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Topic: MPAA, you suck!
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 11-04-2003 10:47 AM
I haven't checked every possible thread to see if this has been mentioned already. Apologies in advance if it has. On Nov. 2nd 60 Minutes ran a segment on movie piracy: Pirates of the Internet
Pirates Of The Internet
Nov. 2, 2003
It's no secret that online piracy has decimated the music industry, as millions of people have stopped buying CDs and started stealing their favorite songs by downloading them from the Internet.
Now, the high-tech thieves are coming after Hollywood. Illegal downloading of full-length feature films is a relatively new phenomenon, but it's becoming easier and easier to do. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
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Those running America's movie studios know that if they don't do something - and fast - they could be in the same boat as the record companies.
But what's really at stake for the movie industry with all this piracy?
“Ultimately, our absolute future,” says Peter Chernin, who runs 20th Century Fox, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood.
He knows the pirates of the Internet are gaining on him.
“I think it's probably in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions,” says Chernin. “It's only gonna grow. Somebody can put a perfect digital copy up on the Internet. And with the click of a mouse, send out a million copies all over the world, in an instant.”
And it's all free. Chernin recently organized a "summit" between studio moguls and some high school and college kids - the people most likely to be downloading.
“And we said, ‘Let's come up with a challenge,” says Chernin. “Let's give them five movies, and see if they can find them online. And we all sat around and picked five movies, four of which haven't been released yet. And then we came back half an hour later. They had found all five movies that we gave them.”
Did these kids have any sense that they were stealing?
“I think they know it's stealing, and I don't think they think it's wrong,” says Chernin. “I think they have an attitude of ‘it's there.’”
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An Internet copy of last year's hit, "Signs," starring Mel Gibson, was stolen even before director M. Night Shyamalan could organize the premiere.
In fact, Shyamalan said the first bootleg copy appeared a few weeks before the premiere:
“Before the Internet age, when somebody bootlegged a movie, the only outlet they had was to sell it to those vendors on Times Square, where they had the boxes set up outside and they say, ‘Hey, we have 'Signs’ - it's not even out yet.’ And you walk by and you know it's illegal. But now, because it's the digital age, you can see a clean copy. It's no longer the kind of the sleazy guy in Times Square, with the box. It's just, oh, it's on this beautiful site, and I have to go, ‘click.’"
So how did this happen?
“Through an absolute act of theft,” says Chernin. “Someone steals a print from the editor's room; someone steals a print from the person; the composer who's doing the music … Steals a print, makes a digital copy, and uploads it.”
Digital copies like "The Matrix Reloaded" have also been bootlegged from DVDs sent to reviewers or ad agencies, or circulated among companies that do special effects, or subtitles.
“The other way that pre-released movies end up is that there are lots of screenings that happen in this industry,” adds Chernin. “People go to those screenings with a camcorder, with a digital camcorder, sit in the back, turn the camcorder on …”
It used to take forever to download a movie, but anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can now have a full-length film in an hour or two.
In fact, there are many Web sites where hackers will announce their piracy releases, says Randy Saaf, who runs a company called Media Defender that helps movie studios combat online piracy.
Stahl asked him to show her Kazaa, the biggest downloading Web site out there. “Kazaa is the largest peer-to-peer network,” says Saaf.
It's called peer-to-peer because computer users are sharing files with each other, with no middleman. All Kazaa does is provide the software to make that sharing possible. When 60 Minutes went online with Saaf, nearly four million other Kazaa users were there with us, sharing every kind of digital file.
“Audio, documents, images, software, and video. If you wanted a movie, you would click on the video section, and then you would type in a search phrase,” says Saaf. “And basically what this is doing now, it is asking people on the peer-to-peer network ‘who has 'Finding Nemo'?’"
Within seconds, 191 computers sent an answer: "We have it."
With crisp picture and sound, “Finding Nemo” was downloaded free from Kazaa a month before its release for video rental or sale.
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And now, you don’t even have to watch a movie on a little computer screen. On the newest computers, you can just "burn" the movie onto a DVD and watch it on your big-screen TV.
And that's a dagger pointed right at the heart of Hollywood. “Where movies make the bulk of their money is on DVD and home videos,” says Chernin. “Fifty percent of the revenues for any movie come out of home video … so that if piracy occurs and it wipes out your home video profits or ultimately your television profits....”
And even if movies still continue to be made, Shyamalan says they wouldn't be any good, because profits would be negligible, so budgets would shrink dramatically: “And slowly it will degrade what's possible in that art form.”
