by actually paying some heed to the people paying the bills -- the customers. And even then the labels stitched themselves up by insisting on a DRM scheme that made them captive to Apple.
The first internet radio was illicit; now there's a rights fee structure and services like Spotify. And we're now in a situation where "grey" sites like Hype Machine have pretty much been incorporated as part of the industry's marketing structure -- and are replacing radio as the means of music discovery.
In video, the fact that we get many network series near day-and-date these days is at least partly down to TV downloading. (The morning that the Sopranos finale was discussed on TV One's Breakfast despite the fact that it wouldn't screen here for a couple of months was a turning point.)
The fact that people already were downloading what had until recently seemed formidably large files definitely became part of the rationale for catch-up services such as TVNZ ondemand.
I'm not doubting the problems you outline, but I do think that downloading has provided an impetus, a proof of concept and a signal of what consumers want. In virtually every case you can name, the pirate offering came first.
My guess is that there will be an extra distribution tier for those of us who want to watch TV with the zeigeist, but to feel right for me, it will need to offer the sense of community and discovery that makes eMusic more satisfying than the terribly sterile iTunes store.
I also wish the goddamn advertising industry would come back from lunch and fix global advertising. There are viable international audiences for all kinds of work, but beyond Google ads (which just don't work on sites like this one) almost nothing that'll help you monetise a niche global audience.
When you, say, visit The Guardian website, you're pretty much burgling it because they don't have the ads to show you. There should be something better than this.
(Also, all of you with ad or Flash blockers -- you're stealing my content. But that's okay.)
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(Also, all of you with ad or Flash blockers -- you're stealing my content. But that's okay.)
Ooopsie... had forgotten to Disable ABP on publicaddress.net on my new Firefox install.
As far as flash goes, sorry, no can do. You'll have to prise that particular preference from my cold dead hands I'm afraid.
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Oh, and in what reads like a thinly veiled parody of our copyright discussions, I give you Do Web Hook Ups Hurt the Sex Industry?.
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Peter, first, don't apologies for writing treatises. We do that here. Many of us even read them in their entirety, or at least try to.
But not having solid indisputable numbers is not a reason to dismiss the argument. It may be a reason to be a little more cautious about what we do to stop piracy, as the effect is not completely known.
My big concern is that the only people advocating caution are those who are being dismissed as "pirates" and "thieves". The vocal people on your side of the argument are all calling for immediate implementation of draconian "solutions" to a problem for which there is no solid evidence of its existence. You've even conceded that there is no solid evidence, and it's not just a matter of there being no "control earth", as you put it, but also that online movie marketplaces in the style of ITMS have no history to support or refute either side of the debate.
Eight years ago, the music industry was in precisely the same situation as the movie industry is now with regard to online distribution. It was an accepted "fact" that you couldn't possibly make money from selling music digitally. Nobody would buy, or if they did they would immediately share it with the whole world. Do those arguments sound familiar?I don't mean to lecture and patronise, I really don't, so please accept my apologies. It's just hard to phrase things in a way that don't come across as such when I'm seeing the movie industry making exactly the same arguments against online distribution as the music industry made, when we've now got conclusive proof that you can make money selling music online. Not only that, it looks like the music industry is undergoing a resurgence that, if you had listened to the dire predictions of many involved, should be completely impossible in the face of continued downloading.
I'm going to leave this one alone now. I've made my point, you've made yours. I accept, and always have, that there are some unavoidable costs in making movies that are not faced by music - film stock, for example, which will remain an expense until such time as digital achieves the same saturation and colour fidelity as film. I know the list of sub-million-dollar movies isn't anything to base an industry on, but it was posted to counter the assertion that movies must cost tens-of-millions to make.Perhaps, but as you mention an 8 gig file is going to be a very different beast to most music, even flac, so we’re in for a wait before that becomes viable. Particularly if (heaven forbid) your film actually starts doing well, downloading starts to accelerate, and servers come under pressure
This is where that evil bittorrent comes to the fore, doing exactly what it does best: breaking up large files for distributed distribution. We're using it at work to distribute 20GB install images to hundreds of computer lab machines simultaneously. It doesn't matter if the file is encrypted to high heaven, you can still distribute it over BT. One of the real problems I have with the "bittorrent is t3h evil" attitude is that BT actually provides a way to solve the distribution issue for large files, even ones containing protected material. Encrypted, protected torrents are a very viable way to get a high-def movie distributed online, without killing the servers.
the Production Company worked very hard on creating their ‘market’ or consumer base or whatever you want to call it, and then those same people turned around on release and downloaded it for free on the internet.
