I think the tech community thinks the MPAA is much more monolithic than they actually are. The individual companies are not going to agree on what content to offer at what rates in a new high-speed market, so the MPAA is going to talk about the one thing its members agree upon: piracy=bad.
I honestly have no idea why the MPAA spokesman decided to go on the record about Google Fiber. If it were me, I would have just managed expectations by pointing out that it's probably not in the interest of of MPAA member studios to remaster their content for gigabit rates, given such a small potential audience.
It's not like these studios just have uncompressed 4k files of every movie they've ever made just sitting on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for someone like Google to say "can you offer 500 Mbps versions and see what the residents of Kansas City are willing to pay for them?". Even if they did, every writer, director, etc. entitled to royalties from future releases would be up in arms saying they're not charging enough.
Actually, starting around Spider Man 2 (2004) major studios have been making growing use of DI - digital intermediates - which are usually 4k files from which they generate the negatives from which they strike the release prints. And with the shift to digital projection they skip the prints and just deliver the files to theaters directly. So yes, they do have have them just sitting on hard drives, because that's how their business already works.
Increased royalties are not a huge concern. Studios will avoid them when they can, and and minimize them where they can't. But they won't leave money on the table to avoid paying them outright. If there's business to be done, they'll do it.
The serious opposition is likely to come from the theater owners. They're still vitally important partners for the studios, and they hate anything and everything that has the effect of narrowing their window of exclusivity on access to content, or creating a home-viewing experience big and bold enough to make the theater unnecessary.
If someone is going to park a 4k display at the delivery end of a pipe fast enough to supply it, they want it to be them and them alone. And they will be tremendously forceful in opposition to any threats on this front, actual or perceived.
> It's not like these studios just have uncompressed 4k files of every movie they've ever made just sitting on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for someone like Google to say "can you offer 500 Mbps versions and see what the residents of Kansas City are willing to pay for them?". Even if they did, every writer, director, etc. entitled to royalties from future releases would be up in arms saying they're not charging enough.
Well, that sounds like an opportunity for most industries, not a problem, but momentum there is what it is (the dig at writers and directors is odd, since of course the studios are in line for by far the most royalties, they're the ones that insist on ever more draconian DRM schemes and higher prices to "preserve" the perceived value of film, and in the 2007 writers guild strike they wanted to give the writers nothing for royalties on streaming video).
But even streaming bluray quality video, which is available for every movie on bluray, would be a huge step up, and much more realistic for the speeds we'll see over a "gigabit" network. I was leaning more toward Amazon video for tv shows and movies recently, but the new 1080p itunes video has made me switch back. Even though it's relatively poor quality for the resolution, the step up from the 720p versions has been fantastic. Moving up to something approaching bluray would be something else entirely, I would pay as much or more for it as I do on itunes, and the instant gratification is something no torrent can match.
Now the economics might not be there -- most people will mess up the video input or not even notice the bump in resolution, and to be honest, I almost always rent movies on itunes, not buy them (though doing so at a steady rate basically turns me into a willing subscriber who owns nothing, which is pretty much their dream) -- but there certainly is a viable technical option.
I didn't mean it as a dig at writers and directors, although going back and re-reading my post it certainly seems like it (my bad). I merely wanted to point out how large the number of stake-holders is for your average motion picture. One significant reason the film industry is so slow to catch up to the internet is because it's so hard to get those stake-holders to agree to anything and, at least until recently, their contracts weren't written with an eye to technologies that didn't exist yet.
I think the reason we've stand-up comedians be among the first to offer audience-friendly distribution is that they don't have to go back an renegotiate all their contracts to allow them to give the audience what they want.
I agree that blu-ray quality video streaming to the home would be a huge step forward (and actually a very reasonable usage of that bandwidth - the higher bitrate codecs are mostly useful for reduced latency, which really isn't an issue for Hollywood content). There would probably still have to be some remastering, at least of the audio, which is not optimized for streaming, which would be expensive given the current market size.
Just another example of how out of touch the MPAA is with reality. Any 10Mbit+ connection is perfectly adequate for downloading pirated material. It very possibly might take an individual less time to download a torrent than to navigate some archaic cable box UI to find the same program. Mandatory un-skippable movie trailers on DVDs or BluRays can take longer to watch than downloading a torrent. Why isn't the MPAA concerned about that?
