The myth of online piracy
They’re highly exclusive, and extremely reclusive. Their names and locations change frequently – very frequently – and the only way you find them is if you’re on a list or chat, also ever-changing. Or you get a phast phone call or a heavily encrypted email.
They’re Internet sites and not so far back, they were mainly about warez – a word used to describe software stripped of its copy-protection and available for download. If you knew where to look.
Because before many new games or applications were released – especially if they’d been heavily pre-hyped – the chances were they were already being traded. But instead of punters frantically signing with hand codes on a stock exchange floor, the action would be on online and you’d be moving from one chat to another every few seconds, following it.
Online Piracy, some called it. But it hadn’t caught the mainstream media’s eye, so it wasn’t really visible to the public at large. Besides, downloading warez wasn’t a mass activity likely to be enjoyed by 60 million people – the most quoted estimate of the number of people sharing files online in the US. Nor was a pirated software application an ‘instantly consumable’ product, unlike a music or movie file.
Then came mp3 and suddenly, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was screaming blue murder saying its owners, the Big Five record labels, were losing billions of dollars because people were violating copyright laws by passing songs around via p2p (peer-to-peer) networks. This was at the huge expense of sales and, later on when they realised they needed public support, their contracted artists and background labour. Or so the record label trade organ claimed.
File sharing, some called it, and unlike warez trading, it was instantly a very big deal.
In his Los Angeles Times story Secret Movie Moguls, Jon Healey writes about a 17-year-old high-school student who’s "trying to make a name for himself as a film distributor".
The student and his colleagues (friends?) are members of MysticVCD – "one of dozens of ‘ripping’ or ‘release’ groups that obtain, prepare, package and feed movies, songs and games into a secretive and complex distribution scheme that functions a bit like the illegal drug trade ? minus the bloodletting," he says.
A bit like the illegal drug trade? Not even nearly.
Anyway, Healey quotes ‘insiders’ and ‘piracy experts’ as saying the groups are motivated mainly by ego and, "Instead of cash, the online underground is powered by bartering – admission to these elite circles is granted only to those with something valuable to offer, such as computer parts or a pre-release copy of a DVD" …
… or a new game or app.
Healey has that exactly right and does a good job describing how it all comes down. However, there are other aspects worth mentioning.
In the early days of warez, anyone with a modicum of technical savvy could find a software download site and hook Photoshop 4, or whatever. Then, as now, nine times out of ten action, not acquisition-for-profit, was what it was all about.
Healey quotes a posting from a group called Centropy saying, "Please remember: We do this for FUN. We do not make money off this whole business. All of us go to the movies regularly and pay for our tickets just like everyone else."
But, "Not everyone in the scene is so pure," Healey goes on. "Some players – including members of Centropy – are suspected of selling pirated movies and music to commercial bootleggers who have made billions of dollars peddling knockoff CDs and DVDs on the streets of cities around the world."
File sharers usually pay the full price for access in a ‘legitimate’ context at least once. And most DVDs or CDs which end up being ripped are also bought at least once. This doesn’t, of course, equal normal sales volumes. However, the entertainment industry deliberately fosters the idea that none of the movies or songs which end up online have been legally acquired at any point, or in any way, and that many of them end up being sold illegally around the world as counterfeit product.
Ergo, file sharers are thieves and criminals.
However, online file p2p file sharers aren’t even remotely similar to the people ‘peddling knockoff CDs and DVDs on the streets of cities around the world’.
P2p enthusiasts are for the most part teenagers and younger who go online as much for the sheer pleasure of it as anything else. And to just hang out and be cool.
Counterfeiters, on the other hand, are criminals in every sense of the word. They buy or steal movies, music and apps with the express purpose of duplicating them and offering them for sale as perfect copies on underground markets, or through normal retail outlets as legitimate product.
Transactions may be handled online, but they’re through web pages, not file sharing networks.
"The risk that really wasn’t there for them ['pirates'] a few years ago is now, I would say, pretty significant," Healey quotes Bob Kruger, vp of ‘enforcement’ for the Business Software Alliance trade organization, as saying.
"On the whole, however, music and movie groups have operated with near impunity, protected in part by the elaborate steps they take to screen participants, conceal their identities and disguise their locations. The entertainment industry has focused on filing suits against file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and their users, who ultimately copy much of the ripping groups’ works.?
Actually, it’s Big Music (a component of the ‘entertainment industry,’ not the whole ball of wax) that’s been suing people after getting their names through a subpoena process recently ruled as improper. How much good it’s done them is very much open to question, and their efforts against Kazaa, and the like, have so far been equally unimpressive.
Their counterparts in the motion picture industry, the Big Seven Studios, on the other hand, are noted for NOT suing anyone and MPAA (Motion Picture Associaiton of America) boss Jack Valenti is on record as saying there are no plans for the studios to follow the example set their colleagues (not friends) in recording industry.
"The industry also is trying to deter piracy at the grass-roots level with electronic locks for CDs, DVDs and downloadable items," Kruger says in the story.