I said "marketplace", not "market". Huge difference. If it's not convenient for people to find and use a legitimate outlet they won't buy, it's that simple. The success of ITMS over the offerings attempted by the labels, aside from minimally-intrusive DRM, was that it brought together catalogues from a bunch of different labels. It was the cliche one-stop-shop. If you wanted something, odds were that it was on iTunes, at least if it was fairly recent. That is what I mean when I say "marketplace". I don't mean building up a base of customers, I mean building a place where the customers can come to find lots of offerings from different sources, and easily get them in convenient formats. What illicit downloads offer that, so far, has been totally anathema to the big labels is the product in formats that are highly portable: DivX/XviD, MKV, MP3, ogg... Not DRM'd to the hilt, impossible to watch without Windows Media Player, etc. People want to watch on their own terms, in their own time, on their choice of device.
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My personal point of view is that all it would really take is people to feel as if their illegal activities are being monitored for illegal downloading to go down notably.
Who's going to pay for that monitoring, Peter? The ISPs will, quite reasonably, scream bloody murder if the content industries expect the network carriers to wear the bill to monitor traffic for illicit downloads. It's non-trivial to do at large scale, impacts on throughput and speeds, and horrendously expensive. I'm perfectly happy to defer to your experience on why the cost structures of the movie industry can't just go away, but please defer to my experience when I say that monitoring for illicit file-sharing is effectively impossible. I use the word "effectively" because, although technically (and this is getting pretty far into the territory of a PhD thesis) possible the costs would be so horrendous as to make any notional losses to downloading look like the proverbial drop in a bucket. It could be done if everyone were still on dialup and we had modern network hardware, though still at vast expense, but we don't exist in that hypothetical world.
Why shouldn't the ISPs pay? Because, contrary to the media industries' position, the ISPs don't make money from heavy downloaders. They actually lose money because they have to provision more capacity to ensure that other customers aren't unduly affected, and can't effectively pass the cost on to the relevant customers for a whole bunch of reasons.
It's not as simple as just looking at traffic types, either. P2P can be used for entirely legitimate purposes, and often is. Pretty much all Open Source operating systems distribute their installation media as torrents, and without capturing the download in its entirety and reassembling it it's impossible to be certain of the contents. I discussed the technical complexities of global monitoring in "that thread", so won't go back into them in depth here. Let's leave it at really, really difficult and expensive, and also going to do awful, horrible things to transfer rates for all internet users.I don’t know what the technicalities of the law are in regards to fining people without them having the option of going to court?
Skating on very thin Bill of Rights Act ice. Parliament can just make it so, and it's legal, but it's also a very nasty abuse of power. Enabling use of the state's coercive powers without allowing recourse to the courts is police state territory, and although I'm sure there are quite a few people at the top of various large media conglomerates who don't see the problem with that I doubt it's a position that'd have too many fans further down the distribution chain. It's certainly heavily unpopular with the general public, as we saw with the s92A furore.
To me it’s more a case of targeted education: let people know the ways in which pirating is harming the industry, that what they’re doing is effectively theft, which is harming the artists, and personally, I think many casual illegal downloaders will think twice. People, generally speaking, are ethical, they just need a gentle reminder of that fact.
Yes, most people are ethical and will pay. But, they need to be given the opportunity to buy the product. It's not enough to tell them off, you need to offer a viable alternative. What's the viable alternative for Linux users? What's the viable alternative for Mac users? As I said in my last post, if the choices are crippled legit downloads that can only be watched in Windows Media Player 11, or an illicit download that has no restrictions, a lot of people are forced to take the latter option because they cannot reasonably comply with the former. This is what I mean by convenience. It is not a magnanimous gesture of beneficence to use layer after layer of digital restrictions management and then expect people to buy not only that product but also another product in order to use the first product.
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Also, all of you with ad or Flash blockers -- you're stealing my content. But that's okay.
Not that I do, but if I did I'd like to think that I contribute enough electrons to the discussions to compensate ;)
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But if it’s the threat of internet being cut off then to be honest I don’t think it’s the end of the world, given that people can swap to a new ISP (although that has problems itself, with people trying to exit ISPs contracts, etc). I understand that the right to the internet is something quite vital, but to be honest, if you’re going to get caught so many times that you’ve gone through every single ISP in the country you deserve everything you get.
Ok, I propose a solution to the bigger "piracy" problem than P2P & other online avenues. I propose that we mandate schools, Unis, techs and other youth organisations to ask every group of students if they're transfering illegal copyrighted material.
As I stated in a previous post, "sneakernet" is a bigger source of "piracy" than online is (apparently). Yet it's not policed. What's the difference in asking ISPs to police their networks while we don't do it in the "real" world?
Ok, I'll admit I'm being argumentative & facetious. But I don't get why some people seem to think that ISPs should be policing what is effectively a different industry's problem. Enforcement agencies enforce the law, not businesses. And that's not even getting into the whole criminal vs civil thing. It's like asking the city council to monitor every vehicle that travels along their roads for illegal contents and then telling them they can't use the roads anymore!
