A Few Words About A few words about...™ Vendors, film piracy and national security (1 Viewer)

[Worth]

But were there not a couple of cases where this occurred? I'm thinking of Columbia putting out a pristine "His Girl Friday" after numerous dupey bootlegs had been out for years and Universal restoring "My Man Godfrey" which also was out there with a ton of dupey copies.

Charade, as well, which has now been released by both Criterion and Universal.

 

[Robert Harris]

But were there not a couple of cases where this occurred? I'm thinking of Columbia putting out a pristine "His Girl Friday" after numerous dupey bootlegs had been out for years and Universal restoring "My Man Godfrey" which also was out there with a ton of dupey copies.

Those are films worth the investment, which may have been partially financed by others. Charade, noted on the next page, is another example which would have had a clean OCN, and a reasonably easy time in the lab.

RAH

 

[Michael Elliott]

Persianimoortal, I apologize for calling you this but I don't know your real name.

You once again come up with a great post but what do we do from here? It's obvious this thread isn't going to get anything done about Code Red, Paul Naschy, Jess Franco or Alfred Hitchcock. I do find it funny that they know the exact number of times movies X, Y and Z have been downloaded yet they can't get them off the internet. Again, I've never personally visited one of these sites so I don't pay too much attention to them and in all honesty I couldn't find one even if I did want to save $10 by skipping the theater. My whole fight in this thread isn't about pirates/thieves/dorks downloading THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. It's about films sitting in vaults with no way to see except getting lucky at a certain site or someone posting it to view for free on Youtube.

I think we all agree that the MPAA doesn't care about the small guy. I think most would agree that mainstream/Average Joe's don't care about the MPAA. How is the MPAA going to be able to stop these hit movies from being loaded onto these sites and downloaded by 8-million people (worldwide??)?

 

[Michael Elliott]

Be interesting to see a link or reference to the articles. Some studios have done a quality job of nitrate conversion. Some lone surviving prints still need protection, as there are no pre-print elements.There are numerous nitrate OCNs in desperate need of modern protection. Asset protection makes presumptions built upon presumed past history. When one is working with presumptions based upon presumptions one gets into WB-like situations, where nitrate OCNs sit, near their end of useful life, while presumptions may indicate that safety fine grains exist. One might presume that said fine grains are of requisite quality, and those presumptions may lead to a huge loss of asset protected inventory. Nothing changes.RAH

One comes from Joe Dante who had a festival of his films shown in St. Louis several years back where he was shocked to learn that GREMLINS, a movie that made Warner a ton, had only one remaining 35mm print. Tim Lucas wrote about this in Video Watchdog. Baxter Ave. in Louisville used to brag against "screwing digital" and just showing 35mm prints but the studios quit giving them out. I'm guessing this here isn't something too shocking as it's cheaper with digital but still just having one print of many movies is a little worrisome.

 

[Persianimmortal]

Persianimoortal, I apologize for calling you this but I don't know your real name.

You once again come up with a great post but what do we do from here? It's obvious this thread isn't going to get anything done about Code Red, Paul Naschy, Jess Franco or Alfred Hitchcock. I do find it funny that they know the exact number of times movies X, Y and Z have been downloaded yet they can't get them off the internet. Again, I've never personally visited one of these sites so I don't pay too much attention to them and in all honesty I couldn't find one even if I did want to save $10 by skipping the theater. My whole fight in this thread isn't about pirates/thieves/dorks downloading THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. It's about films sitting in vaults with no way to see except getting lucky at a certain site or someone posting it to view for free on Youtube.

I think we all agree that the MPAA doesn't care about the small guy. I think most would agree that mainstream/Average Joe's don't care about the MPAA. How is the MPAA going to be able to stop these hit movies from being loaded onto these sites and downloaded by 8-million people (worldwide??)?

My real name is in the box to the left - Koroush Ghazi

As for your questions (apologies in advance for the wall of text):

Nobody knows the exact numbers of downloads, or bootleg copies in distribution; the figures posted are just understated estimates from a single popular source that can be tracked (torrents), as they have a central tracking mechanism as part of the way they work. All the numbers do is provide a very rough and anonymised estimate of the scale of the problem. It would be impossible (and undesirable) to then go after each individual downloader, even if they could be identified. You would have literally millions of court cases on your hands. The MPAA and RIAA tried a form of this strategy by going after individuals, and it doesn't really achieve anything other than negative publicity, and makes martyrs out of those who are caught and prosecuted - inevitably stories pop up about some working class woman whose son downloaded a few songs being sued for $50,000 or somesuch other exaggerated cases. Pirates use this publicity to further paint themselves as Robin Hoods, perpetuating the stereotype of poor humble folk fighting the greedy corporations.