This isn’t working too well either and frequently proves to be more of an embarrassment, than anything else, to users and manufacturers alike.
Of apples and oranges
The entertainment industry’s ongoing to failure to give the customers what they want – that’s to say decent product at a reasonable price – is a major reason for sharing files.
As we say here, people aren’t crooks. They don’t get up in the morning determined to cheat the labels. But they do react to grossly unfair practices, which is precisely what many, if not most, downloaders are doing. They’re protesting.
Forget copyright infringements and ‘music piracy’. Think antiqued marketing/business models, bad product and terrible policy decisions.
In the meanwhile, online movie and music file sharing may indeed result in a loss of revenue. But it’s relatively small, in the scheme of things, and certainly doesn’t equal the losses down to hard-core software piracy.
Copyright violation – real or imagined – doesn’t equal counterfeiting. Nor does it have anything to do with it.
And file sharing is not illegal, constantly repeated statements from RIAA president Cary Sherman to the contrary notwithstsanding.
Nor are the file-shared songs (or movies, for that matter) available on the p2p networks re-appearing on counterfeit discs.
Mp3s are OK for portable mp3 players, but they’re useless for anything else. You need a high quality recording on a CD for DVD for home entertainment systems. The same goes for file-share movies.
Of course, high-end CDs and DVDs turn up as bootlegs or counterfeits, but that doesn’t have anything to do with p2p networks or file sharing.
Lumping the two together completely misleads the media and the public about the real issues, which in the 21st century are tied directly to outmoded and inefficient entertainment industry practices and pure, unadultrated greed.
"The ripping groups often share similar structures, with officers who grant or revoke privileges, set policies and assign duties to the members," says Healey. "And their members, who share a love for free access to virtually any movie, song, game or software program, include not only teens but also 30-something professionals with families."
OK. But anyone who thinks a movie copied on a camcorder during a cinema showing, which is how most online file-share movies are made, will end up being resold on the streets of the world has never seen one.
Normally, the biggest and best movies files you’ll find on file sharing networks are around 600 to 750 kb and 9.999999 times out of ten, they have pixelation or sound problems. There’s no way they could be sold to anyone, unless the person doing the buying is truly desperate.
And they usually take hours to download – if they can be downloaded all in one hit in the first place. People who don’t have cable, or better, connections frequently wait for days for files to download. So to speed the process up, half or more of the file share movies are 200 kb or less, which means the playback quality is pretty rough.
So why do people bother with them at all? If you’re a Net freak, even in a minor key, you like to do as much as you can online and it’s as neat to watch a movie (bad quality and all) online as it is to listen to an mp3. And if the movie – or music, come to that – is anywhere near good, you’ll want to see it on the big screen, or rent / buy it. And sooner or later, you’ll be able to do the latter online, if actor Morgan Freeman is correct.
Film studios "were a little slow on the uptake of the inevitable," he says here, with online movies as the subject. Music producers, meanwhile, "wound up suing 12-year-olds".
Freeman’s Revelations Entertainment is slated to release a movie on the Net at the same time it debuts in theaters, a move he says will probably be a first and which might prod other studios into selling their productuctions online.
And where online movie trading is concerned, an AT&T Labs report hangs much of the blame on ‘insiders’ who didn’t pay a thin dime for their DVDs.
[Are they the same 'insiders' Healey refers to earlier, one wonders? Ed]
When the $150 million Jolly Green Giant went online two weeks before its official release date in June, 2003, it wasn’t a bunch of frenzied file-sharers who were responsible. Nor were dastardly crews of p2p freaks with camcorders stuffed under their grubby raincoats the ones who uploaded The Hulk onto the networks.
Lorrie Cranor is principal technical staff member at AT&T Lab’s Secure Systems Research program and together with four other people, she studied how unauthorized copies of movies were, and are, being distributed online.
"Part of the reason we were looking was because we suspected there would be some insider leaks," she told p2pnet at the time, "but not so many."
Of a total of 285 movies she and her team sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders.
Moreover, only 5% first appeared after their DVD release date on a web site that indexes file sharing networks, indicating that consumer DVD copying currently represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks, says Cranor in Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Movie Production and Distribution Process, the paper which flowed from the research.
Healey refers to a recent online posting from a group calling itself Chosen Few which says:
"If you or someone you know works at a video store, movie review affiliate, DVD distribution warehouse, production studio, Academy Awards (news – web sites)/Oscar staff and/or have some other means of getting your hands on screener/retail VHS or DVDs ahead of store date, contact us now."
Most serious file sharers already have everything they need and posts such as this are far more likely to be poorly disguised entertainment industry sting efforts than anything else.
In the meanwhile, "The point, said a source close to the scene, is to spread the word of their exploits and earn praise from the rest of the groups, which is the main reward for 99% of the people involved," says Healey’s story
That is indeed the point. And it doesn’t have a lot to do with online piracy for profit, or counterfeiting.
Jon Newton
March 8th, 2004 at 12:07 pm
boo hoo
November 11th, 2004 at 12:18 am
How do I turn someone in who is selling pirated movies? It happened to someone in my family.