Add the MPAA to the list of copyright holders targeting Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay over allegations of unauthorized distribution.

Despite the fact that the site doesn’t host any copyright material its founders were convicted for the facilitation of copyright infringement this past April in a confrontation with the music industry so it was really only a matter of time before the movie industry followed suit.

Some 10 movie studios have petitioned a Stockholm District Court to force both the Pirate Bay and its ISP to cease and desist facilitating the unauthorized distribution of their films. The studios are also asking for a “substantial” fine if it fails to comply.

“We’ve been forced to seek a court order demanding that they stop the spreading of these roughly 100 films and television programmes,” said their attorney Monique Wadsted.

She also blasted the fact that the Pirate Bay’s 4 founders have yet to serve their sentence of 1 year in prison.

Wadsted says they aren’t seeking any damages at this stage and are only trying to get the site shut down.

As for Global Gaming Factory’s plan to make the site legit Wadsted is all for it.

“If the site becomes legal, that’s good for us,” she said. “We’re not opposed to it. But we can’t wait and see.”

GGF has said recently that it will complete its acquisition for the Pirate Bay on August 27th despite the concerns of some that the deal won’t go through. This suit by the MPAA won’t necessarily complicate the deal, but will surely make the site’s founders glad to be moving on to new projects.

jared@zeropaid.com

The crew behind the BitTorrent client Vuze read with disbelief last week that Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton said he couldn’t see “anything good having come from the Internet.”

“Period,” in fact.

Vuze says that part of the problem Lynton may have with the Internet is that although there is finally the technology to effectively deliver content online, “the industry has only begun to solve the business model side of how we productively monetize this distribution.”

It says that what Sony and other Hollywood execs need to do is adopt the “burning platform paradigm,” that is “experiment like your business is at stake.” Having already watched the music industry run itself into the ground for refusing to evolve and embrace digital content distribution, the movie industry ought to take heed and recognize that “consumers are changing.”

“Let’s change with them, and identify business models that embrace this change,” it adds.

To this end Vuze commissioned a survey that concludes that BitTorrent users, specifically Vuze, are “Hollywood’s best customers.”

According to the data, Vuze users were 34% more likely than average Internet users to have gone to the movies or rented a DVD, and 24% more likely to have purchased one.

“We’ve been making the case for years now that Vuze users are avid entertainment fans,” it observes, and it may just be right.

For TV producers the news is a bit grim, for 40% of Vuze users report watching less live TV and as a whole.

The report sampled 693 Vuze users and 606 “general” Internet users, so its conclusions are arguably a bit light.

However, the report does square nicely with other done previous that have come to the same conclusion: file-sharers consume more entertainment products.

“Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” conducted by the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway, and the second largest in all of Europe, concluded that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

“The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada,” a study commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, found that for every album downloaded illegally legal CD purchases increased by 0.44, or by about half an album.

Admittedly both cover music and not movies, but that’s only because the issue hasn’t been as of great importance to Hollywood as it has been the music industry until recently as households acquire faster and faster Internet connection speeds.

Either way, the message to Hollywood should be the same, and that is that it needs to stay ahead of the game and listen to what consumers want. Right now it’s apparently ignoring its “best customers” at its own peril. Consumers, especially Vuze, or BitTorrent users in general for that matter, don’t mind paying for digital content so long as its fairly priced and easily accessible.

jared@zeropaid.com

Last September Real Networks launched RealDVD to allow users to make backup copies of purchased DVDs for private use. The MPAA immediately dubbed it "StealDVD" and filed a lawsuit to ban the sale of RealDVD.

It’s essentially arguing that the price of a DVD is predicated on the "notion of certain use rights associated with certain price points."

"When a consumer can voluntarily expand the rights that come with one of those services — in essence open the door to multiple copies of a work not licensed for that — that eliminates any monetization models except one: selling full use rights to the work at one fixed price," says the Copyright Alliance on the MPAA’s behalf.

In other words, it only charges $9.99 per DVD, for example, because it assumes it lasts for a finite period of time, becoming inoperable due to wear and tear I suppose.

If you want a DVD you can make copies of then the "price point" must be higher to reflect "expanded use rights."

Insane I know.

