p2pnet.net News View:- There are three things wrong with the MPAA’s all-out, multi-million-dollar war against people who share files online:

1. It isn’t necessary;
2. It won’t work; and,
3. It will further brand the entertainment industry as a venal collection of bloody-minded, black-hearted companies who see customers as ‘consumers’ whose only purpose in life is to act as cash cows for the likes of the major movie studios and the members of the record label cartel.

P2p file sharing is now part of the landscape in this 21st century online world. It’s here to stay and no matter how many international police forces the entertainment industry manages to suborn, or much money it throws at vanquishing it, it won’t go away.

Aided and abetted by various mainstream media outlets, many of which it owns and/or controls through advertising, the industry is using its MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), to stomp p2p and p2p users into becoming a part of its income stream.

It fails to mention that people who see movies in the cinemas generate only a tiny part of the income the studios derive from their productions. A very significant portion of its billions also flow from DVD and pay-per-view sales, various promotional and derivative deals, books, recordings, TV series: the list goes on and on.

In the meanwhile, just how much of a threat does the sharing of movies via the p2p networks actually represent?

Reading the statements from the MPAA’s new boss, Dan Glickman, the average person will believe faithful, high quality reproductions of feature movies are being ’shared’ online.

That is, to coin the well-used British phrase, a load of old bollocks.

Shared movies tend to be either:

• 600- or 700mb downloads with reasonable quality, but often with sound or pixelation explosion problems where suddenly, part of the picture is lost to panels of colour, or the sound is poor or not synched. If a watcher saw something like this on a tape or DVD rental, he/she would demand a refund
• Small, two or three section files, each of around 120-200mb. Colour quality is usually terrible, contrast is up the creek and they’re jerky because frames have been lost as part of the compression process. And they, too, can be marred by pixel explosions which mean total image losses for seconds at a time, and so on.

On top of that, it can take literally hours – and sometimes days – to download a movie. How many people will bother?

And yet, the studios claim these downloads are costing them huge revenue losses.

Glickman says the studios loose $3.5 billion to piracy every year. He doesn’t, however, explain how the studios are still managing to report eye-popping profits (the North American box office alone took in $1.03 billion in one month, June) or how it’s able to equate even a single download with a lost sale of some kind.

In the meanwhile, movie and record label products are digital and the world is digital, but the studios and record cartel insist on refusing to accept that by going digital, they could resolve many of their problems.

They continue to supply criminal counterfeiters with easily reproduced physical product, aided and abetted by the likes of of one of the big seven studio members, Sony, which makes and sells millions of units of hardware and associated equipment of the type used by ‘pirates’.

But they blame mom-and-pop file sharers for their ills and woes.

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See:-
vanquishing – Hollywood vs BitTorrent, p2pnet, December 15, 2004

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2004 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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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