Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Controls 421
The copyright battles going on right now are not all about SOPA, PIPA, or even the wider-reaching ACTA: suraj.sun snips thus from TorrentFreak: "At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites. ... If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear. The document, which describes a government-overlooked 'Voluntary Code of Practice' for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request."
Re:Do these people understand ANYTHING about IT? (Score:4, Informative)
Why the hell do these morons keep tabling impossible and/or extremely EXPENSIVE (compute-wise) proposals
It's a strategy. These guys have been playing politics far longer than any of us. Starting with something far beyond even your own maximum target is a good way to get almost everything you were really aiming for out of someone who is naive and aims for a compromise solution.
It even has a name, it's called the "door in the face" technique [alleydog.com].
If you know it, you see it at works in politics pretty much all the time. In fact, I see it over here (Germany) so often that I'm beginning to wonder if they teach anything else in whatever newly elected representatives are getting in training.
Re:Do these people understand ANYTHING about IT? (Score:5, Informative)
MP3s were primarily a concern of the 2000s. While it's true that the parent MPEG-1 format was around in the early 90s, and a few geeks were sharing MP3 files from the mid-90s onwards, it wasn't until the end of the decade (circa 1998) with those uselessly low-capacity early MP3 players that they were on the industry's radar. And they didn't really hit the public consciousness until Napster launched in mid-1999, i.e. when the 90s were almost over.
And the problem with MP3s AFAIK was *always* sharing and piracy. No-one cared about people ripping them to their computers in the 90s, because for most of the decade hard drives were barely big enough to hold a significant number of MP3s, and (e.g.) mid-90s PCs used most of their processing capacity just to play them back. As I said, nerd curiosity at that point.
You could probably combine the 70s and 80s; people were taping in the 70s, and the industry woke up to the threat [wikipedia.org] in the early 80s- I don't think the Walkman was itself a threat, beyond the fact that it made the cassette an even more popular format. (Remember that most Walkmans and the like couldn't even record themselves).
But you're right- the industry has made a fuss about this sort of thing before. They also did it with video recorders in the US in the early 80s, then realised that they could make lots of money selling prerecorded VHS tapes.
Ironically, I don't entirely disagree that piracy may be an issue, and possibly moreso than it was back then. I'm happy for people to make money and profit from their efforts in the creative industries (that is, if people want the results of such efforts).
This doesn't change the fact that the industry is- and always has been- a bunch of greedy bastards willing to screw over the working people they'd like to tell us are being hurt by piracy, and to use piracy as a useful indefinable excuse to cover up their own shortcomings (e.g. maybe people aren't paying money to watch their films because they're shallow, adolescent-oriented, unoriginal toss?) And while I might be in favour of reasonable copyright laws, that's certainly *not* not to the extent that those old, entrenched interests are pushing for draconian laws, not giving a toss about fairness or our civil liberties, just to preserve their own meal ticket.
Re:Do these people understand ANYTHING about IT? (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty sure there's a VCR in there somewhere.
"The VCR is to the movie industry what Jack the Ripper was to women." --Jack Valenti, then head of the MPAA. The industry is incredibly short sighted.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Milking excuses? (Score:4, Informative)
You're right, it's only nearly global [wikipedia.org].
Re:They always have the option (devil's advocacy) (Score:3, Informative)
Because their presence, and the star power they bring is worth that much. If you give Brad Pitt ten million, there's a good chance your film will more than make up that cost based on his star power. Directors similarly can command large salaries. You can market both. You can't really market "Gaffed by Johnny Nash!" I work in the industry, and believe me, the 'other people' you mention make plenty of money and can easily make a good living. Do you make $1200 a day at your job? No? Then maybe become a camera operator.
Re:Stuff it where the sun don't shine (Score:4, Informative)
If publishers (and authors, and musicians, and labels) want to end piracy, it's really simple!. Clue bat: (a) make your material available, (b) DRM-free, (c) at reasonable prices. Start with step (a). The stuff I have pirated is all material that I cannot otherwise get. As long as these idiots continue to shoot themselves in their collective foot, piracy will thrive.
Exactly! - Well said.
I'm sure they know this... and chose to ignore it. Perhaps they're really, really, really stupid... but I think it's all about admitting the huge hole in their now seriously obsolete business model. They know they could make a lot more money and reduce the piracy to the freeloaders who's always been around with cassette tapes, VCR tapes and whatever it took to make a copy of someone elses stuff for free. It didn't hurt anything in the past decades and it still won't. Besides, back then they were already circumventing the geo-discrimination already rampant back then so it could have been even less.
Here's an example from real life that shows how stupid release rules kills the business. A few years back I wanted a certain title by a certain french artist. I'm in Denmark so it has to be imported, but both Denmark and France is in the EU with the internal market and everything so that should be a piece of cake... Nope. Turns out the artist is distributed by a label here that owns the rights to all the titles by this artist but chooses to release only two (there's like 25-30) here. So, my local shop (who I'm eager to support) can just import it themselves, right? Nope. The label ACTIVELY blocks 'parallel import' so the shop cannot import it. I can import it myself quite easily by doing it online, but that would mean cutting my local shop out of the loop, thus costing it a sale. I don't want that. I can also give up having already waited and returned several times etc. Both options hurts my local shop who already invested time in researching this. There's no way they can turn this into a sale.
I did get the title online (and my local shop died) but the stupid policy of not releasing all the titles and blocking attempts at importing them moved the sale from Denmark to France (a loss to the danish distributor) but could easily have lost the sale altogether because of the hassle. Some countries actually also block private import (Denmark didn't ratify that part of the Info-Soc directive which controls all this) which means I'd have been shit out of luck and had to go to the pirate market to get it. That would mean that nobody got paid at all (except perhaps a pirate) and that hurts both the label and the artist. Just how stupid is that policy?!?!