MPAA BitTorrent marriage
p2p news view / p2pnet: Bram Cohen (father of Bittorrent) and Dan Glickman (president of the MPAA) have just made an interesting announcement. Or not. It had no direct meaning. So the search of the official TitTorrent site will be filtered. Who cares? Has anyone used it?
In practical terms, Bittorrent Inc only has a valuable trademark and control over a communication standard. It’s nothing. But on the other hand, the film and music industries – somehow see a partner in BT.
Let’s have a look at the happenings of their actions at the post-Grokster world.
They try to eliminate any and all companies developing filesharing technologies, based on a US Supreme Court ruling which says a company shouldn’t advertise illegal actions in any form. Most of these companies did nothing. They simply made software which allows a network through which users can share anything they want.
BitTorrent is not only one of the biggest, it also featured a web-based search for – mainly – copyrighted content. But as far as I know, BitTorrent didn’t even get a phone call from a studio or association saying, Bram, please don’t advertise that our film/music can be downloaded using your technology and your site!
I and many others think something big is coming with the comobination of the huge Big Seven movie production companies (aka MPAA members) and the tiny BitTorrent Inc.
The most likely result will be a BitTorrent-driven online movie shop à la iTunes.
Maintaining it will be very cheap, but as with iTunes, that doesn’t mean content will be cheap as well.
I think the new BitTorrent downloads will cost just a little less than a cheap DVD. Blockbusters will of course be more expensive.
But price won’t be the biggest problem. I doubt if more than a few movies (200-300 maybe 1,000) will be available. Even iTunes attracts a lot of criticism because of it’s small collection compared to what’s available on the file sharing networks. Many said it kills cultural diversity, suppresses small music companies, blahblahblah.
File sharing networks have a huge advantage. The more people there are who are interested in something, the easier it is for others to get it. It’s a kind of automatic mechanism. With iTunes and other similar services, this important factor is missing. The most important reason for file sharing isn’t that it`s free. Rather, you know everything is available and not just the product MPAA and other MPAA-like organizations think is good for you.
Then there’s the speed consideration. BitTorrent is very fast for a p2p network and if I pay for a service, the least I expect is the highest speed possible. Sorry Bram, I don’t mean to hurt you, but BitTorrent isn’t even close to being as fast as a well-configured network of HTTP-servers.
Cheaper? Sure. You can distribute millions of copies for the same cost as a few. But this shouldn’t matter if you have incoming which is proportional with transferred data. In the case of Bittorrent, the more the download, the more the upload. But with this system it should be: the more download, the more money to buy fast servers (to continue providing fast downloads)
And on quality, everyone knows a good DVD rip has almost the same image and sound quality than the original DVD. Will the studios compete against their own business?
If they’re smart they will, but what do you expect from companies such as Disney which called back it’s best-selling movies from the DVD market because the sales of their new productions were low? These movies are currently on the top of the most downloaded listS. And the sales? Well, the Heffalump doesn’t even had a chance against Shrek.
So the quality pf BT a download will probabably be much lower than that of a DVD.
And in the case of movies, we also have to think of the premiere-date. Near movie-premiere? No way! Near DVD-premiere? What are you thinking!?
I don’t think movies will become available until they’ve been shown on even the smallest country’s TV. Saw a movie? Like to download? Wait a few years and you can!
And I don’t even have to mention DRM. It’s obvious: The bigger the better. No copy; no problem.
After talking about the speed, the available collection, the quality, and the copyprotection mechanism, let’s see its advantages against file sharing networks….hmmmm…. it’s legal.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe they’ll make a really good service at an affordable price which it’ll be so good that it’ll stop piracy.
Benedek Toth – p2pnet
[Toth is a software engineer from Hungary. He edits p2pinfo Magyarország, which focuses on file sharing and related issues. He also contibutes to a movie portal and many other files sharing-related sites. ]
November 24th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
well if the movies are good quality, cheap (like under $5 for blockbusters) and have no copy protection, and there is a good viriety to choose from then I would really consider using it.
However, having said that. I remember the old saying reguarding the Mafia… “If you can’t beat it, crush it. If you can’t crush it, buy it…” well they’re buying it, what will they do with it? Braham is swiming with the sharks. If he thinks he’ll have any control over his creation he’s going to be disapointed.
November 24th, 2005 at 10:13 pm
A gig of transit (bandwidth) is very cheap when you buy it in bulk, so it seems pretty unlikely there is much of a distribution cost savings when it already costs relatively little doing it the old fashioned WWW way. Bandwidth costs are a very small slice of the price of a download compared to royalties and marketing costs, hence very little potential for savings by using alternate distribution methods.
It would not be worth the hassle to for anyone to develop a drm-enabled BT client. The only value such a thing would bring to the table would be the very transparent ‘P2P’ branding, and the sheen of that gimmick would wear thin quickly.
They’ll probably just transform the ‘official’ BT to some corporate basterdised attrocity similar to all the other pieces of shit out there. I doubt many in the P2P scene will even notice.