“Technology always wins. Always. You can't shut it down,” says Wayne Rosso, Hollywood's enemy. They call him a pirate, but officially he's the president of Grokster, another peer-to-peer network that works just like Kazaa.
60 Minutes downloaded Grokster’s software for free and asked Rosso questions about his network.
“We're like radio. We're advertising supported,” says Rosso, who estimates that 10 million people have used Grokster each month.
He says he has no way of knowing what people are downloading, “and we can't stop it. We have no control over it.”
And Rosso has the law on his side. A federal judge has ruled that Grokster and other file-swapping networks are not liable for what their downloaders are doing.
“So we're completely legal, and unfortunately this is something the entertainment industry refuses to accept,” says Rosso. “They seem to think the judge's decision was nothing but a typo.”
The studios are appealing that court ruling. And they may follow the music industry and begin to sue individuals who download movies.
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But they're also fighting the pirates in other ways, with ads about people whose jobs are at risk because of the piracy - people like the carpenters and painters who work on film sets.
And, at the same time, Hollywood is trying to keep copies of movies from leaking in the first place.
“You will very seldom go to an early screening of a movie right now where someone's not in the front of that auditorium with infrared binoculars looking for somebody with a camcorder,” says Chernin.
And once a movie's released, or if copies begin to leak, the studios hire people like Randy Saaf to hack the hackers.
“What we're just trying to do is make the actual pirated content difficult to find. And the way we do that is by, you know, serving up fake files,” says Saaf.
It's called "spoofing," and Saaf and his employees spend their days on Kazaa and Grokster, offering up thousands of files that look like copies of new movies, but aren't.
“It might just be a blank screen or something,” says Saaf. “Typically speaking, what we push out is just not the real content.”
But Rosso says it won’t work: “It doesn't work because what happens is that the community cleanses itself of the spoofs.”
What he means is that downloaders will quickly spread the word online about how to tell the fake movie files from the real thing.
“It's like an arms race,” says Chernin. “There will be, you know, they're gonna get a step ahead. We're gonna try and get that step back.”
“But I'll tell you one thing: I'll bet on the hackers,” says Rosso, who believes the hackers will break whatever block the studios come up with.
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Hollywood knows that downloading off the Internet is the way millions of consumers want to get their entertainment -- and that isn't going away.
“The generally accepted estimate is that more than 60 million Americans have downloaded file-sharing software onto their computers,” says Chernin. “That’s a mainstream product. That's not a bunch of college kids or, you know, a bunch of computer geeks. That's America.”
So, instead of trying to stop it entirely, the studios are looking for ways to embrace it, but also get paid.
Rosso says the best way is to negotiate some kind of licensing deal with him. And he says he would sell Grokster to a movie studio in a heartbeat: “If the movie industry acts now and starts exploring alternatives and solutions with guys like me, hopefully they won't have a problem.”
The idea of making deals with what Chernin calls "a bunch of crooks" doesn't appeal to Hollywood. Instead, Fox and the other studios have just launched their own site, Movielink, where consumers can download a film for a modest fee, between three and five dollars.
“I think you would love the idea that you don't have to go to the video store. You can do this,” says Chernin. “And that's what we're working on. But in order for that to be effective, we have to stop piracy, because the most effective business model in the world can't compete with free.”
A few days ago, Rosso announced that he's leaving Grokster to take over as president of another big file-swapping software company based in Spain. Grokster will continue under new management.
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Evans A Criswell
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1579
From: Huntsville, AL, USA
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted 11-04-2003 01:40 PM
High school and college kids are mentioned as being the top downloaders. Guess why? They don't have enough money to legitimately buy hardly any music or movies. When I was in high school, I got around $40 or $45 per month, and that was for entertainment (admission to places I went), video game playing, and buying records. I could buy several 45's per month, and if lucky, one album per month. There is no equivalent of the 45 anymore, so there's no way that high school kids will be able to buy the songs they want.
When I was in high school, I taped a lot of songs off the radio and bought 45s of the songs I really wanted good copies of, and bought a few albums. When in college, I had slightly more allowance, but not much more.
It wasn't until I got a full-time job that I was able to start buying all the music I wanted legitimately. Downloading music from the internet is a lot like taping songs off the radio, except it is usually better quality, but 20 years ago, all you had were records and cassettes and FM radio and the quality difference wasn't as great on most systems people had back then.
As for movies, I could never dream of buying movies until I had a full-time job. I never considered VHS a format worth buying movies on, and Laserdiscs was far too expensive. It wasn't until DVD came along that I started buying movies. However, high school and college kids will always have to find ways to copy things to inferior media until they have jobs and are able to afford DVDs and CDs unless drastic changes are made to the way that music and moves are sold. People, regardless of income, will find a way to play what they want when they want, whether legitimate or not.