Now after the MPAA made its closing arguments in the case to determine whether or not Real Networks can resume selling Real DVD, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel, raised some interesting questions.

Her most poignant question for the MPAA attorneys was whether or not it believes it’s legal for consumers to make backup copies of purchased DVDs for private use.

"Not for the purposes under the DMCA," said Bart Williams, one of the MPAA’s attorneys. "One copy is a violation of the DMCA.

Copyright law makes it illegal for anyone to circumvent DVD encryption technology, which RealDVD seems to do.

Real Networks thinks its really all about "stifling competition."

"We believe the buyer has that right to play a DVD as many times as they want," Scott told Patel. "We think he also has the right to make a copy, this fair use copy."

He used the music industry as example, whereby it allows consumers to make copies for personal use.

"This is the experience that has been recognized as lawful fair use," Scott said. "These same studios have talked about CDs. A purchased CD can be copied to a computer and then transferred to an iPod without any charge to the consumer."

The fact that the MPAA tries to prevent consumers from making backup copies is what really should be on trial here. To say that we must pay more if we want to make backup copy is outrageous, and is another glaring example of why people turn to BitTorrent and other file-sharing outlets – they’re filling a void left purposely by the MPAA and its own shortsightedness.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

There is a rather in-depth look at Wired’s Threat Level regarding this latest revelation during the trial. The MPAA has already issued a ban on the sale of RealDVD pending the trial because they claim that it circumvents the CSS coding within the DVD, and thus, violates the DMCA. Realnetworks has already defended that the CSS is not broken because the CSS is copied with the DVD.

As David Kravets, the reporter who’s been following the trial notes, accusations of anti-trust activity has been attempted before, but has failed to gain any leeway (ala Napster case). An EFF attorney seems to have taken a sort of wait and see approach given the comment questions whether or not the court will agree with Realnetworks on the anti-trust accusation.

One has to admit, the accusation isn’t completely groundless given that if one were to remove all the members of the MPAA out of the movie-making market, how much of Hollywood and the entire US movie industry would be left short of a collection of small independent studios? Having said that, the legal battle isn’t going to be easy from Realnetworks as the article discusses at length.

Right now, it seems that the MPAA legal team has to study what the accusations are based on before they can respond, but they seem confident that there isn’t any grounds for Real to make such accusations.

The RealDVD trial started on April 24th. Already, the MPAA said that RealDVD could be software that enables piracy via rent, rip and return practises. Additionally, the MPAA has accused RealNetworks of destroying evidence. Realnetworks have already said that RealDVD is not for pirates. Clearly a case where big punches are being thrown between the two entities.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

There’s plenty of places to find this story now. One way is to find it on BoingBoing. What’s causing the stir is the MPAAs demonstration video on how an educational fair use – showing a video clip for educational purposes – can be obtained by the teachers. “In 2006,” the video description says, “film and media professors were granted an exemption in order to break copy protection on DVDs so that they could utilize high quality video clips in classroom teaching. Up for consideration during the 2009 exemption hearings is whether this exemption should be extended to apply to faculty teaching in all disciplines, and whether the exemption should apply to students.”

For our readers who are still stuck on 56k modems thanks to, say, a local duopoly of ISPs who deem your area not profitable enough to extend their networks to your home even though the local government gave them money and/or the resources to do so, here’s a description of what goes on in the video. An MPAA official narrates a demonstration video on how teachers can extract a required 18 second video clip from a movie. The video shows a woman, presumably your average teacher, hooking up a chord to a camcorder that’s already hooked up to a DVD player. The narrator describes how this method can be used to obtain multiple clips from multiple discs by simply recording and playing and stopping the camera’s recording. The woman then, as described by the narrator, frames the television set with the camera, making sure that the TV set sides, a large wide screen plat panel TV, is not showing while none of the picture is actually cut off. Not wanting to bore the audience, he stops the clip so he can go over the results of the practise, also revealing he was using VLC in his presentation. He then goes over a series of short clips, trying to show that it’s still high quality. At the end, comparing the actual clip from the DVD to the camcorded version. What is also emphasized is that this is using a standard DVD.

The most obvious ironic thing about this is the fact that the MPAA has been waging a war against people who take cameras into theatres and record the movie. The comparable practise that was demonstrated here is known as a telesync which is known to be the method to getting a higher quality cam in the theatre.