Things are made even more complex by the fact that most of the pirated IP is owned by US entities, so there's very little sympathy or incentive for other countries to truly act upon piracy. In some countries, piracy is even legal. In the Netherlands for example, it is legal to download pirated material, and at least 30% of that country's population engage in the activity. They're also a major source of the uploads for pirated material that is downloaded across the world.

And as to how piracy of the big movies affects the more obscure ones, it's all part and parcel of the same problem. This is just my opinion, but one borne of a lot of research and observation: piracy becomes a way of life for many people, especially the younger generation. It's a habit people fall into. That means that whenever someone who is used to pirating wants to watch a movie or TV show, listen to a song, or play a video game, their first instinct is to turn to pirated sources. The main piracy sites work like search engines. You enter a word or phrase, and all manner of pirated multimedia is returned in a nice list, which you can click on to initiate download. So say a person hears about the movie Safe in Hell - instead of going to Amazon or ebay to find a copy, they're much more likely to do a search to find a pirated copy to download straight away, no fuss, no muss.

You'd be surprised just how many classics and obscure titles there are which are listed on pirate search engines. Below is a screenshot of what I found in 5 seconds searching on a single piracy search engine: two separate download sources for Safe in Hell 1931. I can't attest to their quality as I haven't actually downloaded them, but I imagine they would be reasonable given they're available in ~4.5GB (single layer DVD) download sizes:

Note: If a moderator finds the above image and discussion of methods to be inappropriate, please let me know. I don't want to overstep the rules here, I just want to give a practical demonstration.

So as you can see, virtually all material is available via piracy, even very obscure or notionally less popular stuff. That's because, given the scale of piracy, even the obscure stuff will be uploaded by someone, somewhere, and since it costs nothing to upload, and nothing to download, it will sit in cyberspace for quite a while, available to anyone, anywhere for free at a moment's notice, if they so desire. Now how exactly can any paid product compete with that sort of convenience and price?

There is no simple solution. In my opinion it comes down to a two-pronged attack:

[*]The first is obviously to go after the source. The downloads I show above are available via a mechanism known as Usenet, which means it's held on central servers, and thus the material can be taken down with DMCA takedown notices. Usenet is slightly more complex to use for downloading pirated material, so many people don't use it, but it's growing in popularity. As an interesting aside, just now when I did a Google search on Usenet, the first result was the Wikipedia page linked above, but the second result was a tutorial on a major site explaining exactly how to pirate multimedia using Usenet, so it's little wonder that more people are learning how to use it.

In any case, the harder we make it for people to find pirated material, the greater the chance they may turn to legitimate sources. So I would suggest the MPAA needs to work harder on issuing takedown notices and going after the piracy sites. This has happened to some extent, as some major sites have eventually been shut down, although new ones are popping up all the time. It's basically a game of whack-a-mole.

[*]The second approach is the more effective one in my opinion, but very difficult. It's the one I've been focusing on, which is to educate people about the consequences of their actions. To make people understand that the more they pirate, the greater the chance that they kill off the goose that lays the golden egg. Basically, it's not about the morality, it's purely about the practical impacts of piracy, especially on consumers themselves. This approach is hampered at every stage by the popular myths and justifications for piracy, which we've seen in mild form in this thread. People want to believe that piracy is harmless, because it gives them free stuff, so they'll engage in all sorts of wild twists of logic and rationalizations to delude themselves into believing that. Convincing them to stop, or at least reduce their piracy is a bit like trying to extract someone out of a cult, it takes a lot of work.

Unfortunately the studios have no real incentive on taking this approach, as it usually means massive negative publicity, at least in the initial stages of any education campaign. The ham-fisted attempts at this in the past also don't help, like the rather lame You wouldn't steal a car ad campaign (read the comments below that YouTube video to see the types of responses it garners - a popular response is "I wouldn't download a car? F*** you, i would if i could").

But really, I can't see any other solution that would work other than convincing more people that piracy is not a victimless crime, and that ultimately, the victims are the consumers themselves in the long run, as businesses constantly adapt to avoid the impact of piracy, and thus we get more DRM, we get more lowest-common-denominator garbage, we lose a lot of variety, and in terms of older movies, we stand a very real risk of losing them as it becomes unviable to spend much on restoring/maintaining/releasing them. Companies go where the money goes, and piracy is leading them by the nose to cheap digital streaming, and focusing on low risk projects, like the summer blockbusters.
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[schan1269]

Not that I have a dog here, but.Over at BFI is an interesting article called...Flaming the FansIt is about people translating and adding subtitles to works "never seen/released" outside the native country. Interesting read as the author clamps down on the entire "illegality" of it.

