A shot in the foot
p2pnet news view | P2P:- The ongoing battle between the faceless, cold-blooded, lying, cheating, thieving RIAA and MPAA with the help of the lamescream media, against the millions of honest, law-abiding file-sharers around the globe who don’t make a red cent for their efforts sharing legally purchased or recorded video and/or audio files on the internet, is a joke. It could be pitched to Hollywood studio heads as the plot for a Pink Panther film.
The Criminal News Network (CNN), the BBC, and other uninformed news outlets continue to espouse the influence of the iPod and YouTube as the wave of the future for portable on-the-go media, even spouting the merits of lame-brain ideas like the recent CNN/YouTube U.S. Democratic debate (I refused to watch it or even download it) which allowed any dope with a camera to submit video questions, censored and filtered by CNN and Google, of course.
It’s difficult to imagine a less-productive or informative endeavour. Wait! I can. They’re called MySpace and FaceBook.
They want us to do their jobs for them by recording and uploading videos of news events to CNN’s i-Report and other network’s websites.
As consumers’ appetites for portable entertainment and information grows, and the worldwide, 24/7 unrestricted availability of it to anyone with a pc, wireless laptop, or mobile phone continues to cross geographical and cultural borders heretofore untraversed by modern technology – now that cheap wind-up computers are finally reaching their intended destinations – the racketeers of the MPAA and RIAA continue their pointless and illegal attacks on innocent people in the forms of unwarranted bogus lawsuits and illegal ‘Search & Seizure’ dawn raids.
They would have you believe that file-sharing is illegal – it’s not; that it denies performers and technicians their royalties it doesn’t; that it will inhibit creativity – it won’t.
No court has ever decided that files-haring of legally purchased or recorded media is illegal.
Court documents and records prove the RIAA and MPAA have historically and intentionally denied and/or misrepresented (read falsified) royalties to performers, directors, producers and technicians alike for decades.
Bands who allow their music to be shared freely wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for the efforts of their file-sharing fans.
As proven by study after study – especially those conducted by the RIAA and MPAA – file-sharing hasn’t decreased sales of music or video, and allows the sampling of media before a purchase is made.
The RIAA – and especially the MPAA – have it dead wrong as far as what consumers want and are willing to pay for. It seems almost every day TV networks and movie studios roll out new ‘podcasts’ of shows and films – either at a price and filled with ads and DRM, or restricted to certain countries. Then these ‘webcasts’ are downloaded or ripped from the websites and converted to XviD, making them some of the most popular files in file-sharing. They want us to buy iPods and Zunes and PSPs with miniscule screens, built by slave labour for pennies per day in Third-World countries.
They think we want this. But we don’t.
Sure, maybe at the beginning of the millennium we did when broadband was in its infancy and we all were amazed and delighted to be able to watch films and TV shows streamed from websites like the now-defunct Yahoo! TV.
Gone are the days when one marvelled at the technology of streaming TV and movies and sitting uncomfortably on an office chair in front of a 14-inch monitor to watch a favourite or rare video. That just doesn’t cut it anymore. Nowadays and for the past few years – with the advent of more affordable wide-screen TVs and better home theatre systems, the preference is to leave the bedroom or home office and return to the living room or den to watch a film while lounging on one’s own sofa or comfy chair.
Gone, too, are the days when one can demand a refund from a movie theatre because the over-priced, lackluster blockbuster they’d just seen was crap. P2P fills that void.
But the studios don’t get this. Instead, they try to sell us portable players in order to watch our purchased poor quality mp4 iTunes videos on a tiny screen while sitting on a moving bus or train. Mobile phone companies make deals with Napster to rent music, and TV networks make deals with Vodaphone for streaming live TV. What rubbish! No one wants that anymore. That’s the past. Small screens are out (they were in for perhaps a month) and larger portable media players and DVD players with a minimum 10-inch screen that play XviD and DivX are in.
At the beginning of the 21st century, P2P was new and Napster ruled the roost. Then along cam KaZaA and Grokster, which paved the way for video sharing. Still, the MPAA and TV networks were slow to catch on to customer demands and delayed upgrades to their systems and reforming their out-dated business models – instead focusing their efforts and finances on suing their customers.
While they were busy filing court papers and mis-using domestic and international SWAT teams and police forces to invade pre-teens’ bedrooms in order to confiscate their personal computers, SONY, Panasonic and others saw increased sales of miniature hand-held video cameras, easily concealed and used to record movies to be shared on the net within hours.
Lobbying the U.S. Congress for new laws against camming succeeded in classifying it as a federal crime, with punishments equal to or greater than those for murder or manslaughter. Ironically, SONY and Panasonic are the producers or distributors of many of the films being cammed, as well as being named parties in several lawsuits.
Seemingly out of the blue came the open-source BitTorrent, which revolutionized and popularized the power and nature of file-sharing beyond anyone’s expectations. Although BitTorrent is now in bed with the RIAA, MPAA and iTunes, it hasn’t stopped the creation of new versions of the most popular file-sharing tool ever. Even BitTorrent’s recent purchase of µTorrent hasn’t slowed P2P one bit.
On the other hand Panasonic, SONY, and hundreds of other name-brand and no-name manufacturers of DVD players have acquiesced to the demands of consumers by marketing machines that play the most popular and most desired video formats available in P2P networks – XviD and DivX.
This year has also seen a newly invented dvd region code, unimaginatively named ‘R5′, created by movie studios to supposedly combat the sharing of dvd screeners. Screeners – which are available only to people in the industry and theatre owners for review – somehow find their way into P2P networks.
R5 dvds are released by the studios at the same time a movie is playing in cinemas and sold at affordable prices in countries such as Germany and Russia. These dvds generally have all the extras and subtitles included, and don’t show any retarded watermarked ‘Property of’ warnings. And although they purportedly have a lower quality of audio and video, this is hardly noticeable as one can easily see by logging onto any file-sharing network and downloading an R5 version (XviD or full DVD) of ‘Die Hard 4.0′ or ‘The Simpsons Movie’.
The shot in the foot is this: R5 DVDs were invented to combat the flow of screeners onto the internet, but R5 rips are quickly overtaking screeners on P2P networks.
It’s quite a strange phenomenon that sees major studios and music producers wasting money by suing their customers who have the right to do what they wish with their legally purchased or recorded media, and at the same time sell video cameras, home theatre systems, and dvd players that allow the consumer to view or listen to so-called ‘pirated copies’.
catflap – p2pnet
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August 15th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Artistically speaking the second half of 20th century was a desert just like the second half of 18th century was. The cause? The entertainement industry and their greed and their marketing BS that elevated in hit any type of rubish junks! But the entertainement industry id dying and is replaced by Internet. Internet will induce an new big bang in art during the 21st century that might surpass the bigbang of the 19th Century and without the RIAA or the MPAA Good night parasites! Have a roteen time in hell!
August 18th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
hi i enjoyed the read
August 20th, 2007 at 5:54 am
It is quite amusing to watch these corporate clowns blundering around in the dark, crashing into people, treading on toes and making enemies by the truckload where ever they go. They still hold the (last century) view that “money is power” and think that all their problems can be solved if they spend enough …… WRONG! In this century knowledge is power, but since these fools are ignorant as well as arrogant they just don’t “get it”.
Naturally, the IT “snake oil” salesman are quite happy to keep taking large amounts of money from them in exchange for flawed “copyright protection” systems that get hacked by teenage geeks (usually within 24 hours).