p2pnet news view Movies | MPAA News:- YouTube is the top site when it comes to hosting illegal content.

Who says so?

Warner Brothers.

And in the second, third and fourth and fifth places respectively are Rapidshare, Veoh, Megaupload and Hulu, claims the company’s Trevor Albery (right) .

A third of all Britons are online pirates, p2pnet quoted Fact, a UK private limited company financed and owned by Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), as  saying, last week.

Fact, short for Federation Against Copyright Theft, could also be an acronym for Farcical Approaches to Copyright Transgressions.

The declaration came from the unit’s Eddy Leviten during Stopping Digital piracy: Strategy and Tactics, a pep talk for industry executives sponsored by Fact and Warner Brothers Entertainment, Europe.

According to Leviten, “the entertainment cartels have now moved far beyond simply accusing their own customers of being criminals and thieves, claiming sharing a movie or music online is exactly the same as stealing it from a retailer,” p2pnet reported, going on:

“Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney [read Hollywood] and Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG [read the Big 4] are, unbelievably, now even folding borrowed and viewed movies and music into their statistics.”

That figure, “has gone up dramatically,”  he stated, declaring, “We can safely say that people in the UK are engaging in piracy more, much more, than they were previously.”

Does that mean UK Citizens who borrow music or a movie from the local library and then enjoy it at home might soon find a corporate copyright cop banging on their doors? - we wondered, also pointing out home users aren’t the only ones in apparent danger.

Fact will also be, “looking a lot more at streaming when we do the research for next year” said Leviten, because, “Certainly, the proliferation of those sites has caused us anguish.”

However, he wasn’t the only one in pain.

“We don’t think we are going to eradicate piracy,” admits  Warner Bros’ Albery in Part Deux of the FACT/ Warner chat.

And having reached that conclusion, “we want to bring piracy down to a level which is going to enable us to continue to grow our business, to continue to flourish, and to enable us to launch legal services that will enable us to meet that demand  being satisfied by piracy,” Albery, who used to work for Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), says.

These days he’s in charge of Warner Bros’ Europe, Middle East and Africa anti-piracy efforts, and is responsible for coordinating strategy, “spanning technology & operations, legal & enforcement, public policy & consumer education and new business” initiatives.

Not only but also, he’s in charge of the EMEA Warner Bros anti-piracy pirates.

BitTorrent rules

When it comes to file sharing, BitTorrent is The One.

“What we see in June of 2008 (compared to a year earlier) is that the P2P user base overall is static, neither up nor down, statistically,” BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland tells p2pnet.

But, “if you look at BitTorrent separately from the rest of the P2P , you find that the BitTorrent base has grown dramatically (by 17.5% y-o-y) while the rest of the P2P applications have declined as a group by 9%,” he says.

This suggests the growth in P2P activity, including the huge surges in P2P traffic volumes, is “generally attributable to the increased popularity of feature film and television swapping,” says Garland.

BitTorrent is also important to the movie industry, which tried to muzzle it by taking it over.

Could it be the technically challenged executives who run Hollywood were, and still are, under the delusion afflicting most corporate media outlets: that BT is a network rather than a protocol?

True or not, BT in its non-corporate form is still very much alive and well and in use with the P2P filesharing fraternity.

Together with the various indexing sites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt, it’s largely responsible for the “devastation” that’s wreaking havoc with the profits of Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, they assert, at the same time reporting record eye-popping, mind-boggling revenues.

Batman cometh

Amassing over a million downloads in under seven days, The Dark Knight was, “by far the most pirated movie of this week,” said TorrentFreak on November 17, going on »»»

This success is a truly remarkable accomplishment in times where piracy is rampant. As with every other blockbuster, ‘The Dark Knight’ was leaked onto the Internet in various formats. It began right after the premiere in July with a cammed version, which was celebrated by the folks from The Pirate Bay. The Cam was followed by a DVD-screener in early September.

Although Hollywood did its best to prevent the movie from hitting BitTorrent, their efforts were not very successful. In July, just a few days after the film premiered, the police arrested a 40-year-old man who tried to record the movie with a camcorder. However, around the same time someone else had already put up a cammed version from another source.

This week, in another round of leaks, DVD-rips of ‘The Dark Knight’ found their way to BitTorrent. Unsurprisingly, given the commercial success of the movie, these were downloaded well over a million times in just a few days. From the looks of it, Batman will crush Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Transformers, as it will easily become this year’s most pirated movie.

“It’s going to happen,” said E! Online this November. “Maybe it already has.”

The story was referring to the fact the at-the-time current Batman flick, the Dark Knight, was close to raking in one billion dollars.

As of November 17, it had reach $994,986,691, and counting, and at the time of writing, the three current members of Hollywood’s billion-dollar club were Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

And DVD-quality Dark Knight rips are already firmly established on the P2P networks, although the flick doesn’t doesn’t officially go on sale in the US until December 9.

