Kiddie pirates threaten Hollywood
p2pnet news | Movies:- Our children are in very real danger from Hollywood’s MPAA hit men.
And it’s no joke.
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the enforcer for Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney which are, to all intents and purposes, Hollywood.
US prosecutor Richard E. Trodden had Jhannet Sejas arrested for capturing a 20-second video of Transformers so she could show it to her young brother.
“Her idea was to get him to watch the movie,” I said, going on, “She’s now facing a jail term for supposed illegal camcording.”
In another post, I wrote my daughter, Emma, and I had also seen Transformers and, “we noticed several of the younger members of the audience using their cellphones“.
I went on:
I’d bet a dollar to a dime not one of them had any intention of doing anything illegal with the images, stills or moving.
But whether I’m right or wrong, one thing is sure: if these kids had been in the States, they would have stood an excellent chance of being arrested, giving them police records at best and, if they were old enough, jail terms, if the major studios had their way.
Exaggerated?
This weekend Emma and I watched the Bee Movie and Yup, a couple of kids were snapping away.
Is that a threat to the studios who, from one side of their mouths, are claiming they’re being “devastated” by file sharing and from the other, are reporting sky-high revenues like they’ve never seen before?
If the local kids been in the states, there’s a chance they may have been spotted by ushers with might vision goggles, or maybe stoolie members of the audience with one of those special anti-piracy transmitters.
Had that been the case, the child could easily have ended up with a police record.
But wait! They could have been using their phones to actually film the flick, as did Jose Duarte in Australia with 20th Century Fox’s The Simpsons, says the Sydney Morning Herald.
Then they might have posted it to their website, just like Duarte. And that, assuredly, would have been exactly the same as stealing money from the Fox’s pockets.
Well, The Simpson’s has been on the P2P networks since day one, if not before, so that must have cost Fox a bomb. Right?
“The Simpsons Movie’s $30 million [opening] Friday was a shock to the Industry because it was more than Transformers made on its opening day and best single day this summer, and good enough for The Simpsons to slot into the Hollywood’ Top 17 opening days of all time (right behind the $30.1 mil of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones),” says Deadline Hollywood.
And what of The Bee Movie?
If the kids in our local moviehouse were using their cellphones to grab flicks or pics, probably, thousands of other kids around the world were as well.
Oh! The Horror!
Meanwhile, “In the future, I will not complain about file sharing,” said the makers of The Man From Earth.
“YOU HAVE HELPED PUT THIS LITTLE MOVIE ON THE MAP!!!! When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the net myself!”
Jon Newton – p2pnet
Also See:
20-second video – Girl arrested on movie-house’s say-so, August 23, 2007
using their cellphones – Hollywood ‘Transformers’ travesty,, July 11, 2007
never seen before – Hollywood’s eye-popping summer earnings, September 1, 2007
Sydney Morning Herald – Doh! Simpsons Movie pirate fined, November 13, 2007
Deadline Hollywood – #1 ‘SIMPSONS’ D’OH! $167M Worldwide: Bigger Than Any Pixar Toon, Fox Boasts, July 27, 2007
I will not complain – iracy and The Man From Earth,, November 13, 2007
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November 13th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
The media associations are shooting themselves in the foot, period.
The bottom line is that ANYTHING that a business does publicly which is anti-consumer seriously damages that business. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has this GS Agent guy running around all kinds of Internet message boards defending the Geeks while telling people how STUPID they are for complaining about them, all under the alias “Agent Orange.” He responded to one Internet article about how Geek Squad’s prices were quite excessive (and yes, kids, charging half a C-note extra because you’re installing a “suite” like Office instead of a “single title” like QuickBooks is NUTS) with this commentary:
“I am an Agent of the precinct and laugh at you people who call for service and scoff at the charges…If your so savvy, why don’t you do a google search, find a forum and hook up your wireless network yourself!!! You boomers think you have all the answers but can’t follow a “recipe” for anything but hamburger helper…By the way…How come you will pay your lexus mechanic $1100 for a tune up, but us coming into your home and saving you a headache for $200 is absurd…I have spent $30,000 on my MCSE and countless hours honing my craft…I can’t vouch for the 18 year old newbie’s out there but what were you doing when you were 18?”
See http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/37291/service_review_the_geek_squad.html for full context.
If this is how any representative of a business treats its customers, or POTENTIAL customers, IT KILLS OFF BUSINESS. The RIAA and MPAA lawsuits against consumers for sharing music, the RIAA wanting radio stations to pay a nasty chunk of money per song play that they can’t afford instead of the current licensing model (when THE RADIO STATIONS’ COOPERATION MAKES THE “HOT BANDS” KNOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE), and the pressure from the **AA international wings to shut down The Pirate Bay…these are all OUTRAGEOUS and EVEN THE “AVERAGE JOE” GETS IT.