Since I got my full-time job back in 1989, I've been the "model customer" when it comes to music, and have been a "model customer" since DVD came along in 1997. The music and movie industries should stop putting so much energy into trying to keep high school and college age people from copying music. If it were technologically impossible for them to do it, what would the industries gain? These people have practically no income, so they wouldn't make any more money off them than they already do. When these people get full-time jobs and have the income to buy, they'll likely replace their inferior illegal copies with better DVD or CD versions, since people tend to have attachments to music and movies from these years. If they weren't able to enjoy these movies and music during their "no-income" years, they probably wouldn't go on that buying spree after getting a full income.
After I got my first full-time job, my objective was to replace all the copies of songs I liked that were taped off the radio with CDs.
Just something the music and movie industries should think about...
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Phil Hill
I love my cootie bug
Posts: 7595
From: Hollywood, CA USA
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted 11-14-2003 02:09 PM
It's ABOUT TIME! From The L.A. Times 11/14/2003 Here
(Note to self: For $1 mil a year, I will apply for the job)
>>> Phil
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Valenti Likely to Leave MPAA Post in January
Rep. W.J. 'Billy' Tauzin is seen as front-runner to replace the 82-year-old as Hollywood's lobbyist in Washington.
By James Bates
Times Staff Writer
November 14, 2003
Jack Valenti, Hollywood's voice in Washington for nearly 38 years, most likely will step down in early January as chief of the Motion Picture Assn. of America while retaining the chairman's title and continuing to oversee the movie ratings system he fathered, sources said Thursday.
People familiar with the matter said Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) remained the clear front-runner to replace the 82-year-old Valenti, who last summer disclosed he was planning for succession but left the timing vague.
With an annual salary of $1 million, Valenti occupies one of Washington's highest-paying and most visible lobbying positions.
Tauzin's name has been linked to the job as far back as January, with the 60-year-old chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee edging slowly toward the MPAA post amid repeated reports that a secret deal already has been forged.
But sources said there still was no formal agreement between Tauzin and the MPAA.
"There's no final stamp," one source said.
Still, several senior studio executives said it was informally understood that Tauzin would accept the title of MPAA president and chief executive if offered. The MPAA's member studios have given their quiet blessing to the move, sources said.
Tauzin spokesman Ken Johnson said up to this point, "no one from the MPAA and none of the studio heads have contacted him about the position."
But, Johnson said, "is he on their wish list? Absolutely. If Jack Valenti retires, and in fact an offer is made, he will listen to what they have to say."
The MPAA declined to comment.
The MPAA's three-member finance committee — made up of Viacom Entertainment Group Chairman Jonathan Dolgen, News Corp. President Peter Chernin and Walt Disney Co. President Robert Iger — would work with Valenti to finalize any deal with Tauzin.
Earlier, certain studio officials privately expressed reservations about whether Tauzin would be a good fit with the MPAA, while some put out feelers to gauge who else might be available. Executives at Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., for example, met with former Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke and Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), who was co-chairman of Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful campaign for California governor.
Hollywood's studios have given Valenti wide latitude in setting a schedule for his departure.
Although he has made it known that he wants to formally announce his retirement as chief in January, sources said the date remains somewhat in flux and Valenti's exit could come as late as March. The studios, people close to the situation said, want Valenti to keep the chairman's title of the organization he has led since being hired away in 1966 from President Johnson's White House staff.
Under the plan being discussed, Valenti also would continue his work with the National Assn. of Theatre Owners on ratings issues. The ratings operation would remain independent from the MPAA.
Sources say Tauzin has been reluctant to formally negotiate a deal with the MPAA while Congress is in session, noting that he is behind three major pieces of legislation — relating to energy, Medicare and Internet spam — that he would like to leave as a legacy.
If Tauzin was hired, he would be unable to lobby Congress for a year under laws aimed at curbing influence abuse.
But sources said the studios were comfortable with Tauzin sitting out 2004 as a lobbyist because they didn't expect much headway to be made on their legislative agenda during an election year.
Even before last summer's disclosure, Valenti had been hinting for a long time that he might want to shed his day-to-day work at the MPAA. Although he relishes the job, it carries numerous headaches.
In recent weeks, for example, Valenti has been the target of intense criticism over his move to stem piracy by cutting off the DVDs that studios send out to promote films for awards. Sources said the uproar had nothing to do with Valenti's planned departure.
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