 

[Robert Harris]

The answer may exist in stricter penalties. Even for exceedingly religious women working to feed four children. RAH

 

[Michael Elliott]

Koroush, I certainly wish you the best going forward with your research and battle. There's no question that you make some wonderful points but if there's no official release out there then I'm personally not going to lose much sleep. I'm not connected with a studio or law firm so it's just not my place to try and fight their battles. I don't make money off anything I've watched so I can't really say I'm one they need to be fighting. I don't upload or download material. Now, if a day comes when the government thinks I need to do a 10-20 year prison sentence because I bought some titles that aren't out there officially, then I'll cross that bridge when it comes.

Stricter penalties might get something done but then again murder, rape, drugs and various other crimes have strong penalties and this doesn't prevent people from doing it. Then you also open the can of worms of bad press for the studios, the fact that most people already think they're greedy bastards and you also get into an economic question on how countries/locations are going to be able to house 8-million bootleggers since we will now be throwing them in jail and being forced to feed, bath and house them.

The whole "fan-sub" thing is rather interesting, although it too is something I haven't really dove into. I've had to watch countless foreign films without subtitles and in horrible condition since there's no official release but when they've been "re-released" with the fan-subs, I've honestly never went back to see what I was missing the first time around. Of course, if an official studios ends up releasing these then I'll support them 100%.

I've watched 83 movies at the theater this year and if you say an average ticket price is $8 then the studios and theater owners have received $664 from me. This thread has opened my eyes to the fact that I could have stayed home and watched all 83 of these movies for free. Now that I have this great knowledge I will still be going to the theater to watch movies. I will still be paying Netflix, Hulu, Warner, Amazon and others for their streaming/renting services. I'm sure most people know this stuff is out there but are either like me, or don't care or simply don't have the knowledge to find a download, actually do it and then have the knowledge of how to watch it.

 

[Persianimmortal]

Michael, I don't get paid to fight piracy, it's not something I focus most of my time on; despite how it may appear, I'm not on any crusade, and I don't have any affiliation to studios or law firms. What initially encouraged me to do some research on the topic was that I was watching a hobby (PC gaming) that I enjoy steadily transform into something that I don't enjoy so much, due in large part to piracy. The availability and types of games has undergone a major transformation as the game developers and publishers have adapted to reduce the impact of piracy on their revenues. And the people who were responsible for this change - the average gamer - while acknowledging the negative aspects of the changes, would firmly deny that a piracy problem even exists. So in my frustration, back in late 2008 I set about researching and writing a detailed article about game piracy that got a lot of attention, both from gamers and from games companies, much to my surprise. By wrapping some facts and logic around the issue, instead of pure speculation and myth, I think some progress was made in educating people who would otherwise rampantly pirate games without considering the consequences. The feedback I've received since the article was published indicates that many pirates opened their eyes to the problem and changed their behavior, or at least reduced their pirating tendencies.

Now, you are obviously not someone who needs to be overly concerned about the negative impacts of your actions, as you are not pirating. And I'm sure that many of the other enthusiasts on this forum, like you, pump a disproportionately large amount of money into studio coffers through your many purchases of films and related products. So I can relate to your lack of interest in pursuing this topic.

The key issue here is that the studios, major corporations, investors etc. really won't lose much in all of this, in the long run. They'll just change their models, the types of products they release, and the modes of delivery, to minimize exposure to piracy. The question you have to ask yourself is: will these changes be desirable for us as consumers, particularly for those of us who care about higher quality products like Blu-ray, and the preservation and enjoyment of older, potentially less popular, films. In my opinion, the answer is that we're already seeing undesirable changes in the type of content, and how it is being delivered, due in some part to the environment created by piracy.

So I think it's an issue that affects us all, and needs some action, at the very least in countering the common myths and justifications that are used to support piracy, to make it socially acceptable, and in some cases, to even paint it as a positive force for change.

 

[zoetmb]

I don't believe that it's a matter of the movie being buried "sight unseen". In many of these cases, collectors do have copies. In most cases, some video release was in fact done - whether that be on videotape or laserdisc or whatever. Over many, many years of VHS releases, a lot of these things did make their way out. And again, there are the collectors - not to mention the places where movies have been preserved by various institutions.

It's an interesting choice to say that the principled position is "it's better that a movie never be viewed again" when the option that's being presented is the idea of someone stealing it and downloading it. I'm not saying that I would like to see movies buried forever. I'm saying that it's not okay to take copyrighted work and just distribute it without any regard to the people who created it.

I have mixed feelings about this. I respect copyright, but I think Congress erred when it extended it to 95 years (largely because Disney absurdly claimed that if they lost copyright to "Steamboat Willie", people would make porno videos of Mickey Mouse). On the other hand, I can also support a position that says that if the work is older than "X years", and copyright owners don't exploit their work for a given number of years, the work should fall into the public domain. We have already seen in the record industry how artists are entitled to get the rights to their work back after so many years, regardless of what's in their contracts.

