DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Welcome to the first WNR for 2015, an abridged version since, well, I don’t think anyone’s in a mood to read (or to write) an essay length article, not this early in the year anyway. Hope your NYE celebrations were awesome, or at the very least, you managed to get a sensible good night’s sleep to get energized for the new year.

So let’s take a look at some of the stories doing the rounds for the last week of 2014 (and the first week of 2015), some of which I may cover in more detail during the next week.

A super hit at the cinemas and on Blu-ray, but not that popular for pirates …

So it’s the end of the year, and as is customary, there are a lot of “top 10”, “best of” and “year in review” type of stories. The top 10 most pirated films for the year, for example, can be found out in this article courtesy of piracy tracking firm Excipio. Surprisingly, at least for me, was the fact that ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ was the year’s most pirated movie, not ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ (the top box office earner for 2014), which wasn’t even on the top 20 list. One explanation is that movies like ‘Guardians’ and the new Hunger Games movie, ‘Mockingjay’ were released too late in the year to climb on the list, but movies like ‘The Lego Movie’ (4th on the box office charts) also didn’t make the top 20.

In fact, the most pirated movie released in 2014 was ‘RoboCop’ (3rd on the piracy charts, although it includes the original, and much more superior version, in the numbers) – this is a movie that was 54th on the box office charts, a flop by most standards. The piracy charts also include the 8th placed ‘The Legend of Hercules’ (107th on the box office charts), another flop that somehow beat out top movies like ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ (even if this much worse of the two Hercules films this year was available online for 2 month more than the 300 sequel, released in March).

It seems to me that pirates are very selective in what they download, and it has nothing to do with how they select which movies to watch at the cinemas, or to purchase on Blu-ray and DVD. A point that has already been made recently.

… while popular TV shows, especially those that aren’t easy to access, *are* popular with pirates

The same may not be exactly true for TV downloads, with the top 10 list compiled by TorrentFreak matching well with the popularity/critical acclaim of said show. Though if you dig into the figures, you’ll find that many of the shows are being pirated more outside of the US, or in areas that do not have as easy/cheap/fast access to the latest episodes. Access is much less of a problem for movies (perhaps more so for certain movies that don’t get wider, or long releases, such as flops, hence the piracy), and when access is the main problem, piracy will usually follow popularity trends. Solve the access problem, then people will pay (like they do for hits like ‘Guardians’), and only pirate those that they deem unworthy of their patronage, or movies that aren’t easily available to view at the cinemas, or on Blu-ray/DVD.

Fiber broadband … the MPAA’s next “public enemy number one”

But instead of focusing on the access problem, and solving that by having better and more viable options, particularly taking advantage of new technology like fiber broadband (4K cinema quality movie streaming, anyone?), Hollywood instead lets their fear rule and instantly adopts a over-cautious approach to new innovations in technology. That they’re now fighting against Google Fiber, instead of trying to find new ways to sell content to those on these super-duper fast broadband connections, just goes to show why they keep on losing to tech companies when it comes to innovation. Especially when they use dubious methods to come up with dubious conclusions about said new technology (including the fact that studios would lose $1 billion dollars a year more due to fiber, based on the assumption that 31% of the entire population of Kansas City, including little children, grandparents, those that don’t use a computer, are pirates).

Every change can be seen as an opportunity, or an impending disaster, and I just wish the creative industry, for once, looks on the bright side of things. Stop being so focused on sending DMCA takedowns, or throwing tantrums if you don’t get your way on things, and start confronting change and saying to yourselves “how can I make the best of this”, and maybe, just maybe, things will work out for the best.

So movie studios, please make this your New Year’s resolution, and I think you’ll find this will be a win-win for everyone!

That’s it for the first WNR for 2015. Hope you have a great year!

Welcome to what is probably the penultimate “proper” WNR for 2014, with the WNR scheduled for December 28 likely to be a very short affair (given it’s that time of the year and everything). Where has 2014 gone? It seems like it was only yesterday that we were talking about The Pirate Bay’s journey to find a new home and HEVC’s growing stature as the industry codec for the (immediate) future. I guess things haven’t really changed that much in a year!

