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Columbus Underground Messageboard » General Columbus Discussion » Politics
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
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Mister Shifter
Lewis Center
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Posted 1 year ago # -
JonMyers
HCMC, Vietnam ✈
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cheap said:
i can't either.Sherrod Brown has done the classic fuck up involving himself in this mess.
Yeah, he's clueless and lacks an innovation oriented mindset like most politicians.
Another report of wackamole since SOPA hasn't passed....
German national Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, was one of four men arrested on Friday, a day before his 38th birthday, in an investigation of the Megaupload.com website led by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
High-octane arrest in Megaupload fraud
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Lastly, just spotted this and love it.
Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood
Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.
That's one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?
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I do think a lot of SOPA is a wild grasp to protect Hollywood (TV/ Film Industry) from their failure to innovate and innovate fast enough.
The thing is - someone, somewhere will.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Mister Shifter
Lewis Center
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Hollywood is going down the tank, fast.
Higher and higher ticket prices, declining amount of quality films, compounded with the fact that home TV's are getting better, bigger & cheaper, and network television is getting better than what's being offered in the cinema (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, LOST, American Horror Story, etc etc etc). I used to go to the movies all the time. Now I go less than five times a year.
Not to mention movie studios continue to not get it and charge close to $30 for blu-ray movies, and wonder why people turn to bit torrent, or just not buy physical media anymore.
Sorry if some of this has already been said, I didn't take the time to read the previous few pages.
Posted 1 year ago # -
hugh59
Aboard the ultimate power in Olde Towne East
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I am transferring this post over to this thread because ww have not had a discussion about video piracy for a while.
Here is an interesting story about piracy and GAME OF THRONES from the Washington Post today:
Game Of Thrones Questions Everything You Know About Piracy
The season 3 premiere was the most pirated tv show in history. Yet DVD sales for the previous seasons are very good (in spite of rampant piracy of those episodes). Apparently the piracy helps build excitement and desire of people to own higher resolution copies once they become available. Also, the report notes how HBO makes it difficult for people to watch the show legally. If you do not want to subscribe to HBO, you either have to wait for the episodes to come out on DVD or you have to pirate them.
Posted 1 month ago # -
susank
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I think fewer people have cable tv, and even fewer have premium channels. So the numbers make sense that people either are pirating or waiting for the DVDs. I really doubt a ton of people care too much about resolution and need to rewatch this type of thing.
It reminds me of the excuses people make for taking office supplies from work. Somebody paid to write, produce and market The Game of Thrones. If you are pirating it you just don't care.
Posted 1 month ago # -
hugh59
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People can rationalize a lot when it suits them. Still there is a wide range of behavior that gets included in the definition of "video piracy."
For instance, if you own a movie on blu-ray but want a lower resolution copy to have on your portable device a lot of people would not consider it to be morally wrong to make or acquire that low resolution copy since you have already paid to own the content in some form.
The law need to reflect what people are actually doing. However, just because a lot of people (maybe even most people) think something is "ok" does not make it right.
Posted 1 month ago # -
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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This is a demand/artificial constraint problem, and one wholly the fault of the suppliers. In an ideal market people who wanted to watch GoT would be able to purchase just that. Intead you have to pay for cable service, so then you can pay for premium service, so then you can watch GoT. Because of these fairly archaic barriers of entry (you know, so the Golf channel can exist), and because piracy of content doesn't involve actually depriving another individual of said content, viola people who find the barriers too hard to cross will find another way.
If they want to capture that "lost" revenue they think they are missing, they need to develop products that capture that. Of course, that puts at risk their nice shell game whereby I (and all cable customers) pay for 95% of crap channels to get the 5% I ever tune to.
Posted 1 month ago # -
hugh59
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That may be one reason why HBO does not appear to be too distressed by all the piracy. They know that the high number of viewers and fans will translate into higher DVD and Blu-ray sales. They may profit more from the disk sales than from the cable broadcast revenues after all expenses are considered.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Rockmastermike
The Bacon District
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myliftkk said:
If they want to capture that "lost" revenue they think they are missing, they need to develop products that capture that. Of course, that puts at risk their nice shell game whereby I (and all cable customers) pay for 95% of crap channels to get the 5% I ever tune to.the fact that they have that opportunity to 'capture that lost revenue', and have chosen not to, only speaks to the fact that they really dont care about recovering the supposedly lost revenue. They KNOW exactly what they lose and do not lose from piracy and it's not much.
The CEO of HBO even admits they know and don't care about piracy and it does not hurt sales (as Hugh has pointed out they make scads of cash on disk sales). But they know they have to SAY they care. : http://news.yahoo.com/hbo-admits-piracy-compliment-doesn-t-hurt-sales-035946132.html
They could, for example offer the show via amazon streaming video, where they could make episodes available shortly after broadcast for a low a la carte fee to folks with ROKUs or other internet connected TVs (or computers but really everything is a computer now, so there is no distinguising). Other shows do this and lots of folks just pay $1.99 to watch an episode. Nope. instead they offer it only on HBOGO, which is only available to HBO CABLE SUBSCRIBERS. I.e. folks who could just DVR it anyway. Only past seasons are available on Amazon's pay-per-view where they would make money. And they know they could very easily use their already working HBOGO service to charge to view episodes and capture lost revenue very easily. Yet they have chosen not to.