Another thing that’s ironic about the clip is the use of VLC. While we weren’t able to find any verifiable reference on what the MPAA thinks of VLC, we do know that the MPAA has been pounding RealNetworks over alleged ease of bi-passing encryption through RealDVD – thus leading to a very simple conclusion that technology such as VLC wouldn’t be allowed to flourish on US soil given that it’s known to read so many codecs.

Another ironic part about this is the use of the camera itself. Why this is significant, one would have to really dig around a news archive from 2002. The example we came up with comes from the EFF at Lawyerpoint which has the following:

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the “Content Protection Status Report” with the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, laying out its plan to remake the technology world to suit its own ends. The report calls for regulation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), generic computing components found in scientific, medical and entertainment devices. Under its proposal, every ADC will be controlled by a “cop-chip” that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material — your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo.

One final thing that we can safely note that’s ironic about this is the portrayal of what is suppose to be an average teacher exercising fair use rights. The equipment itself, given the common budget of a school like high schools, how realistic is it that the average teacher would just happen to have a nice expensive spare big screen television set, a high quality camera that is suppose to pick up on the video in a reasonably clear scenario, an assistant to watch their every move, a large open space to work with and that much free time to sit and figure out how to put together such a supposedly simple set-up? Particularly when there are a number of teachers out there that just bring DVDs into the class, skip to the scene and just show the scene in question in the first place? It’s likely that the MPAA just wants to prevent any more exceptions from happening and make the act of fair use as difficult to accomplish as possible.

What isn’t shown in the video is how to convert the footage on a camera (many of which uses tapes like the MiniDV tape) and converting that footage over to a format that is recognized by the player in the classroom. There’s two possible methods of accomplishing this, neither of which is easy (as easy as just playing the DVDs in the classroom that is).

One way is to hook up an IEEE fire wire cable to the camera, hook it up to a computer that hopefully recognizes the signal. Transfer the footage over, hoping there’ll be enough room on that hard drive. Then editing the footage through video editing software like Adobe Premier or Sony Vegas (both of which are, of course, cheap and easy to use pieces of software for such a task), then encoding the finished video into, preferably, an MPEG2/broadcast ready format, making sure to have specific scenes in the footage that the DVD players CSS would recognize for ease of use naturally, burning the footage onto a DVD and then playing that footage to your class. These are just minor details of course.

The other possible method is to take the camera into the classroom, having studied whatever entertainment system that classroom has available of course. Next is bringing compatible audio and video cords, properly routing the signals to the equipment like a television set, setting up the television set or viewing screen so it will properly read the signals and display what you want (a step teachers, of course, universally accept is such a pain free step) then playing the footage via the camera. Again, just minor details.

Let’s just hope that teachers would just be granted the exception so they can exercise their fair use rights.

Further reading:

Michael Geist’s observations on this

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

The MPAA wants to make sure lawmakers stay focused on fighting piracy in the economic downturn and trying to show that it is an important source of creative and blue collar jobs, not just in Hollywood and New York but in all 50 states so that it can gain the support of lawmakers across the country. It’s pretty clever I must admit.

“People don’t think of the business of making movies the same way they think of other American businesses such as manufacturers or large retailers. However, our industry in many ways is just like every other – we employ millions of people, we create jobs all across America, and yes, we too feel the sting of declining economic times,” said Dan Glickman, MPAA Chairman and CEO. “But just as you have to look beyond the images you see on the silver screen to fully appreciate the hundreds of working men and women that go into making a single 20-second scene from your favorite movie, if you look deeply at how movies are made you will see that there is also much to consider and, indeed, celebrate about the contributions of this uniquely American industry to our economy.”

You see, with other industries laying people off by the tens of thousands the MPAA is having a tough time selling its “sky is falling” nonsense about physical and digital piracy, especially after a second consecutive of record breaking profits.

So it’s compiled a report called the Economic Impact of the Motion Picture and Television Industry on the United States in order to provide a “snapshot of (the) economic impact and job creation derived from production and distribution of film and television entertainment.”

In it the MPAA tries to emphasize the development, preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution phases of films and TV shows and the geographically diverse locations for each to argue that piracy affects all.