I have "up to 15 Mbps" cable internet. I've gathered this is becoming a pretty standard speed for this type of service. If I use the torrent to download the image of Ubuntu 12.04 it takes < 10 minutes. That's 650 MB, which is enough for a 720p version of a full-length movie or a high def version of a 1-hour show (42 minutes I think). It would take about as much time to download a show as it would take to decide to watch it, find it, get settled on the couch, etc.
And another example of how industries clinging to obsolete business models try to hold back progress and keep everyone else stuck in the past. Really sad and scary.
Anyone with a DVD burner is perfectly capable of making a copy for a friend. Before this it was the VCR.
There are distribution systems better than the Torrent approach but they're priced astronomically high. I don't mind spending maybe $5-8 on a digital download of a movie if the product is as good as what you get in physical form, but this is rarely the case.
They should be thanking you for downloading a legit digital version, not punishing you with prices, missing features, and poor quality.
How is it companies with billions of dollars can't produce a simple, affordable, legal system for downloading movies?
While I don't disagree with your overall sentiment, most "high speed" internet connections have rather limited upload speeds which can have some limiting factor on peer-to-peer activity (including piracy).
Does it really matter? My nephew and his roommates managed to download 750gig of movies in 3weeks on their comcast internet.
With the average movie size being around 750meg that's 1000 movies. (not that I would actually know the size of a ripped movie ;-) So on gigabit they'll be able to get more faster but if we're already at 1000 movies in 3 weeks what does it matter? That's more than 2x than you can actually watch on those 3 weeks if you could even manage to watch 24/7
Ars Technica had a similar article last week. They're probably worried that Google isn't a party to the "six strikes" copyright plan that's supposed to start up this summer, which is a private agreement among the large content owner/ISPs which control internet access for most Americans.
There are also rumors of some kind of video service being offered by Google, so they might worry about that, too.
This does not surprise me at all. The existing media cartels have always opposed new technologies that make the transfer of information between individuals easier and faster. This is especially when the technology is dumb, that is, it does not and can not differentiate between content which requires a license to transfer and that which does not. When you think about it, since they're in the business of selling intangible 'licenses' for information -- things you don't need to enjoy the information itself -- their actions make perfect sense. What we need to do, instead of sneering at their perfectly justified self-interest is re-examine exactly how we grant these groups the artificial monopoly of copyright in order to ensure that the original purpose, that is promoting the sciences and the arts, is maintained and that the behaviour, which is now considered to be anti-social, of these groups is modified or eliminated.
... to be fair, Hollywood does license a number of streaming and download services that will take advantage of good broadband, such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, VUDU, iTunes Store, etc.
Hollywood certainly will let you watch movies and TV shows at a variety of price points, even if it does reserve some control over what is available at what price and when.
"...even if it does reserve some control over what is available at what price and when."
And crucially where. If you are outside the US, much of this is either not available or heavily restricted. Hence piracy is the only option to watch some movies or shows, depending on where you live. You hear about these great new shows online, then guess what...you can't watch them legally, even if you want to.
I wish it were possible to have some sort of multi-channel funnel view of people who pirate content. Did they pirate a song and then proceed to buy the album? Did they pirate a the first movie of a series and then later legally purchase the rest of the series? Do they just pirate content and never purchase anything?
I think these are interesting questions. Who wants to build something to answer them?
Wouldn't that basically require everyone who pirates to take a questionnaire to truthfully answer?
For the record, I've been watching X-Files on Hulu on my laptop. I've made it through season two, but will probably just download AVI's of the rest of the seasons, because my Wifi barely works in the kitchen, and the video quality goes down.
Am I ethically in the clear if I stream the Hulu episodes on my desktop, while watching pirated AVI's in the kitchen?
One interesting thing you can do with such a questionnaire is a coin flip survey (sorry, I don't know the real name). Give the survey participants a list of sensitive true/false questions and a coin. Instruct them to flip the coin twice, concealing the results from the survey-giver. Then have them follow this algorithm:
if (first flip == heads):
return second flip == heads
else:
return truthful T/F answer to sensitive question
When results are aggregated, roughly half the participants will have answered truthfully, and the other half are uniformly distributed. None of the individual participants have tipped off whether they did something bad, but in aggregate they have truthfully answered the survey.
While this operation may be statistically sound, it requires work. Humans are notoriously lazy when it comes to anything other than what they want to do. You'd be hard pressed to get each respondent to actually do this repetitively for an entire survey. Even if it had only three questions.
For $50? College students have done much weirder and stupider stuff for less money than flipping a coin twice and answering a straightforward T/F question, even if it were twenty questions. The technique has been around for a long time. You should consider it a solved problem.
