Tuesday, 27 November 2012

In Conclusion


I’d like to leave whoever is out there reading this with my final thoughts on what I’ve learned by writing this blog. Throughout my research online it seems that in terms of online piracy, it’s the people against the corporations and the government. And I believe this completely. In the last couple years several bills have attempted to be introduced into our law structure, and they have all failed miserably. Many influential sites protested them, and eventually they were all shelved. Many of these bills tried to invade our privacy by monitoring the Internet and having the option to control it. The internet is pretty much a lawless society, anything can end up on there and once it’s on, it’s there for good. How could they possibly think it would be controlled? So how would they stop Piracy? I mentioned in our class presentation that they only way to deal with piracy is to compete with it. Why are these organizations and government agents attempting to stop it altogether and spending more money then necessary. They should really just embrace it and come up with ways of competing, because piracy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So to wrap it up, until the government decides to become a totalitarian state, it’s pretty much up to you whether you download files illegally or not… Keep on rockin’ in the free world!

Dinner or music? It's an easy choice for students


Why are the claims against Piracy put out by organizations such as the Institute of Policy Innovation or the Record Industry Association of America so outrageous? Well, these companies hate losing money, even a penny. And a penny is a lot closer to what they are actually losing compared to billions of dollars and thousands of jobs that are supposedly lost from piracy. You’d think that if this were actually true, the economy would be even further into the shitter than it already is (well, at least in the states). But what I would like to do is take a look at how the economy might not be losing any kind of revenue even with piracy. I am speaking solely from the point of a university student on a shoestring budget so bear with me here. Let’s say Joe Guy has 10 dollars and his favorite bands new album just came out, but he also needs to buy food for dinner, and coincidentally his friend just sent him the link to a torrent site for that album. So now he can get dinner (money into the economy) and also hear his favorite music. As I’ve mentioned before no one in my generation is going to pick paying money for an album over buying food. It’s not a big deal to them… Steal dinner or an album online, what would you do?

Hollywood isn't giving us much of a choice

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This article is a pretty interesting read. It claims that Hollywood is actually pushing people towards online piracy. There are a few reasons behind this claim, which I believe to be pretty spot on. First off, DVD sales are going downhill – fast. And all in all, so are movie rentals in general, even though there seems to be a large market online for such a service. Remember Blockbuster? The next generation probably won’t just like the latest generation barely knows what a floppy disc is. The thing is, people don’t like renting movies anymore, and as much as online rental services are convenient, there are still many drawbacks. These drawbacks include the following. You don’t get all the extras that come on a DVD, but you’re still paying for the full rental price. You also have a 24 hour time restriction to your digital rental, seems a bit short considering places like blockbuster had 3 and 7 day rentals and no late fees. But the biggest drawback of all, is digital rentals don’t have some of the best movies out there simply because big Hollywood execs just won’t release the rights. You don’t want to give the people what they want legally, so why are you so surprised people are downloading the same things for free and at their convenience? It’s a no brainer.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-hollywood-encouraging-onine-piracy 

Monday, 26 November 2012

The most pirated movies of all time


This summer Daniel Bukszpan, a writer for CNBC, did some research in order to find out the titles of the top 5 most pirated films of all time. They are in order:
  • Avatar (2009) with 21 million illegal downloads
  • [Tie] The Dark Knight (2008) 19 million downloads
  • [Tie] Transformers (2007) 19 million downloads
  • Inception (2010) 18 million downloads
  • The Hangover (2009) 17 million downloads
Personally if I were to pirate one of these films I delete it after I have watched it. The iTunes Store charges $4.99 to rent a standard quality version of a movie for 2 days. If the 21 million downloads of Avatar were rented on the iTunes Store the estimated value of lost revenue equals $105 million. Avatar's gross box office revenue was $2.78 billion and cost $237 million to make. If you add the sunk revenue from piracy and the cost of the film you get $347 million which is a mere 12% of total potential revenue... And iTunes is expensive!

The Wild Wild East



This beautiful place is Podgorica, Montenegro where online piracy is an enormous industry. It's estimated that 83% of all software and software accounts are pirated. This is the highest level in the region but surrounding countries use between 40-70% pirated software. The country is also responsible for hosting the servers of services that provide safety for pirated document storage. ProjectFreeTV.me has fluctuated in relevance over the past 5 years but has always been located in Montenegro. Oliver Obradovic of Microsoft Montenegro noted that the issue is mostly caused by individuals and small businesses who see an opportunity to make some easy money. Countries like Gabon in Africa and the Phillipines host many of the servers responsible for the Copyright issues of more economically developed countries.

Paying for music with a Tweet

Pay with a Tweet is certainly for either the pre-established forward thinking businessperson or the monetarily unconcerned up-and-comer. The service is useful for musicians, journalists, authors, service providers and more. Essentially what you do is set up a download link through the site in order to set up a download link for one of your files. For example you have just spent hours on Abelton creating a new track for your DJ page. You upload the file to the internet and get a download link. You then take that download link into the Pay with a Tweet form and design a tweet to be posted on the listeners feed to promote your music. The service is making music more accessible and helping artists promote themselves online. Using a system like this can cut out middlemen and recording companies to promote live performances rather than album sales for money. This service could be the future of the music industry.

Why 4Shared is different

4Shared is a file sharing site that is very different from most others. The service has a .com URL which makes it a little more legitimate than the illegal .me or .ru sites of today. Above is an image of the companies iPhone application's icon on which you can add downloads to a registered account cue. You can also link the account to your Facebook in order to share the fact that you have just downloaded an artists song. The concept of Creative Commons Copyrighting and relies on the artists obligation to attribute the work to the original artist. 4Shared certainly plays into this by attributing downloads to original artists automatically (if allowed).