I was listening in on a local show on talk radio that I won’t name, and the host has always talked about how he doesn’t think people should download music because it hurts artists and it’s illegal and wrong…but that seems to be changing, because the slice of the show I caught today was on this very topic, specifically the radio station licensing changes the RIAA wants to force upon radio stations. Everyone was very unhappy with what they heard about this, and it was essentially unanimous that such a thing would result in a terrestrial radio gravitation towards cheaper and more varied independent music, or formats such as talk radio.
My grandfather had a nice big HDTV hooked to a hi-def digital DVR, and a connection apparently went wrong, causing a “connected HDMI device does not support HDCP” message to cover up the Big Game that they were watching. It wouldn’t have stopped a pirate from copying the Big Game, but it certainly stopped the legitimate purchaser of the TV services from receiving the service being paid for, all in the name of “copy protection.” The damage from consumer-unfriendly behaviors like these on modern equipment (that never was a problem on VCRs and CDs, by the way) will far outweigh the blocking of a few amateur content pirates that follow poorly written directions from two years ago on how to copy content from an HDMI output.
Microsoft, by putting a higher priority on content protection technologies than customer-helpful features (tossing out, for example, Windows Future Storage, or WinFS, a very highly anticipated and potentially even revolutionary feature when Vista’s beta was called Longhorn), has shot themselves in the foot. Vista murders performance benchmarks for every single application thrown at it, and introduces user-unfriendly “features” such as the nagging bastard that is User Account Control (which can be disabled, only to cause other things to break) and “driver signature enforcement” and encrypting video data that passes over the PCI Express bus to a digital-output-enabled video card…not much more needs to be said.
Apple’s starting to slow down in their quest to run their business model off a cliff, but they’re still making some of the mistakes Microsoft has made. They simply can’t afford to make ALL of them just to keep some pissy exec at BMI or Sony happy because of their minority market share that relies on highly dedicated customers who they simply can’t afford to anger.
When these fools all start to remember core principles of business such as “give the customer what they want and you will flourish,” this pending train wreck may be avoided, but mark my words…in ten years, Microsoft, Apple, Best Buy, and every record and movie label under the media associations’ umbrellas may well be gone completely from the markets they have dominated for the previous ten if they keep going the way they’re going.
Being sued for taking a clip of a movie on a crappy-quality camera phone and being forced to use only “approved” hardware that restricts your ability to use your own computer you paid for…these are all fatal errors on the part of the companies engaging in these behaviors, and the real problem for these companies and associations is that customers are “getting it” without requiring the help of angry p2pnet readers to make it understandable. I can tell you from experience with many diverse classes and backgrounds of people I have talked to who ask me computer questions from time to time that the biggest question I am asked after “what can I do to get rid of viruses and spyware and all that junk?” is invariably “what can I use to download music?” I tell them the whole spill every time about how to do it, as well as some hefty warnings about what’s legal and what’s not because they all believe that it’s OK to download music from the Internet for free, and I let them decide what they want to do with that information after I’ve informed them fully. Downloading music is here to stay. The momentum behind the media distribution revolution is too huge for the **AA to keep ignoring. If they don’t adapt, they *will* die.
They can sue their customers all day long, but eventually, P2P and disgruntled customers leaving Britney behind for non-RIAA indie groups will break them so hard that they won’t even be able to fund the lawyers in the first place.
The customer is always right.
Even if you think they’re wrong.
Because the customer is the only reason your ass is in business in the first place, and when you forget that, the customer reminds you in pretty painful ways who’s the *real* boss.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:38 am
The media goliaths are running scared as they know their days are numbered. Music and films will be made by independent people and distributed via the net. That’s the future and they know it. Who needs these money grabbing institutions to dictate over inflated prices to fill their grubby hands with money earned off the hard working artiest that produce the content.
Chasing after kids for such pathetic reasons like this smacks of desperation. They know their days are numbered and continuing to chase the little man like this will only serve to accelerate their demise. I for one will be glad to see the back of them. The big studios and record labels have earned millions while the people that create the content are ripped off by them. Good riddance to a bad lot.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Touch my kid and you die MPAA!
November 14th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
And as expensive as lawyer services are, you’d think that with all the money they LOSE on FILING these suits, they could have funded production of another entire full-length movie, easily. Why are these people suing customers instead of rolling what profits they have back into making their business better?