Cool, this sounds like it'll be a fantastic article.

My quick views and thoughts on the issues you raise:

When is it OK to steal?

For me, I feel less inhibited to steal content when I know it's been produced by someone / some company that's extremely rich. I think the cult of celebrity works against the industry in this aspect... in other words, I think that seeing some big film star all glammed up in "Hello" magazine makes people think "they've got lots of money, they won't mind if I download their film online without paying for it".

Is downloading pirated content stealing? In a way, it doesn't actually hurt anyone if you download (for free) something that you never had any intention of buying. You're not taking anything away from the producer. The problems start to appear when people get used to getting something for nothing.

Downloading TV is also a very slippery area. TV is broadcast to everyone so that makes it seem to a lot of people that sharing recorded TV on-line is OK. Indeed, the BBC are currently trialling a TV-download service called iMP (Internet Media Player). I heard a rumour that lots of the production companies who feed the BBC content went mental when they heard about iMP so the BBC decided to design the system so all the content would "auto destruct" 7 days after download.

What makes it easy / difficult?

Well, there's no question that broadband and peer-to-peer technology makes piracy easier (but it's important to note that there was piracy before any of this technology was available). What makes it more difficult? The big players certainly hope that Digital Rights Management (DRM) will make piracy harder. But there are a lot of people who believe that DRM is just a usability nightmare (e.g. Sony's early DRM-enabled minidisk players) and won't stop serious pirates.

How far can comparisons to the music industry be stretched?

I think we'll only know the answer to this once a mature model has emerged for downloading movies on line. I think the short answer is: quite far but not all the way.

It's worth considering iTunes and Steve Jobbs. As we all know, Steve Jobbs recently became the largest share-holder in Disney when Pixar and Disney merged. This makes Steve a very powerful man in Hollywood. But it also has the potential to seriously damage his plans for getting movie content on iTunes. Consider this:

iTunes for music works very well and one of the reasons it works is because a whole tonne of record labels agreed to sell their stuff under one roof because Apple has no affiliations to any single label. In other words, every label feels secure that their content will be treated as well as the next label's content. This isn't true for movies. Will distributors refuse to sell movies to iTunes for fear that iTunes will always be pushing Pixar/Disney films?

How do I predict the situation developing?

Movies are already available for legit downloading and soon many more will be.

Personally, I worry that simaltaneous release on DVD, download and cinema will kill the cinema and that's bad news in my book.

High Definition and Home Theatre PCs (HTPCs) will be significant catalysts for the movie-download world. Why pay £1,000 for a shiny new Blu-Ray / HD-DVD player when you can download the HD movie for £5?

Is it really a big deal?

Legit download of content is a HUGE deal, yes. In 5 year's time will think back to those strange times when we were constrained to broadcast schedules and the weird workings of DVD postal services.

Piracy of movie content is also a big deal, if only because the fear of piracy may force the big players to be too slow off the starting blocks.

Great thread, by the way!
Jack

Just because a record or film is released by a huge label/studio/distributor doesn't mean that the actual creators of the record or film are rich though! People need to remember that at the end of the day there is still a group of human beings working to create something to share with the world - so I don't think it's ok to justify 'stealing' from a company just because they are well reputed. A big company still has hard working teams. More money may be involved but the ethics should be the same.

Alex

True. It's often the distributors rather than the creators who get rich. That's one of the "big promises" for on-line distribution: that far more of the money from sales will makes its way to the actual filmmakers rather than the middlemen.

How do I predict the situation developing?

I think that online distribution will become a major sector. But I think it is the one with the most potential flaws. If you have your own music studio - or have access to one - then (if you wanted to) you could strip the itunes protection encoding and distribute a song at will. I'm sure that those with the right equipment could do the same for film. The problem with piracy is that where there is a will, there is a way - so it doesn't matter how much encoding you embed within a file - somewhere someone will figure out how to hack it. What needs to be looked at is not how to prevent piracy, but why it exists in the first place. What motivates someone to buy a DVD, rip it, compress it, and then put it online to share? What have they gained? I understand someone trying to save £10 - but not someone who spends the money so that others don't have to. It's not a social service! (Or perhaps I'm being naive in thinking that the DVD wasn't stolen to begin with!)

Content online is the most vulnerable to piracy - and I don't see that changing. I suspect that the film industry will do its best to protect its content - and it will be successful in getting the majority of the population to buy rather than steal (much like with music), but there will always be those who will steal.

Whilst it's certainly true that digital content has historically been the most vulnerable to piracy, I think that may change. It is theoretically possible to create unbreakable protection (or, at least, unbreakable unless you happen to have millions of years worth of computer time). For example, I'm pretty certain the AES encryption used on modern 802.11G WiFi is unbroken at the moment. The future of Digital Rights Management (DRM) is almost certainly watermarking: the embedding of a DRM signature in the content itself, not in the (easy to rip off) header.

Why do people put stuff online? Whilst I've never done this, I think there are two reasons:

1) Stupidity.

2) They have very strong (but misguided, in my view) political beliefs about "freedom of information" etc. Web geeks tend to be quite lefty and at the extremes are people who would like to liberate all information. Think of projects like WikiPedia: it's based on some fairly radical left-field ideas about information not just belonging to "the people" but also being produced by "the people" (I'm not saying WP is a force for piracy, I'm just pointing to WP as an excellent example of web-leftyism).

I'm not convinced anyone pirates out of stupidity. If you're clever enough to rip a DVD and put it online then you're probably clever enough to understand the implications of what you're doing.

(Welcome to UKFillm.org Cyril!)

