p2pnet news view MPAA | P2P:- A week ago today, we ran an item from Surfer entitled Share the Wealth.

“Surfer has been around a while,”" we said. “He`s well-known online under a variety of nicknames and has, he says, been an active member of the Mac underground for more than 12 years.”

We’re glad to report he’s agreed to contribute regularly to p2pnet. So here’s Share the Wealth, Part II »»»

I’ve already covered the underpinnings of the file-sharing community, so in this article, I’ll elaborate more on actual content and distribution.

First and foremost, I would like to point out how significant this link is: Wayne Crookes vs p2pnet: full decision.

Thanks to Jon @ p2pnet and the decision outlined in the above story, a significant precedence has been set. ‘Merely linking to an article does not amounts to publication’.

Let’s think about that for a minute, and consider the ramifications. Although this was ratified under the British Colombia court system of Canada, it has international impact. Merely linking to an article does not amount to publication. I like the sound of that. Let’s extrapolate the legal angles that can be compounded on that ruling.

Merely linking to an article could be considered a link to view the article, or possibly a downloadable link to the document, either or, same thing, yes? Merely displaying a link to an article (read download link) to the article does not amount to publication, ok. So, displaying a link to an article, er, file does not amount to publication, and therefore not a violation of the copyright owners’ rights.

Therefore, displaying a link to copyrighted material is not a violation of the owner’s rights’.

Awesome, this might vindicate The Pirate Bay, considering all Federik, and the other admins there, do is run a search engine that generates links to files, albiet links to copyrighted content.

Speaking of which, as I write this article, I’m watching a blu-ray rip of The Dark Knight on the 52″ that I got from South Korea. Unfortunately there’s an annoying text claiming the movie is ‘Property of Warner Bros’ at the bottom of the screen. But that’s ok. I don’t mind. ? Sorry, off topic.

In my last article, a reader made a valid point concerning my ‘car’ analogy: “If I buy a car, used or otherwise, I own it and can resell, distribute, give away, or dispense of said vehicle in my own manner of choosing. Makes sense, Yes? Well, the RIAA thinks that you cannot resell, copy, redistribute, or disseminate `their` content.”

Yvon Rozijn said, “The essential difference between both examples is the word ‘copy’ that appears in the latter but not in the first.” And this is a good point. Not that I really give a fsck, but I’ll address it.

If I read passages from a book, is that infringement? If I whistle a tune, is that infringement? If I record content from TV while watching it, is that infringement? No, no, and no. If I photocopy an entire book for personal use, is that infringement? Again, no. Why the fsck are there copy machines then? If I transcribed the entire book by hand for personal use, is that infringement? Again, no. This ‘copy’ reference is nothing more than ideology. Perhaps the reader should address the ‘counterfieting’ ideology that the MPAA claims, instead of my copy analogy. Let’s move on.

75% of all copyright infringement of movies is done thru usenet, it being an international community whose members ‘cam’ movies from Russia, to Macedonia. The only place it’s truly illegal is in Amerika, land of the free, home of the un-informed.

This is the impetus behind the MPAA attack on ‘child pornography’. ‘Let’s shut usenet down, cause it peddles in cp!’

Honestly, I’ve some experience in taking down cp (child pornography), and believe me, usenet has about zero content concerning this topic. It’s an avenue to an end and the MPAA think they can use this as leverage to enact their Draconian agenda. Unfortunately, the government system believes this idiocracy. However, this will never actually impair file-sharing. The RIAA and MPAA have solidified the existence of file-sharing on a grand scale.

In fact, they’re the reason it exists and a perfect example is the current situation in South Korea, and many other asian countries.

Warner Bros pulling out of SK will change nothing, absolutely nothing. They get their content from cams and usenet like everyone else does, so the kiosks will continue to offer the same content at the same price. And the USAF airman will still have the same opportunities.

Thanks MPAA.