The report was compiled using data from 2007, so it’s arguable its conclusions are outdated, but nonetheless it claims the motion picture and TV industry was responsible for:

• 2.5 million American jobs;
• an average salary of $74,700 for production employees;
• $41.1 billion in wages to workers in America;
• $38.2 billion in payments to U.S. vendors and suppliers, small businesses and
  entrepreneurs;
• $13 billion in income and sales taxes; and
• $13.6 billion in trade surplus.

The data was recently released at the 2009 Business of Show Business industry symposium, a biennial event providing the movie industry a forum to speak to lawmakers, students and other interested parties about the business of movie making. A number of lawmakers were attendance, including Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Senator Orrin Hatch, Rep John Conyers, and Rep Henry Waxman among many others.

The MPAA also became worried after Senate Republicans targeted the entertainment industry in the debate over the stimulus bill in early February. Arguing that the strength of the box office meant that there was no need to give tax breaks to Hollywood producers, they successfully fought for the showbiz provisions to be removed, and one senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, went so far to call the stimulus a “Hollywood bailout.” (The industry did get tax breaks as part of last year’s bailout bill).

“We know that we need to do a better job of educating policymakers of the economic and job impact of our industry nationwide,” Glickman said.

With most companies losing money hand over first, the MPAA must be out of its mind to think it needs more attention, not just because it made record breaking profits last year, and the year before, but also because it’s on track to do the same this year.

jared@zeropaid.com

MPAA head Dan Glickman routinely tells anyone that’ll listen that Hollywood needs protection, that profits are being robbed of it by heartless pirates and that more, much more, needs to be done fight illegal file-sharing.

Why just the other day it was reported that the MPAA was working with ISPs to begin targeting broadband subscribers accused of repeatedly downloading movies illegally and that a plan could be announced as early as this month.

“Our efforts are focused on educating consumers who receive infringement notifications for illegal downloading about where to find high-quality, legitimate content on the internet and on effective ways to deal with repeat infringers,” the MPAA said in a statement.

Now comes the kicker.

The MPAA enjoyed another, yes another, consecutive year of record breaking box office ticket sales. That’s two in a row for those keeping score at home. This year is also already on track to set another record with the domestic box office already up 17.5% in the first 10 weeks alone! Overseas ticket sales are also up.

But, rather than admit it’s doing well and that it’s not nearly in the dire straits it so often pretends to be it instead says it’s time to protect “creative jobs” so that they’re not reduced to “second-class citizenship.”

Say what?

“When folks talk about how well the box office is doing, it’s nothing to apologize for,” Glickman said. “It’s not just in our interest, but the national interest to have constructive policies that protect intellectual property and that don’t give second-class citizenship to creative jobs, but rather encourage the economic growth we can deliver. Whether we build cars or make movies shouldn’t matter. What matters is getting folks back to work and
reviving our economy.”

So the MPAA is basically saying ignore the fact that it’s making money hand over first and focus on the need for busting people preventing it from making even more money and breaking even more records in the process.

Even more hypocritical is that he also stresses that the “…best approach to the international economic crisis is to keep markets open and to allow consumers to make choices about what products and services they want to buy – not to not to impose government barriers to the free flow of commerce.”

Hmm, so the MPAA only wants govt barriers when it suits its needs?

The fact that the MPAA again earned record profits ought to remind people, and lawmakers especially, that the MPAA is a business lobbying group concerned only with business and that everything it says ought to be judged accordingly.

There’s an interesting report on CNET which suggests that over 10% of the MPAA work force might be laid off. A spokesperson confirmed that layoffs are happening, but didn’t confirm the extent of how much of the workforce would be laid off.

From the report:

The MPAA’s leadership is mostly unaffected, said the MPAA spokeswoman. Prior to the layoffs, Dean Garfield, one of the more high profile MPAA attorneys, left the trade group in December to become CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, a technology-focused trade group.

It’s unclear from the report why the layoffs are occurring, though there could easily be a strong indication against the activities of p2p. Going back to a report we wrote last year, the copyright industry stock market values, for the most part, dropped significantly no doubt thanks to the general economic crises given the drops all occurred at roughly the same time the general stock markets went down. Our report might be just another nail in the coffin of the argument that file-sharing is causing the major copyright industry to lose real money. Given that reports are coming in on a near daily basis of a fresh round of layoffs, almost all of them seeing the companies in question blaming the economic crises, this would probably be just another case of this happening.