Finally googled the names. I also discovered the original formulations do it with only one coin flip (or one roll of a die).
If you're offering $50 in cash to answer some questions and flip some coins, sure you'd get people to answer loads of them. But you're not offering an incentive to answer the questions.
The general question is interesting... I think about it in the lines of:
Is it ok if I take a shortcut to get something that I am entitled to have access to because the rules by which my access is should abide by are basically bullshit?
I tend to think it is ok. I'm also indebted to Grace Hopper [1], who came up with the gem It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission, a behavior that I often find useful. Also, I tend to give the highest level of access to people working under my supervision so they can do their jobs without any avoidable hassle. It's important to be consistent, after all.
But (there's always a but) some content creators don't have the same pragmatic thinking I pride myself in having, and will tell you convoluted stories like "we don't sell the music/video, we sell the physical disc with the thing inside, and you can only access such thing trough the disc". And sometimes these convoluted stories do stick. Except that when you have a network as the distribution channel they don't work anymore and become plain bizarre "we sell you only the nontransferable right of watching/listening to this only up to 3 times in the next 24 hours and will not refund you if our network goes down and you're unable to watch".
So, my answer to you, and to the general question is: IMHO, you're ethically in the clear, but legally your situation might raise some concerns. Obligatory disclaimer: this is not legal advice. I would love to see what other people think about all this, though.
If we were to achieve open and free-as-in-software standards, you wouldn't have this moral dilemma.
When you pay for the right to use copyrighted content, you should get to use it on your terms -- in the kitchen or in the family room or wherever you want. You should be allowed to back up your content in case your computer crashes and you should be allowed to watch it when you want, even if your Internet is out.
If content isn't offered on those terms, don't take it.
Your kind of begging the question here. When media was mostly physical, you did have many if those rights you describe. The problem is networked digital devices make large scale (unauthorized) copying and distribution cheap, trivial, and unavoidable. Selling popular (and expensive to make) media content without DRM and legal (and enforceable ) anti-pirating laws is simply not viable IMO.
At least I've never heard a scheme floated that seemed remotely plausible as in industry business structure to do this. I'm music producer and in arguments where I've explained how expensive it is to produce music and how hard it is to recoup an investment, when people have understood my argument, they've thrown up their hands, saying if the music industry is that bad why would anyone even do it?
And I think it points to a general devaluing of creative work afoot in the culture. That might not seem like a big deal to some, I think a lot of really don't care about what kinds of media get made or how: it's just hard tu take the same peoples cries of injustice on the part of the MPAA as a serious threat to human progress because they can't watch what they want, whenever they want, for a super low price (or free).
It might be that some awesome new business model exists to support an industry that creates digital IP products that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity and IP but I haven't heard any proposed
I wasn't looking to answer any questions with regard to ethics. For your situation, I would want to know if you went on to purchase other X-Files episodes (or other works starring the cast members from X-Files). This would tell us whether or not your piracy was a net gain or loss for the studios.
That being said, I dont think there is a realistic way to build what I was suggesting.
Any innovation in technology presents a company with two options - adapt, or risk failure. The MPAA mitigates this by trying to stop innovation. It's a valid business strategy, albeit one that isn't very good for PR. Luckily more and more people are becoming aware of what's going on with all of this PIPA/SOPA/CISPA/ACTA/ETC-A stuff.
Delaying is invariably cheaper and more effective for any given quarter's financial results. And after several decades of our market becoming increasingly quarterly-number obsessed, it seems only fair to judge the soundness of decision-making based on the market standards.
You might want to see the article I linked to below. There's probably a little more going on than that, especially whether or not they can get Google to join their "six strikes" plan.
Note that Google is one of the few companies which might actually be plotting to roll out a nationwide ISP sometime soon. Sure, they might have other plans, but owning an ISP could give them important leverage, especially when ISP/content owners are considering ways to use their ISPs to favor their other lines of business.
I honestly have no idea why the MPAA spokesman decided to go on the record about Google Fiber. If it were me, I would have just managed expectations by pointing out that it's probably not in the interest of of MPAA member studios to remaster their content for gigabit rates, given such a small potential audience.
It's not like these studios just have uncompressed 4k files of every movie they've ever made just sitting on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for someone like Google to say "can you offer 500 Mbps versions and see what the residents of Kansas City are willing to pay for them?". Even if they did, every writer, director, etc. entitled to royalties from future releases would be up in arms saying they're not charging enough.