Usenet is the catch-all medium that allows us to anonymously distribute content to, well, anywhere. It began as ‘cams’ in European countries, ( a ‘cam’ is a video recording of the movie presentation from the theatre itself, normally of very low quality and ususally barely watcheable..) Consider a ‘cam’ a full length trailer, low quality, sufficiently enticing to make you want to go see the real thing.

Now don’t go postal on the UK crowd. Camming began in Russia and China and then spread. According to p2pnet, 83% of Finnish teenagers share copyrighted material, France 33%, and so on.

China is the largest disseminator of duplicated copyrighted material, yet I don’t see the MPAA busting kiosks in China. They distribute copies (counterfeit does not apply, as ‘movies’ are not used as currency) of DVDs, including the packaging. Sometimes they even shrinkwrap them for authenticity. (Including the price tag intact from the original sale! ?)

Unless you have a drive-in theatre at home, or an 80′ screen at your disposal, there’s no replacement for the movie theatre experience. Consider as well that the movie theatres still use celluloid for their presentation medium. Why are they ‘digitally remastering’ old movies, yet they will not record new movies digitally?

I’m no rocket scientist, but that makes no sense to me. 32fps on 35mm is less that VHS quality when blown up to 80′. And if the ushers paid more attention to people on cell phones, screaming children, or that annoying group of ethnics that ‘won’t ever shut up’ during the movie, as much as they do looking for ‘cammers’, maybe the theatre experience would be worth enduring.

Did they not notice that we PAID money to enter?

I guess the 800usd/pound of popcorn now finances high tech gear like night vision goggles, looking for those high profile rapists and murders that hide in theatres after committing a crime, wait, my bad, I meant the high profile criminals ‘camming’.

Besides, camming is so last year. The ‘adrenelin’ rush that file sharer’s feel when they’re ‘first’ to digitize the newest movie and post it on usenet is the motivator behind camming in the first place. Typically they’re lousy quality, with lousy audio, and tend to have people walking in front of the recording, like I said, consider it a full length web trailer.

Long ago, word of mouth took weeks, sometimes, months for the general populace to find out just how crappy this movie or that movie was.

Camming reduced this to days, if not hours, thanks to the digital world they refuse to embrace.

That’s why they (read MPAA) are so pissed off about camming. Not for lost sales, (well, yes to lost sales, but not because of file-sharing) but because the word gets out much faster how just how lousy a movie really is before the thought police have fleeced the public at large to turn a profit.

Both Iron Man and The Hulk, produced by Marvel Studios, were cammed the day they came out, and BOTH movies broke box office records. Here is an excellent article that outlines the theatre demise going back to 1950. Read it here.

This is just the tip of the disengenuous digital youth that the industry is losing daily.

In a day of huge ‘monitors’, (I refuse to call them televisions anymore, because they do so much more) and DVD players, digital recorders, computers to phase shift content, the movie experience is just not what it used to be. I can get better quality at home by watching the DVD. I can even pause and rewind the ‘naughty bits’.

How is recording digital content at home wrong? Why was the VHS invented with a record button?.

I paid for a UFC event on pay-per view, and because the FCC requires there be an open firewire port on digital boxes, and DVR boxes, you can easily pipe the content to something that will record said show.

PVR’s are easy to setup. (Personal Video Recorder, i.e. computers. I’ve a Mac dedicated for nothing but a Media Center.) I personally like ‘Lost’, and as each episode comes out, I capture the episode digitally, like many others do, and then share said episode, SANS the annoying commercials.

If I can watch it, why is it an issue that I can capture the same content digitally? Why would a TV/Monitor have ‘output’ capability if not to record it? Firefox blocks advertisements, Cable was supposed to be commercial free, so why can’t I ‘rip’ the commercials out?

So, I ask, if your TV has ‘output’, as every TV does (including the scrambled, u cant record this content), why is it an infringement to capture said output?.