November 25th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
It will not wokrk at all and will not solve the problem of parents whose children are all now criminals because they do what their parents did (copy cassettes) years ago, copy music or video digital files.
It is time that governments asume the right role of representing the people and not the interests businesses, cartels, that have done huge damages to (actually ruined it) culture, to artists and to the people.
My proposition is an entirely new copyrigh licensing system, which I have posted on another (BitTorrent, Hollywood team up) thread but will repeat here:
Art License System (ARTLIS)
About 75 years ago a group of composers got together and created several “composer societies” for the purpose of licensing their music’s performance rights. Under the model, for example, radio stations and others would be licensed for a catalog of songs. The licenses were called “blanket” licenses, because it covered many songs (all registered songs in a catalog). The money paid by the radio stations would then, theoretically, be split among the composers based on song usage, A composer whose songs were performed more would get more money. The model was invented before there were computers. The model has been a failure because of corruption. The model was taken over and controlled by non compose owned music publishers, who split the money after it is passed through a dark room where the accounting is done. The record of song performance (sampling in some cases, logs in others) is a fictitious sham and the accounting by publishers is worse. The system degraded to the ridiculous point that the licensee do not get a copy of the catalog, so the licensee get the rights to perform songs that are essentially unnamed.
Regardless of the results, the model was a good idea even though the implementation got corrupted along the way by the mostly corrupt music publishers who hi-jacked the system. The lack of computers and the Internet did not help either. It did not help also that the licensing for recordings (the so called mechanical rights) were excluded from the model. As a result the music publishers created their own mechanical rights licensing organizations, creating the condition where if a composer did not give their rights to a publisher, the music would not got recorded, as the publishers alone controlled the licensing of mechanical rights.
Here I propose a model that could work. Let us call it the “Art License System” or ARTLIS:
1. Make a copyright performance-mechanical rights licensing organization. It could be an adjunct agency of the Copyright Office. It is important that the organization belong to and be controlled ny the people (government) and not be private. The “license” is automatic. By default every individual and organization is automatically licensed for normal use any copyright registered work, be art a song or a book. By normal use I mean to listen, to read, and to copy). Perhaps to make a movie of a copyrighted novel, the novel authors permission may be required to protect the author’s moral rights. The same for recordings of songs. In the event that the authors are unavailable at the registered address, then no licensed from the author would be required and usage can proceed after notifying the Copyright Office that the author was not found.
2. The people would all be licensed to the works licensed by paying for a “blanket” license that covers all the works registered with the government (Copyright Office). The payment is a tax that is included with the normal taxes that the people pay. For now let us call it the “art tax”. The “art tax” should be about the same as people would save by not buying physical copies (CD, DVD, books,,) because they download them from the net or copy).
3. The “art tax” is then split among the authors (music, literature, software), and producers (movies studios, recording companies, large scale software developers, etc.).
4. The “art tax” money would be split according to how frequent the works are (a) downloaded and (b) how frequent the works are performed at the radio, television, clubs, etc. For b, the system could be similar to the way it now is supposed to work (heavy on the record keeping), except that the license fees paid by the venues (radio/clubs/etc) would not go to private publisher controlled performance rights organizations.
A alternative, to simplify record keeping, the “art tax” money can be split among authors and producers simply on downloading data, based on the assumption that the downloading (a form of copying) data is a statistical representation of all usage and that, for example, a heavily downloaded song is also a heavily performed song.
Who are the looser in this system? The publishers that do not produce movies or recordings, because they get nothing of the “art tax”. That is as it should be, since in the new age, described publishers that merely own the so called intellectual property serve no function (as they never have).
Briefly, ARTLIS
a. Is run by the people, for the people.
b. The people are automatically licensed to use, share, download and to copy everything that is permitted by law.
c. Tax money is distributed among authors and producers by a government run ARTLIS
A you can see , the system is in plain sight because it has been un used about 75 years ago. The key: ARTLIS must be run by the people, for the people.
No doubt ARTLIS will require a huge government undertaking in making the law, colllecting data, making changes to the tax system and in modifying the Internet so that all download files have a copyright number and the downloading software in the servers keep counts of the downloaded files and then pass the information to the ARTLIS administrators.
The huge government undertaking are however offset by the even greater benefits, such a fair compensation to authors and producers and the decriminalization of sharing and copying of digital files. The actual fraudulent music licensing and author compensation systems are eliminated.
BTW: This is the first description ever published of ARTLIS, published on P2PNET,at 4:26 am, from San Juan Puerto Rico. From the son of composer Guillermo Venegas Lloveras, whose songs were all stolen by music publishers and whose royalties were never paid by the fraudulent performance licensing and royalty payment systems.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
November 25th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
MPAA and Bit Torrent…..Hmmm..
Lets see A lit of the MPAA over here , a little over there a little over there. MPAA in bits, sounds good to me.
December 10th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
> So the search of the official TitTorrent site will be filtered.
^ lol?