There’s a new lobbying paper posted on Change.gov that shows that the MPAA isn’t slowing down on dreaming big while lobbying the US government. The document (PDF) shows what appears to be a wish list from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) – just in time for the holiday season no less.

The paper says, “One of the MPAA’s top priorities is attacking Internet piracy, through vigorous investigation and enforcement worldwide, as well as working with governments to ensure that their laws provide adequate remedies to stop internet piracy and are in full compliance with the WIPO Treaties.”

Of course, while lobbying the government with this might seem like a first step, there’s plenty of obstacles to overcome from there. One of the big ones is the sovereignty of other countries which has been vigorously defended in the past when it comes to these issues (try being a non-Canadian/French person and telling Quebec how to run their province in ways that isn’t in the interests of Quebec) Issues like this hit Sweden back when ThePirateBay got raided in 2006. One of the big concerns was that the United States was directly interfering in the internal affairs of Sweden (namely through political figures and the police) In short, the raid caused protesters to hit the streets. This, of course, is just a small sampling of issues coming into play here.

The paper continues, “Achieving inter-industry cooperation in the fight against online piracy, including through automated detection and removal of infringing content is imperative to curb theft of online content, and is a priority for MPAA and its member companies.” Aside from missing a “the” in this portion, no amount of lobbying would make any form of automated anti-piracy initiatives possible for the simple fact that it’s technologically impossible with todays detection techniques.

This is an issue we followed in-depth earlier this year where there were two studies – one in France and one in Australia. The French study, also known as the “Internet Evolution” study, suggested that normal p2p traffic filtering was “less than perfect” and basically sketchy at best, let alone when one adds in encrypted traffic which made the performance of the filters far worse. Essentially, just detecting the traffic was extremely difficult. Later on, an Australian study showed that, while it may be possible to detect targeted content through normal internet traffic, it was virtually impossible to even figure out what content was legal or illegal on any given p2p protocol.

In fact, internet filtering was the subject of controversy recently where British ISP’s blocked and unblocked Wikipedia. This was a blocking method performed by people and the filters didn’t exactly win over public approval. In short, the MPAA can lobby all they want for an automated system for eliminating so-called “internet piracy”, but it’ll be impossible to get today even if they get what they demand.

Surprisingly, the MPAA singles out Britain as a success story and says that Britain, along with France, is a “useful model”

The paper also included a short list of countries the MPAA wants to lobby. They single out Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia and Spain as a “priority trade policy” Canadians including Michael Geist were not amused.

It is no secret that the copyright industry likes to talk about morals when it comes to unauthorized downloading. Unfortunately for members of the MPAA, morals might be playing against them now. The New York Times has learned that Ryan Kavanaugh, the chief executive of Relativity Media was arrested recently.

The article says that the charges include drunk driving, speeding and driving with a suspended license.

Relativity Media is no small fish in the movie industry, financing virtually every movie studio, the biggest being NBC Universal with the recent $3 Billion deal, the previous deal funding the movie “Changling”.

The MPAA has already been having difficulties with cash – a seemingly direct result of the financial crises hitting the United States hard. We investigated how hard a little over two months ago and the outlook wasn’t looking good. Obviously, with such a big player in the financial department being detained isn’t going to help much.

Perhaps the MPAA also thought it was finally in the clear with moral conflict when they were accused of pirating “This Film is Not Yet Rated” two years ago – maybe not anymore.

Coincidently enough, the company made a $550 million dollar deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment, a company already under a lot of bad PR.

A French arm of Sony had a nightmarish story earlier this year. We broke the story that Sony was sued for software piracy and had their assets seized in France. The story brought back memories in the file-sharing community of a previous scandal known as the Sony Rootkit Scandal. Some suggested that it was a form of karma coming back to haunt the company. Sony had to settle class action lawsuits in several countries including Canada.

This latest blunder may not be of the same magnitude of Sony getting sued for software piracy, but it could continue a long list of memorable blunders the copyright industry has been involved with.