Well, it’s not, and the MPAA would like to think that you don’t have this right. Again, ‘copy’, as ‘Reader’ points out, my counter-argument is what-the-fsck-ever. If I had a mnemonic memory, is that infringement, cause I retained the content in my own memory? No, and I think I made my point.

Let’s get back to distribution. There are several levels of distribution. Usenet is the most prolific because of its anonymity, but it’s not the only distribution avenue.

This is freedom of speech at its finest.

The content comes from file-sharing members digitizing bought copies, and insiders who get pre-release content and then distributing said conten — like the version of Dark Knight I’m watching comes from a member that got a pre-release version, and digitized it for distribution.

This refutes the analogy that a distributed ‘copy’ equals a lost sale.

Believe me, if I didn’t have a copy of Dark Knight in blu-ray, I probably wouldn’t have suffered the movie experience to see this in theatre quality. If I wasn’t going to pay to see your crap in the first place, then you didn’t miss a sale cause of your crap. Case in point. Stop regurgitating ideas like ‘Horton hears a Who’, and people might return to the theatres.

Because content can be distributed via digital means does not mean I would have gone to the theatre and seen your crap in the first place. Hello?

Movies are actually more popular than music, mainly because a song is 3-5 min and a movie is 90min +, that and we don’t really give a fsck about the MPAA.

Content is content. It makes no difference if we distribute ‘Leon’, or ‘Transformers’. Cams used to come out first but are quickly replaced with rips, and then DVD rips, and then bluray rips.

It would probably stun the MPAA if they knew how many ‘insider’ copies are distributed, replacing the ‘cam’. Most of us don’t even bother with the cam copies anymore, mainly because the DVD rip will be out days later, mainly from insiders.

This is an international dilemna that the MPAA needs to swallow. It’s going to happen. Deal with it, or adjust your business model to supplant us.

10% of all movies shared are from insiders in the industry, hence the copy I’ve that whines ‘Property of Warner Bros’.

Like most of the digital ‘content’ I’ve is actually from the industry itself.

Thanks,Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney.

Enacting usenet gives power to the users and is then disseminated down to community distribution level. It’s something that you can’t sway, or affect. Claiming ‘cp’ will get little done, and never affect the actual distribution of your ‘content’.

Face it: we’re going to distribute your crap, and the only way to deal with it is to adopt a digital distribution model that’s better than ours (read FREE). And your claim of cp is hollow at best. It’s only a means to an ends to inhibit usenet content. They don’t even have a clue as to what is disseminated.

Has MediaSentry every downloaded cp from usenet’s? If so, then they’re in violation of federal law, private investigator or not. What percentage of usenet content is cp? I’ll gander less than 0.01%.

Movies come from different sources, and all are protected, or unknown to the MPAA. Therefore, our distribution network has little fear from their lame attempt to infiltrate how we do things. Shut down usenet, and something else will pop up days later.

They don’t even know how we are distributing, so we fear nothing they spout as ‘reality,’ all the while reporting record profits each and every revenue quarter.

Copyright infringement is duplicating intellectual property for profit, personal or otherwise, while capturing copyrighted content for personal use is just that ‘fair use’.

I came, I saw, I kept a copy. Isn’t that what it’s about? Generating popularity? I don’t keep the crap. And I don’t see ‘Henry Poole Was Here’ going bluray anytime soon. Because NOBODY would buy it!

DVD content can be ripped and/or copied via a multitude of analog and digital software applications.

For every version of DRM that they produce, the interested parties that hack their content outnumber the employed coders the MPAA has that invent their encryption. Even bluray, which was supposed to have DRM that would last the test of time for around 4 years, was circumvented in days.

Consider: every movie released on bluray currently is in my collection, and freely distributed on file-sharing networks as I write this article.

Get used to it.

Share the Wealth

Stay tuned.

Did you enjoy this story, or find it interesting/useful? Help keep the posts coming by donating. No amount is too small. Cheers! And thanks.

News 1130 – , November , 2008

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under MPAA News, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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