...we won’t find innocent people getting caught up.
So NZ's system will be more accurate and effective than the US system? I'm sceptical. Even an ombudsman won't stop the accusations (and disconnections).
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For those wondering if it's possible to make lots of money selling music even if it'll end up online, here's a solution from The Beatles:
The Beatles have an agreement with EMI to pump out 30,000 apple-shaped USB drives loaded with the band's music in FLAC 44.1KHz 24bit—higher than 16-bit CD quality—and 320Kbps MP3 files. At this point, one has to wonder if The Beatles are aware that it's possible to make tracks available over the Internet that were not first sold over the Internet (Paul, if you're reading this: yes, it is possible).
Given the success of the USB drive promotion, Apple Corps looks poised to make plenty of money; the drives are sold out in the US, and appear to be going for $430 in Japan.
$8 million or so is a nice bundle by anyone's reckoning... (US$280)
Beatles piracy fixation gets stranger with huge FLAC release
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here's a solution from The Beatles
Yeah, but... it's the fucking *Beatles*. They'll probably outsell Michael Jackson this year, and dude DIED.
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@Danielle: I know, my point was that they're selling to the consumer what the consumer wants, and making it an experience that is impossible to duplicate online, and making a lot off it.
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Danielle, yes it's the Beatles. But the principle holds for anyone. Limited edition physical media with a non-trivial-to-copy design has serious cachet. I imagine that those Beatles USB keys are probably in the vicinity of USD15 each to manufacture, given that they're a pretty limited run, though hard to really estimate without knowing the construction. They're selling for USD280 retail, which is one heck of a good margin.
Oh to be able to look six months in the future, at eBay.
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They'll probably outsell Michael Jackson this year, and dude DIED.
And are now the biggest selling act of the 2000s which is just odd......
That said, I wish I was able to access one of those wee things, but really.....$280?
And Paul says odd things about the internet and piracy (from Cameron's link and the Guardian story it links to):
And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, 'Now you recompense us for that.' And they're scared of that."
The 320kbs and FLAC files of the remasters were online a week before 09.09.09, ripped, I guess, from all those promo CDs floating around. Doesn't seem to have substantially hurt the 4 million or so sales of these over the next month or so.
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Limited edition physical media with a non-trivial-to-copy design has serious cachet.
Yeah, I dunno. Remember all those limited edition coloured vinyl pressings of things? I feel like that only really works if you've got an inbuilt collector-type audience. Like, say, a bunch of obsessive boomers.
I wish I was able to access one of those wee things, but really.....$280?
Yeah, I'm Beatle Nerdlinger McGee, as you know, but... not happening.
(We did download the whole of Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road for Beatles Rock Band a couple of days ago, though, at reasonable expense. I'm partially keeping Heather Mills in the manner to which she has become accustomed. Bah.)
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Woohoo. Caught up at last. Just sayin.
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So, Sacha, now that you're caught up, care to join in?
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Feels like we've already had this conversation several times on other threads. I agree it's more civil this time around and I commend our host for his part in that.
As before, I'm interested in hearing about what might work so that creators can make a sustainable living with strong industry infrastructures and the public get to enjoy the work and nourish the various cultures we belong to. I've been way too busy to have any fresh thoughts since last time about how to make that happen.
Have appreciated the discussion about differences between books, music and film - though no one has mentioned software yet this time. The number of likely repeat experiences for a movie, book or track must have some effect on our sense of exchange value as a consumer.
However, securing access can be broader that holding/owning/downloading - and Youtube is an example that must be affecting expectations especially of younger New Zealanders. Renting, not buying. Paying with attention, not just money. Converting attention to income for creators, producers and distributors in ways like related product sales and advertising.
There are certain overall things that will happen regardless (some technological, some demographic) and I understand how that can sound a bit "adapt or die". I believe with leadership we can choose how we respond and add our nation's own approach to world IP/creative industry arrangements. With leadership and with investment.
It's not going to happen by propping up the existing middlemen. ACTA worries me because it eliminates some options without proper local discussion, just like s92 threatened to. It will similarly tempt those who want to suck up to the big American daddy, especially our current government. China might be an interesting factor.
I disagree there was widespread public opposition to s92 and I doubt most people know or care about ACTA either. That means the pressure on politicians has to come from those who understand what's at stake in many ways. That's us, broadly, so we do need to decide what options we want to pursue. I'm not expecting a single answer.
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I don't get why some people seem to think that ISPs should be policing what is effectively a different industry's problem.
I suspect it's mostly to do with uncertainty over how difficult it will be for the ISPs to monitor this stuff.