But somehow, file sharing notwithstanding, the latest Batman continues to do gangbusters and, “Warner Bros will be releasing its new Batman flick, The Dark Knight, in January, 2009,” said p2pnet recently, going on:

“But, Wait! … Hasn’t it already been released? Well, Yeh. In fact, it’s already the second-highest-grossing Hollydud movie ever, with Titanic as Numero Uno. Dark Knight has so far poured $512 million into Warner’s domestic coffers and and $440 million internationally, “including more than $55 million in Imax grosses,” says the Hollywood Reporter.

January is the, “height of Academy Awards voting season,” it notes. “It’s just a matter of bringing it back as a reminder for people,’ a studio insider said.”

‘I think I’m funny’

Hollywood’s main PR-cum-enforcement-cum-movie ratings machine is the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), currently run by former US politician Dan ‘The Joker’ Glickman (right), once known as “one of the funniest men in Congress,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Of himself, “I don’t know how funny I am,” he’s quoted as saying, but, “I think I’m funny.”

He heads an organisation which directly or indirectly controls not only numerous ‘trade’ organisations such as Fact, but also government departments and law enforcement agencies around the world, all of them paid for by taxpayers.

Its mission is to make sure the studios continue to haul in their unimaginably enormous profits at whatever the cost — to their audiences, not themselves.

But with the kind of money the MPAA has at its disposal, that’s no problem at all. It has all the resources it needs to aid and abet Warner Bros, as well as the other members of the Hollywood Big Six.

The MPAA is responsible for movie ratings with five release categories.

• G for General Audiences, all ages admitted
• M for mature audiences, parental guidance suggested but all ages admitted
• R for Restricted, children under 16 not be admitted without an accompanying parent or adult guardian (this was later raised to 17 years of age, and varies in some jurisdictions)
• X for no one under 17 admitted

But there’s a sixth.

• BS, reserved mainly for print and electronic mainstream media outlets.

It’s used by Albery and others of his ilk for presentations such as the Fact / Warner talk  in which he explains “How Warner Bros approaches the issue of piracy”.

Because its “crucially important” for any movie industry component which hopes to successfully grapple with online ‘piracy’ to first understand the landscape, he says.

And with that in mind, “we are continually working with our industry allies to raise the profile of the piracy issue, trying to make sure we have laws in place that enable us to protect our rights, also trying to move piracy up the list of priorities for law enforcement to try and get them to take more of an active role in actually enforcing against piracy.

“A big, big area is discussing with policymakers the role of ISPs  and there’s been a lot of discussion and commentary on this in the UK and across Europe.   It’s a huge issue for us and takes up a lot of time.”

Nor is DRM relegated to the sidelines at Warner.

“We also do things like trying to promote the benefits of digital rights management DRM as a tool which enables us to provide new services to consumers rather than as is often portrayed as being something that tended to lock up content,” says Albery.

But, Albery emphasises, movies themselves aren’t the only things to be considered.

Theatrical audio is also important, he says. A film is released in English and in Germany three weeks later, it’ll be available in German.

“So that’s another challenge we have. To try to stop people from just recording the audio.”

Audio and/or video, it’s all down to pirates with camcorders who are wholly responsible for online piracy which, as per MPAA MPA  (Motion Picture Association) statistics, in 2005 caused $1.8 billion in losses, he states flatly.

However, no entity on earth can do more than make guesstimates of how much it might have earned if only ….

But MPA (A) estimates are presented as actual losses and even those are based on the assertion that a file downloaded somehow in some way directly equals actual revenue lost in some form or other.

Down through the piracy pyramid

Meanwhile, there are a number of different sources for pirate material, “and they all get supplied to what we called the release and encoding groups,” says Albery, failing to mention significant amounts of Hollywood ‘product’ are also uploaded by Hollywood insiders.

In a now famous 2003 report, an AT&T Labs said of a total of 285 movies researchers sampled on the p2p networks, 77% were leaked by industry ‘insiders’, and Mel Gibson’s Icon company sued a Hollywood post-production house for the unwanted online appearance of his Passion movie.

In February last year came the news Salvador Nunez Jr had allegedly uploaded a copy of Flushed Away after getting a copy from an Oscar voter. More recently, a working copy of Lions Gate’s Hostel: Part II showed up on a DVD.

And there are literally scores of similar examples.

However, they somehow pass Albery by. He sees only »»»

… very secretive groups, very well organised groups, which often have members in different countries around the world and their whole purpose is to access one of those pirate copies of a particular film and distribute it.

And they will do that firstly by putting the pirate copy onto a top site: they’ll encode it into whatever format is required to put it on the Internet and put it on to a very secretive top site that has very limited access, and then we start flowing down through the piracy pyramid.

It then goes down to slightly wider access sites that are still quite private, but then it really seeps out into the consumer facing forms of piracy, or pirate distribution channels, like peer-to-peer networks or UGC or streaming sites. That’s when links to pirate content will appear on the portal sites that are on the Internet.