They KNOW someone who doesn't have cable or subscribe to HBO is not going to bother doing so just for one show, so they wouldn't make that money anyway. If someone watches it free they know for a fact they most likely would never have gotten that persons money anyway, or in some cases they already have that persons money and that person just wanted to put a copy on their tablet to watch on a plane or something. They know they are actually REFUSING TO TAKE MONEY from people who would happily pay a couple of bucks to watch an ep.
The fact is, they KNOW they have gone to great lengths to only make the show available to a limited audience, And they KNOW that drives 'piracy' and they know full well that it's their choice to do so and they know what the result of that choice will be.
And the bottom line is that they know it does not actually hurt their bottom line. In fact, they know the rep of it being an 'exclusive' product, or 'forbidden fruit' actually helps drive buzz and get subscribers to watch.
That being said... i've never bothered to torrent a copy, which is, in fact, my only option for watching current episodes. is it really that good?
Posted 1 month ago # -
hugh59
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I can only guess that HBO execs have determined that the company's net income from the current setup regarding Game of Thrones is higher than their net income would be if they allowed more viewership options. The stuff you download via torrent is going to be lower resolution hence people who really like the show and want to see it on their big screen HD tv (and who are not going to subscribe to HBO for just one show) will be happy to pay the $50 or so for the season on DVD or blu-ray.
If HBO made the show available for HD downloads through some other vendor, they would have to share the profits. Those downloads would probably have a bigger impact on disk sales than torrent downloads do.
Posted 1 month ago # -
mrpoppinzs
Arena District
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I think there is a lot of assumptions and rationalizing going on. I torrent it, but I am not gonna kid myself that HBO (or whoever worked on it) is fine with that. They just haven't worked out a business model that works for them and their obligations.
I am not anonymously sending them $1.99 either, though I really can afford to.
Posted 1 month ago # -
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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Rockmastermike said:
That being said... i've never bothered to torrent a copy, which is, in fact, my only option for watching current episodes. is it really that good?
Uh... yeah.
My guess is the cable carraige deals they brokered might preclude them from a la carting content. I, for one, would clearly drop basic subscription cable if I got get premium content a la carte.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Rockmastermike
The Bacon District
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hugh59 said:
I can only guess that HBO execs have determined that the company's net income from the current setup regarding Game of Thrones is higher than their net income would be if they allowed more viewership options.yep!
You're totally right, but to clarify a couple of points...The stuff you download via torrent is going to be lower resolution
nope. That's a misconception.
Full resolution copies are easily made (and easily found on the torrents, btw) that will match the (compressed) cable signal that actual subscriber see. In fact if the recording is then carefully compressed (more carefully than the on-the-fly compression the cable companies use) you can then compress the recording (x265 compression for example) and preserve a video recording to the point where most viewers will not be able to tell the difference. I can show you how to do this if you wish.
hence people who really like the show and want to see it on their big screen HD tv (and who are not going to subscribe to HBO for just one show) will be happy to pay the $50 or so for the season on DVD or blu-ray.
or they will simply download a high quality blueray rip and play it to their big screen tv via one of the many many ways there is to do that.
When my DVR glitched and failed to record "Cult" the other week, I spent 10 minutes downloading a full HD copy of the episode and, watched it on my big screen TV in full HD via my ROKU interface. LOTS of folks do this. if someone is tech savy enough to download in the firstplace they know how to do this too (or know how to google how to do it).
If HBO made the show available for HD downloads through some other vendor, they would have to share the profits. Those downloads would probably have a bigger impact on disk sales than torrent downloads do.
Except they have their own vendor, HBOGO. And they chose not to use it. Perhaps that's a contracted service and they have to share profit. That may be true. I suspect not. But I have no evidence.
Also, that's not "downloads", that's streams. People who want a physical copy vs people who just want to watch the show once. Its two different markets although I'm sure there is some overlap.
My point is (and yours too apparently), people who really LIKE the show are willing to buy the disks to KEEP it and HBO KNOWS this. And apparently they also know (As you say) that the money they lose via 'piracy' is less than they would make offering streaming. You're totally right about that.
Which leads to the larger discussion about piracy in the media. They have little actual proof of financial harm from casual end user piracy and actually may be helped by it. They know what they need to do to effectively stop piracy and yet many chose not to or they chose less effective (regulatory) means to stop it. And this is where the discussion gets interesting.
BTW, sorry for repeated edits if you've noticed. I cannot effectively edit in the ridiculously TINY edit window CU provides.
Posted 1 month ago #
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