Revenge of the Sith
p2pnet.net News:- Andrew Kantor has an interesting post in USA Today in which he uses Revenge Of to make a number of observations on file sharing which, nine-point-nine, nine, nine, nine, nine times out of ten, are totally ignored by his colleagues in the world press corpse. He also picks up on a possibility we mooted five days back: that maybe the leak came from within the industry itself.
Today `Revenge of the Sith.` Tomorrow well, the world, he says, pointing out the latest and last Star Wars movie appeared online well before it hit the cinemas.
A quick check at TorrentSpy, one of the places that catalogs what’s available on BitTorrent, showed more than 50,000 people in the process of downloading it, he writes.
When we keyed Sith on TorrentSpy the day after it went online, This search query has been blocked at the request of the copyright holder, in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (`DMCA`) came up. And it still does, which isn`t to say you can`t find Sith on TorrentSpy by other means, not to mention that it’s also on a ton of other sites.
Anyway, Amusingly, the Motion Picture Association of America had a press release out on Thursday decrying this fact, Kantor states, going on, I say `amusingly` for two reasons. First, the press release came out before it was common knowledge that the movie was available online – thus the MPAA helped draw attention (and downloaders) to the fact.
Second, there was the release’s headline: ‘BitTorrent Facilitating Illegal File Swapping of Star Wars On Day of Opening.’ The MPAA is trying to lay the blame for the problem on BitTorrent. But BitTorrent is a protocol – a language, if you will. That’s like trying to blame 9/11 on Arabic.
Of course, the MPAA is in the process of trying to shut down file sharing altogether.
ABC News had a long, breathless report about the piracy, complete with plenty of MPAA opinion, the item says. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Why? As Kantor emphasises, ABC is owned by Disney, “which is apparently trying to use its news division to further a political agenda – smart, but still disturbing.
Word of the ABC report came from Rick Boucher but, “A broad-fronted attack on file sharing is going to fail” Kantor quotes him as saying.
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” says Kantor, continuing, “I also find the MPAA’s release funny because of the files that are available on BitTorrent: They’re studio screeners … in other words, the files that are on BitTorrent came from the studios themselves. I’m not saying that 20th Century Fox did it deliberately. (Although I suppose that isn’t incredibly farfetched.) What I’m saying is that it was an inside job.”
He even has NCIS series producer Don Bellisario observing, “Every time we put a script out, the minute it gets to the network and to Paramount Studios, it is online. So someone at our companies, at Paramount or the network, is feeding the information online.”
However, as Kantor says in the beginning of his article, when you combine broadband, Internet-enabled television, and p2p you can see where the future is.
Maybe we can. But the entertainment cartels sure as hell can`t.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
USA Today – CyberSpeak – Studios seek revenge as file sharers beat ‘Sith’ to screen, May 31, 2005
five days back – Was the ‘Sith’ leak deliberate?, p2pnet, May 25, 2004
he is us – ‘The enemy is us’, p2pnet, May 5, 2005