Oddly, it's very hard to find sensible discussions on this subject. I guess it's because they get bogged down in the 'is piracy really hurting the industry or not?' discussion before the technicalities of doing something about it is really picked up on.
But the more that we can be realisitic about the realities of each other's industries then hopefully we can move forward in a constructive way.
Thanks, by the way Matthew for your thoughts on this. And general cheers and 'here, here's' to many others. I won't name names, but you know who you are :)
Anyway, I will absolutely defer to others on the technicalities of a monitoring system. But are we really stuck in an unassailable bind? Are there not any better ways to get around it all? Only logging the activity of people who visit the bit torrent sites for example?
Does anyone know how the French are doing it?
Oh, btw:
On a Monday morning? I didn't realise things were that bad!
I'm in Italy at the moment, so it was Sunday night ;) Which is not to say I don't drink on a Monday morning - although that's usually a sign things are good rather than bad...
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Addition FYI, on the French law:
the law, which will set up a new regulatory body with the power to investigate suspected illegal downloaders and recommend sanctions, has also been heavily criticised by consumer groups as well as the opposition.
They say it will be ineffective in combating determined pirates and will impose unduly harsh punishment on ordinary Internet users.
The previous version of the law was watered down after the constitutional court rejected a text that would have created a body with the power to cut Internet access for those found guilty of illegal downloads.
The constitutional court ruled that the new body could only have the power to issue warnings and that any disconnections could only be ordered by a judge after two written warnings from the new authority.
The sanctions imposed by a judge could also include fines of up to 30,000 euros ($44,420).
The law will also oblige anyone with a wi-fi connection to block non-authorised users from using the connection.
Interestingly, there seems to be very few mentions of what's happenning there, since this went through in June. Certainly, I can't find any information on how they are technically doing it.
(oh, and PS Russell, fully take your point on the failures to offer decent online services, and my suggestions on piracy harming uptake are hard to prove. I also agree that it was the pirates who pushed the innovatio of digital distribution first. The big players are very slow to move, and if they're already making money in the system they have, they don't want to change. However, I suspect the lessons leart from music are echoing in the film industry. (Sony, for example pushed very hard with the PS3 to get multimedia internet streaming into the lounge, some might say rather too hard, and most likely with the desire to corner the market). Anyway, I am hopeful that with more entrants to the market, we will see improved services...)
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Peter, the proposed arrangements here as far as I know were for the music industry copyright bodies like RIANZ to monitor and complain and for the ISPs to respond to claims of infringement. The US model, in other words, as ACTA will push on us. Not sure about France or others, but all part of the same campaign like s92 was/is.
I guess the film industry would also be expected to invest in monitoring filesharing, torrents, etc. The technical difficulties of that mean a high error rate in accusations - details in the earlier copywrong threads.
Wishing I were on Italian time.
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I guess the film industry will expect ISPs to invest in monitoring filesharing, torrents, etc.
There, fixed that for you :P
That's another big concern of mine. There seems very little political willingness to engage with the serious concerns that ISPs have over the costs of monitoring (as Peter has noticed), and who will bear the burden. As a very vague indication of the money involved, in the consultation phase of the Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Bill, the select committee accepted that "compliance costs to be borne by the telecommunications companies were estimated to be $12 million". This is just to provide the facility to intercept and store (not screen in real time) the communications of a particular customer, primarily aimed at tapping voice service. That is a very, very basic system that just diverts a particular customer's traffic through a storage device for later analysis (something that is very, very easy to do, and demanding only inasmuch as it requires storage capacity). There is no comparison of the traffic with anything, never mind attempts to store, reassemble, then calculate and compare a hash value for multi-GB files at something approximating real-time speeds. This is incredibly demanding computationally. As an example, it takes my Core2 Duo workstation, doing not very much else, about eight seconds to calculate the hash on a 4GB .iso file once it's completed downloading off bittorrent. Multiply that by hundreds, or thousands, and then by dozens of ISPs, and you start to get a vague idea of the demands. That's not getting into the complexity of trying to capture and assemble streams of traffic, doing matching of traffic types because you can disguise bittorrent to look at a casual glance like other types of traffic, and then the maintenance of a database of hashes of infringing files.
Don't discount, too, that such legislation would result in thousands of malicious torrents being created with suspicious names but innocuous (or nonsense) content, just to keep the filtering authorities busy. There would be active measures to disrupt the system through spurious results, never mind the legally-dubious means that would likely be utilised. I would estimate feasibility of a monitoring solution, on a scale of 0-1, as 0.0, rounded from about 20 decimal places. Yes, it really is that difficult, and that's in a world where you don't have outraged citizens engaging in disruptive-but-completely-legally-and-ethically-acceptable as well as outright-illegal-and-ethically-dubious acts of rebellion.
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