Pirate content is also distributed through newsgroups and cyberlockers [essentially a server in cyberspace where a person can upload any piece of content including a pirate copy of a movie and then have it stored in that cyberlocker as opposed to a computer and then you get a link to that piece of content which you can distribute as widely as you would like. And so you find links appearing on website which people can just click on and start downloading the content from the cyberlocker.

And of course you have physical piracy as well.

"Also" distributed through newsgroups?

p2pnet correspondent Surfer would differ on that.

Yesterday, "75% of all copyright infringement of movies is done thru usenet, it being an international community whose members 'cam' movies from Russia, to Macedonia," Surfer posted, going on »»»

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.

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! ?)

Catching the bad guys

Albery continued his talk saying Warner Bros tracked unique Dark Knight camcorder copies which were uploaded to the Internet and, "within two weeks of the actual theatrical release we found pirate DVDs which contained those 10 unique versions in 19 countries around the world."

He didn't say what brands of camcorders were used, or if heavily touted, extensively promoted video recorders from Sony, one of the most vociferous of the Hollywood companies which are claiming there had been devastated by online sharing and downloading, were among them.

p2pnet and many others have has been saying since Day One that the Net is the obvious sales, distribution and marketing vehicle for anything which can be digitised, and that rather than seeing P2P as an enemy, the entertainment companies should be looking at it as an amazing solution.

Indeed, "The Internet is being used as a very effective distribution channel," Albery confirmed.

And, "There are several levels," Surfer points out in p2pnet, stating »»»

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.  

Go forth and consume the legal product!

Meanwhile, "There is a clear consumer demand that is being expressed for our content and we have to find a way to meet that consumer demand in a legal way," says Albery.

"We can't always need every expectation of all consumers and give content away for free for example. But we have to find ways to as far as possible to meet that consumer demand so that we're not simply saying to consumers you cannot do this, but we're saying, don't consume illegally. Go and consume the legal product, and to provide the services to them to enable them to do that so that ultimately, we can continue to grow our business.

"We're continually licensing content to new online platforms, but we're also doing things like placing digital copies on our DVDs and what that means is that with a traditional DVD, it's not possible to take content off the DVD and put it on to a PC or a portable device due to the content protection on the DVD.

"But we are listening consumers who are saying that we want to watch our movies that we buy on DVD on a portable device so for example onto disc editions of many of our films we will include -- and in fact soon on all of our films -- a couple of digital files on the second disc that can then be transported on to a PC or onto a portable device so the consumer is able to what the consumer wants to do within a controlled framework that means that our rights and our content is still protected."

Q&A

In a short Q&A after the sessions, "eBay remains a huge problem of the sale of pirated DVDs, albeit more subtly than years gone," said one audience member to Leviten, asking, "How would you recommend tackling this problem?

"We've done a lot of work in the UK with eBay over the past two or three years and the problem has diminished substantially, although there is still a problem there," he responded, going on »»»

What you won't find on eBay certainly in the UK, I can't speak for other territorials, new release movies. There's been a lot of work done with the MPAA as well on that front. The biggest problem we do have with the eBay is box sets, TV series that are imported, or what we call drop shipped, from China predominantly where you will actually buy a box set from a UK eBay owner, but the product will come to you directly from the far east so the UK account holder in the UK doesn't actually handle the product, but they're acting as the middleman effectively. We are working very closely with eBay.  We do have our own page on eBay. I think we're one of the few territorials that has an anti-piracy page on there   Specifically looking at audio / video products. Whilst there is still a problem with eBay and other auction sites as well, the problem isn't so great as it was perhaps two or three years ago.

"How would you promote DRM as a positive system to home users who may be used to the freedom of older formats?"- Albery was asked

"DRM is often seen as a tricky issue in the sense that many people see DRM as something that is used to lock up content and it's certainly not the case," he said, continuing »»»

DRM is essentially is what enables us to offer some of the new business models and distribution offerings that we are now rolling out. it's worth bearing in mind that DVDs, for example, always have DRM in the sense that there has always been a copy protection technology applied. And in fact many VHS cassette also had a copy protection technology. So it's always been there. Often it's been, as it should be, in the background -- as something that works without the consumer even realising. But what we're looking at now is the sorts of online business models (like rentals) which are really not possible without DRM.

Adds surfer:

"They should release a movie with six cds, two soundtrack music cds, two DVDs, one for the movie and one of extras -- and I mean the entire DVD of extras, and two blurays and quit being so retardedly stingy with what they are on actually producing, 'content'," says surfer.

"This would diminish physical copying to nil. Just go borrow Joe's. He's got it.

"Do they really think that when we buy it, we only plan on viewing it once on one device?"

"Cheapskates."

Stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet

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.

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under MPAA News, Movies. 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.

HOME

Viewed 7214 times