Onto this week’s all copyright, all the time, WNR …

Where is The Pirate Bay?

The Pirate Bay ship has been sunk … or at the very least, it has disappeared into a cloud of smoke, fate unknown. With the site still down at the time of writing, this one looks like to be one of the biggest TPB outages in history. All of this is because of a Swedish police raid on the nuclear bunker style data center that TPB (and other sites, including EZTV and a few BitTorrent trackers) used – the bunker may be nuclear bomb proof, but it wasn’t police proof, it appears.

Still hard to find any definitive information on just what happened, but it appears that TPB’s load balancers were taken offline in the raid, while the actual servers that hosts the site and files are “in the cloud” and so, I guess, still there somewhere (without the load balancers to direct users to where the servers are). For all the talk of TPB being “raid proof”, the load balancers still appears to be a single point of failure for the site, although I guess there are solutions for this as well.

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I found the headline for this article, “Sony Pictures mad at Netflix’s failure to block overseas VPN users”, particularly ironic this week given that pretty much everyone, from President Obama to Kevin Hart to Angelina Jolie will have been pretty mad at Sony Pictures this week (for those not keeping track, leaked emails revealed very insensitive to downright racist remarks made by executives at Sony).

Just as damaging may be the leaked emails explaining the MPAA’s strategy in dealing with piracy, with several key, previously unknown details being revealed. You can read this article for a brief overview of what’s in the leak, but it appears that the MPAA will be moving ahead with litigation in several countries in a bid to stop what they feel is the top piracy priority, cyberlocker and video streaming sites.

The introduction of a “site scoring service” was also interesting, and may tie in neatly with Disney’s patent for a new piracy-free search engine. The service will rank sites based on “trustworthiness”, with I suppose official and legal services being more trustworthy than say the Pirate Bay (if and when it gets back online). Support services such as payment processors and domain name registrars can use the service to identify and boot suspected piracy sites. So in reality, this “site scoring service” may just be a fancy name for an Internet blacklist.

One of the priority targets is piracy related apps, which may or may not have anything to do with this story. Google has pulled piracy related apps from the Play Store, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is happening as part of a bigger plan, the very plan that was leaked.

This kind of cooperation between the MPAA and Google may be a thing of the past though, as Google’s recent algorithm changes, which have proved quite effective at taking down piracy related sites, were met with a ‘snarky’ response from the MPAA. Against, the Sony Pictures leaked emails proved to be very insightful, as Google’s intentions of doing something helpful for the MPAA was met with disdain and distrust, which may have caused the relationship between Hollywood and the search engine to completely break down. Nice one MPAA!

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Pirates buy more stuff on iTunes than “model consumers” who don’t pirate

All of this week’s stories so far have been about stopping downloads, pirates, piracy sites, blah blah blah … but does it all really matter? According to a survey released by Australian consumer group CHOICE, stopping pirates may not be the most important thing ever, and kicking them off the Internet may be the last thing you want to do. This is because, according to the study, people who admit to regularly pirating spend more money than people who say they never pirate. Similar results have been found in the past, in other regions, and it also makes sense if you think about it. It’s because people who like to consume digital content will do so both legally and illegally. People who don’t pirate may also be the same people who just don’t want the content on offer, whether it’s a movie at a cinema or the same movie on BitTorrent.

The interesting question for me is how these so called “regular pirates” decide what to buy and what to download (illegally). I think this is where value, availability, quality, ease of use and things like DRM come in. People ARE spending money, and it’s important to find out why they’re doing so. Of course, once funds are exhausted (consumers do not have unlimited funds, take note RIAA/MPAA), there’s only one real option left. Now whether content owners want people to have this option or not, or to simply stop consuming when they run out of money, that’s sort of where the debate is at right now – either way, they’re not going to get a cent more, but allowing people to still download may have promotional value beyond a simple dollar return.

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And that’s all we have time for this week. Actually, I have a lot of time, but I also have a lot of stuff in my Netflix queue to catch up on. Like, A LOT of stuff. See you next week!