Once Again It’s Become the Story of Cops and Pirates

The MPAA and RIAA are one note wonders. Whenever something goes wrong, the customer is the one to blame. It could never be their ridiculous practices, the poor excuse for quality content, or their own gross stupidity.

Or could it?

This time, it’s actually worse. Not only does paramount Studios want to blame the customers, they want to pin one on the internet at large, as the culprit in their game. In a story of their woe on Ars Technica, we are given the details to a scheme that seems to bring an indictment of theaters and their owners more than any users of the internet. What I refer to is where the first mistake took place. The story pins the internet viewing of the movie Star Trek on the internet download of copies of the movie where a camcorder was used to record the movie.

Ooh, high tech piracy at its finest! The next thing you know, they will be using the U.S. Mail to distribute popcorn and candy so that people won’t have to eat fresh popcorn and candy; because obviously a bad movie experience needs to end as stupidly as it started.

Who is letting people with video cameras into theaters? More than that, why do so many want to see crappy quality movies delivered this way?

Paramount Pictures says that, in the months following the theatrical release of Star Trek, the media company tracked more than five million IP addresses that downloaded one of six camcorded copies of the movie. The first was in Russian, but it was followed by editions from the Philippines, the Ukraine, Spain, Germany, and finally the United States. Who does Paramount blame for this? Pretty much the entire Internet, it seems, including google.com, youtube.com, Microsoft’s bing.com, yahoo.com, and, of course, millions of ‘Net users.

“Just five years ago, one had to be computer literate and exceedingly patient to pirate movies,” Paramount wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on Friday. “Today, literally anyone with an internet connection can do it. Clunky websites are being replaced by legitimate looking and legitimate feeling pirate movie websites, a perception enhanced by the presence of premium advertisers and subscription fees processed by major financial institutions.”

Piracy, Paramount warns, “has advanced from geek to sleek.” All the more reason why content providers “must have the legal and regulatory flexibility to use technological tools in partnership with Internet service providers to stem the tide of online copyright theft.” The letter does not elaborate on what kind of “technological tools” Paramount would like to use.

It’s as though Paramount believes no one is attending the theaters, and they are all sitting silent, save for those five or six brave souls who sit in the theater, with camera at the ready, to destroy the movie business. How much sillier can this sound?

While camcorders are advancing incredibly these days, who is allowing this, for the people doing the intra-theater recording must have the unit solidly mounted, otherwise the picture will be all over the place, bouncing around, moving back and forth, as if the original movie was being shown on an ocean liner.

The movie producers are doing their dead level best to ruin the internet for everyone, because, in their eyes, it is the enemy within.

Oddly, the media company has filed these comments with the FCC’s request for feedback on its National Broadband Plan, which the agency must write and hand over to Congress by mid-February. The Notice of Inquiry, which the FCC released in April, says the plan will focus on “the build-out and utilization of high-speed broadband infrastructure.”

But the Motion Picture Association of America, of which Paramount is a member, argues that it is content that drives the urge for broadband. The Commission gave the MPAA an audience for this argument at an FCC broadband workshop held this summer titled “The Role of Content in the Broadband Ecosystem.”

There Dan Glickman of MPAA pressed the thesis. “You can’t have good connections, good pipes, good delivery systems that mean anything unless you have good content that people like,” he explained. “And the reverse is true. All the good content in the world don’t [sic] mean much if you can’t find a delivery system to pipe it through. And you have to provide the incentives for both to be able to continue their work.”

“Incentives” is probably a euphemism for copyright policing, of course. We’ll get back to this content-moves-the-Internet theory later, but first, let’s look at Paramounts’ version of how Star Trek was purloined by a cast of millions.

I want broadband, I have a 7.1 Mb/s connection, which is frequently maxed out. I don’t pirate software, I don’t illegally download music or movies, and I don’t usually watch television shows online.  Yet I manage to download about 350-450 GB per month, all without any illegal content. These bozos certainly aren’t talking about me, and for every 1 rabid illegal downloader, the kind they want to paint as Joe Average, I’m certain there are 100 people like me. People who might not use as much bandwidth as I do, but still use quite a bit, and don’t do anything illegal.

Two Sundays ago I watched a U2 concert on YouTube; I wonder how much data was transferred over my line in that 2.5 hours? By the way, my son was online playing video games during that time, adding to the download of data.

No, perhaps some need is driven by the wish for multimedia content from the MPAA, but not nearly all of it.

Paramount’s filing includes a tracking chart of all the different bootlegged editions of Star Trek that the company says made their way across the global film market (the image is a little difficult to follow unless you expand it to about 33.3 percent). The studio released the film worldwide on May 8. That very day a Russian language theater-goer camcorded a copy and premiered it on the Internet, the studio explains. It wasn’t a high quality product, but soon other trekkies recorded a better soundtrack from theaters, and merged it with the Russian effort. Various translations then made their way across Europe and the Far East, until a superior Ukrainian edition surpassed them all and became the dominant bootleg edition.

By September, very high quality pay-per-view versions and ripped DVD copies were available in English, Italian, French, German, and Russian. As of the third week of that month, 5,320,000 downloads or views had been served via 73,625 URLs, Paramount estimates.

The studio says it came to its five million plus illegal downloads estimate via a “forensic technology” provided by the BayTSP content tracking company. Paramount contends that the number may be higher, because BayTSP does not track video streams. “Streaming video is particularly appealing to consumers, as hulu.com and youtube.com have learned,” the movie maker warns, “and that appeal has been exploited by sophisticated criminal syndicates now operating professional-quality but illegal websites.”

If these idiots can track it, then let them take care of it by that method, and stop haranguing everyone else not involved. This makes as much sense as the campaign of Andrew Cuomo, another mental midget too lazy to do things the right way, to force the Verizon shut down of its newsgroups servers, because he was too lazy to track down a few (their phrase, not mine) child pornographers. As I said when it happened, no one of good conscience wants to promote child pornography, but throwing out the baby with the bath water is beyond insane.

Next, the same disregard for other internet structures -

But Paramount’s FCC letter doesn’t just blame “illegal websites” for the Star Trek diaspora. Its taxonomy of scofflaws lists Google, Yahoo, and Bing right up there with minova.org, rapidshare.com, and megaupload.com. Why are they included in the mix? Paramount says its rogues gallery can be divided into six groups of scoundrels: “aggregators” like zml.com; “cyberlockers” that allow users to upload files to URLs, then share them on Facebook and Twitter; “leech sites” that facilitate links to content; and, of course, “user generated sites” and “p2p” apps like BitTorrent and Limewire.

“Search engines” like Google and company, however, aren’t innocent by-standers, Paramount warns, because they “provide quick and easy access to pirated movies through keyword searching, and in some case, sponsored search results.” All in all, almost a third of the top 100 websites ranked by Alexa serve up pirated content in some way, Paramount contends.

Well, hey, I know what. Let’s simply ban all computers, because they truly are the root cause of everything. Without computers, not one part of the rest of this would have taken place.

But wait, if we did that, the movie studios could not have computers either, so no computer generated graphics, digital sound, or anything that makes modern movies really impressive. But, there would certainly be lots of difficulty pirating movies!

Obviously, the solution I propose is as inane as the one the MPAA and others want to propose. The difference is, I can’t afford to have several congresspersons in my pocket, making sure that the legislation I want gets passed.

It’s your internet, what are you going to do about keeping it free from the kind of restrictions that the MPAA would like imposed?

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…while there is a use for it…

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