I'm not fully aware of all the details of how YouTube pays copyright owners, but they are definitely doing something. I always wondered how all those YouTube videos of popular songs, with a video of a turntable spinning, managed to stay on the site, but it turns out that YouTube is paying the labels for use of these songs. I shot a video of my granddaughter performing modern dance and YouTube must have analyzed the audio waveform because they informed me that my video contained copyrighted material (the audio playing in the background when the kids were dancing). As a result, they placed advertising on that video, even though I don't have it set as a public video - it won't come up in a search - you can only see it if you know the URL. Personally, I think such incidental use should be considered fair use, even if it was set to be a public video. It's never going to replace someone purchasing that music and it might even encourage someone to buy a copy.

So I have to believe that when people put up old TV shows, someone is getting paid. Or, under the law, YouTube can wait for a "take-down" request. If a studio owns the rights and they don't want it up there (and obviously they would have to be aware that it's there), they can ask YouTube to take it down and they must comply.

The other issue is that most people, especially young people, are totally unaware of the importance of copyright and think they have free reign to post or download anything. I think there should be a required course in schools about copyright protection and the law. Most people seem completely ignorant of the fact that if artists can't get paid, they won't produce anything. Instead, people rationalize that the record labels are corrupt or that the movie studios are rich and therefore, it's okay to "steal". People who think that they're so sophisticated about technology are actually quite the opposite because they don't realize that there's no difference between stealing a physical object and illegally downloading (or uploading) a digital file. People who would never shoplift (although that's a problem too) have no problem downloading a file illegally.

 

[Robert Harris]

So I have to believe that when people put up old TV shows, someone is getting paid. Or, under the law, YouTube can wait for a "take-down" request. If a studio owns the rights and they don't want it up there (and obviously they would have to be aware that it's there), they can ask YouTube to take it down and they must comply.

A bit more complex, and this is where the law becomes problematic and fails at its presumed task.You're correct that an IP owner can file a take-down notice, and generally if the request is legit, that will occur. But then the individual who uploaded the data, can file against the IP owner.If the uploader states that they feel the IP owner is in error or confused, the data goes back up, and the IP owner has no further rights, except one.They are forced to file impending litigation, which most uploaders know they won't do.If you want to protect your IP badly enough, in the end the DCMA is of little value. You're forced to litigate at a cost of tens of thousands to millions of dollars.RAH

 

[zoetmb]

Interesting. Thanks for the info. Although I think this would be more problematic for small, independent producers than for the big media companies.

 

[Robert Harris]

Interesting. Thanks for the info. Although I think this would be more problematic for small, independent producers than for the big media companies.

Problematic for both. Still a great expense. Larger media companies have that expense multiplied --presuming they choose to fight it, and many do not.

RAH

 

[bigshot]

I think the solution lies in providing a quality product at a great price... but I'm old fashioned.

 

[ROclockCK]

I think the solution lies in providing a quality product at a great price... but I'm old fashioned.

Or just a quality product at a fair price. I'm even more old fashioned.

I want the owners of all this arcane stuff to feel there is a value in putting their best foot forward...to feel motivated towards further investment in restoration...even if it's mostly for a niche collector market, much like it was during the heyday of Laserdisc.

 

[Persianimmortal]

I think the solution lies in providing a quality product at a great price... but I'm old fashioned.

Not old fashioned, just willfully ignorant. There's a mountain of evidence, some of which I've posted, that shows that people will still pirate the heck out of great stuff that only costs a few dollars to purchase. I can show you, right this minute, dozens of individual pirated download sources for Lawrence of Arabia, when it's available for purchase for less than $10 on Blu-ray. Unless of course you think that's not a quality product at a great price...

 

[Robert Harris]

Not old fashioned, just willfully ignorant. There's a mountain of evidence, some of which I've posted, that shows that people will still pirate the heck out of great stuff that only costs a few dollars to purchase. I can show you, right this minute, dozens of individual pirated download sources for Lawrence of Arabia, when it's available for purchase for less than $10 on Blu-ray. Unless of course you think that's not a quality product at a great price...

Scoundrels!

 

[Persianimmortal]

Don't worry RAH, I have it on good authority that most of the people who download Lawrence are starving Ethiopian children, who could otherwise not afford to buy the film. So no money lost there

 

[Michael Elliott]

Perhaps those downloading LAWRENCE are those who got screwed at the screenings last year and couldn't wait around two hours for the film to start like I did.


*For the record, I legally bought LAWRENCE on VHS, twice on DVD and a ticket for the theater so I did support the small studio trying to make a honest buck. I even supported the small little guys like the theater owner by buying a large Diet Coke to make it thru the long wait and movie.

 

[bigshot]

I bet the vast majority of those "Ethiopians" who downloaded Lawrence of Arabia never even watched it.