I doubt that stupidity can be a factor in putting something online.... Though I guess a kid might think it's cool in a just because I can kind of a way.

Jack, are you sure there woudn't be a way around the unbreakable encryption? For example, if the file was recorded in analogue and then converted back to digital, then the file would lose it's encryption? (There'd also be a lot of quality loss, but seeing as it's being put online that's prob not a priority for them)

True, you're right - pirates would always have the option of converting from digital to analogue and then back to digital. I'm not sure but it's just possible that someone could design a watermark that survives this process and hence renders the analogue version as watermarked... but I haven't heard of anything like this existing in commercial media players.

But that will become a little harder once high-definition video becomes standard. For example, if a distributor released a film as 1080/24p then very few people would own the hardware decessary to record 1080/24p from an analogue source (cameras like the Sony HDV cameras can't, for example).

Hmm... I just skim-read the description of High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection over on WikiPedia. Before reading that, I was under the impression that HDCP was pretty bullet-proof but it seems there are already some known flaws (all HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players will use HDCP)

Very true - it will become harder.

Would a pirate care about a watermark though? (I guess that would depend on its size and location)

The pirate would care about the watermark if the watermark prevented the content from playing on anyone's player! (I think it's possible to encode a "watermark" that permeates the whole film but isn't actually visible).

A couple of points:

Personally I download a lot of content that is "grey". It's anime from Japan and required english subtitles for non-japanese speakers. People download the RAW version, spend a great deal of time translating the whole thing and re-release it. Once it's available with subtitiles legally the user-edited versions are taken offline.

If I hadn't been able to download it I would never have experienced it.

and some of it is great. Mushishi, Monster, Karas etc...

http://www.mushishi.jp/
http://www.thekaras.net/

Copy Protection

No copy protection will be unbreakable. Period.:-) They've even cloned quantumelectrodymanic crptography which apparently shouldn't be able to be copied due to heisenbergs uncertainty principle. (interference with the object modified the object being observed)

The new graphic/video cards that can supposedly handle HDCP actually can't and were released by ATI to fool the public.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=851

Apart from that the DRM would need to be done at the hardware level and that can be modded easily. All new players have got an inbuilt code to make them region free so that the manufacturers don't have to produce different chipsets for different markets. A new firmware patch can update any drive.

In Hong Kong (lived there 8 years) they have enitre factories that can duplicate anything. When the government hit the triads (HK mafia), the triads just bought the legal media distributing companies, continued pressing the dvd's and sold them the dvd's for more money. So now they sell illegal and legal media and get money from both.

Now that's criminality with style ehehhe. Don't agree with it but you have to admire their affront.

msn - dan.flcl@googlemail.com

"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth." -- Mark Twain

Quality

I have bought many many dvd's yet I have not bought many more. The quality of movies/games etc. has declined significantly over recent years and it seems that often you would pay good money for utter tat. One could argue that's because of piracy. It really isn't, it's because a lot of films are aimed at the mass market and have been compromised to meet that mass market demand. (Spiderman 10?)

The average person on the street rents dvd's or buys them. Torrents have changed that but again not significantly. Usenet has been the lifeblood for the pirate for at least 10 years and will continue to be so. I see a shift in more independent production at a lower price yet at a higher innate quality but at a price that the average person would happily pay.

Consumers have changed the marketplace and will dictate supply by shaping demand.

(i must have eaten spinach, I normally can;t evn speel)

dan :-)

msn - dan.flcl@googlemail.com

"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth." -- Mark Twain

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the great replies. You make a lot of valid points. I, too, see a shift towards lower-budget (~$6M) but more "intelligent" films (which is excellent news).

Quality

Do you really believe that films are getting worse? Whilst I agree that there was a bit of a slump in quality for a while, I think they've recently increased in quality quite dramatically. Over the last 12 months I've felt spoilt for choice at the cinema. I think the "mindless explosions and CGI" era has passed us by.

DRM and HD

I just heard that Sony's PlayStation 3 is being delayed until November:

http://www.ps3land.com/news/article266.php

Apparently it's delayed because the DRM specs for Blu-Ray haven't been defined yet (and the PS3 will have a Blu-Ray drive). This is interesting: it has two implications for the current discussion: firstly, someone, somewhere is getting so worried about the DRM on Blu-Ray that they're prepared to cause Sony to loose billions of dollars in revenue in order to get the DRM spec right. Secondly, the delay of the PS3 is a huge blow for the Blu-Ray camp and gives HD-DVD a big boost. All in all, Microsoft must be very happy!

Quality

What would you recommend? I've watched a fair amount but I would say it has to be very good for me to be impressed. I did like crash, The History of Violence, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I would say I'm just starved for entertainment that's all :-)

DRM and HD

The issue is really simple and that's what happened in HK. If the price of the original game/dvd is reasonable, then people will pay. I still feel that £20 and £25-£40 for one game is too much. I think of it as value for money. Half-life 2 cost about 80 usd but I'm still playing it (counterstrike etc). Call of Duty 2 was £29, I fiinished it in one day, Fear in 2 days etc. I remember playing the first Half Life and it took weeks to finish and then the multiplayer can still be played...

When they introduced dvd-9 burners I bought one. Never used it, not even once. It's already outdated technology. The reason for this is that the media is too expensive. Blue ray and HD-DVD reminds of the betamax/vhs debacle. One will become the leader, the one which is cheap enough to entice users to use it :-)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060317/tc_pcworld/125126

Speak of the devil...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060316/tc_nm/microsoft_gates_dc

Bill gates just had a go at the $100 laptop for developing countries.

but that's another topic :-)

"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth." -- Mark Twain

Hi there,

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