Posts by Dylan Reeve
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to bob daktari,
it’ll be standard for all media in the future dylan, I believe
its the distribution channels that are changing not peoples desire to enjoy content… its for the content owners to find a way to generate revenue…
megaupload showed one way… allegedly with illegal content… replace that with sanctioned content and a revenue stream back to the owners/creators holders of the copyright and the publics desires can actually be catered to (as market forces surely dictate?)
no income vs potential income via one means is our current bottleneck
The problem is that most of the content is created for TV broadcast. Say what you want about the end of linear TV, it's still the driving force of video creation (TV production eclipses film and everything else). While TV channels are the source of this content the model isn't going to change drastically. Until the returns on direct sales (through streaming or downloads) for a show in a region like NZ can exceed the licensing revenue of the same show by a broadcaster the broadcaster will be the primary distribution channel and will dictate the timing and ultimate availability of other channels.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Sacha,
The difficulty is that the US is the primary market. The shows are produced on contract for broadcasters, they then make on-demand (and download) rights available through one or more of a few services to a select geographic area.
Here, we are a secondary market. Shows here are sold to broadcasters, who typically buy all the rights (hence iSky, TVNZ On Demand and TV3 Catchup or whatever). In this region no-one (NetFlix, iTunes, Hulu) can offer that content as they don't have the rights.
Even if the broadcasters didn't buy the online rights, they will be sold subject to broadcast rights. So if NetFlix could buy rights for NZ to Doctor Who, for example, they still couldn't make it available until after the primary exclusive broadcast rights had been exercised (or expired).
The only slight hope of changing this is for the primary market to become online - so a company like NetFlix can commission original content for it's online market, make it available through it's service worldwide and sell broadcast rights as a secondary license.
In terms of getting shows on air here quicker - it's a goal but is made difficult by a few things. One it technical - it's hard to get the content here quick enough. Most HD shows are STILL shipped on tape. Files are very large and HD satellite transmissions are still highly contended and often aren't cost-effective to distribution to broadcasters. The second issue is one of practicalities, the US TV season is often interrupted with mid-season breaks of two to four weeks. Something that wouldn't work for an NZ audience. So shows usually have to start at least far enough behind the US to absorb this break.
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For films and music it should be relatively easy (not sure why we don't have more options in that area in NZ). For Television it's a nightmare and I can't see a way it will ever be resolved, it's simply not possible for companies to provide direct, legal, immediate access to their TV content.
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I literally had no idea that MegaUpload even had pirate content on it until a couple of weeks ago when someone showed me IceFilms... It's astonishing, a massive collection of links. Was possible to find all manner of films and episodes...
Worked very well - I'd happily have paid for the service (something like NetFlix I guess, but I wouldn't really know).
The content industry (of which I am a part) really needs to get ahead of this stuff. Unfortunately a massive number of complex rights management systems they've built up over years stand in the way and push people toward less-than-legal options...
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to nzlemming,
Yes, that might do it. But many of MU’s files would be zipped or rar files. Extracting the audio out would be difficult. MU could have done something similar, but didn’t
And it's not required of them.
With YouTube they then also present some options to the content owners, which including monetising the content (ie. You upload a video with Pussycat Dolls track on it, their label can get ad revenue from your video).
That's not really the sort of business model that MU was operating with.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Russell Brown,
Which is where I thought Graeme’s “these are drugs” example upthread was a lithe bit off.
I actually missed that comment...
So, when someone says “those are drugs”, the police should wait until after trial before seizing the wads of cash when they raid a drug house? And the drug-sellers should be able to continue selling their drugs until tests are back and confirmed by a court that those were indeed illegal drugs?
This is a very tricky one. If MegaUpload were a site that just straight-up stored, indexed and offered direct downloads of infringing content then I can see this analogy being somewhat more reasonable.
But it's not, it is more like a self-storage service. If one person was storing drugs in their unit would we expect (and accept) that police shut down the entire facility?
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to nzlemming,
Good god, you’re quite right. Mea culpa, I missed that.
Edit: However, the MD5 hash will be different if even a bit is different, so this will only work for absolutely identical files
So, apologies to Dylan, they did dedupe, but that won’t stop multiple copies of essentially the same file being available on the server.
If they have different hashes then the claim that MU should or could remove all of them from a single notice.
And as I've said above, I don't think it's reasonable or required for them to remove all unique references (each represents a separate upload by a separate users) to a de-duplicated file.
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So the multiple links thing all seems to stem from the de-duplication. Which I think is bullshit because MegaUpload can't know the legitimacy of any given copy. While User 1 may sharing a file and having it linked to from various places, User 2 may have a legitimate reason to have that file.
While it's not strictly legal I know plenty of people who work in the TV/Film industry who have pirated copies of work they've contributed to for their show reels etc.
Again if that were a requirement then I'm pretty sure YouTube were frequently not in compliance as duplicate videos are often uploaded by multiple users on YouTube.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Martin Roberts,
The indictment clearly claims (para 22) that MU did de-dupe (using MD5 hashes). It goes on to say that they demonstrated the ability to remove underlying content w.r.t. terrorist and child-porn material. Yet they never did this for DMCA complaints. It is also claimed that they misled copyright holders over this in “negotiations” over their ‘Abuse Tool’.
Terrorist related content and child porn are presumably explicitly illegal. Copyright material on the other hand is not. I may have a legitimate right to hold the content, and choose to use MegaUpload to store it.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Even if there are two URLs and you only disable one?
Well that's what's unclear... Did MU files have multiple access URLs? It wasn't my experience in the few files I'd put on the service in the past.
Or did the multiple links referred to actually mean multiple copies of the same content uploaded by different users?