MPAA reports global box office ticket reached an all time high of $29.9 billion in 2009, up 7.6% from 2008, and up an even more dramatic 30% from 2005!

The MPAA has a knack for playing both sides of the fence. On the one hand it says that piracy is so rampant that it threatens the very existence of the motion picture and television industry, while on the other it boasts record profits year after year.

Just last December it warned members of Congress that the “industry faces the relentless challenge of the theft of its creative content, a challenge extracting an increasingly unbearable cost” in a statement praising it for providing additional funding to help law enforcement battle the piracy and theft of movies and other intellectual property.

Fast forward to today where the MPAA is boasting record profits that belie its earlier dire predictions.

Its annual Theatrical Market Statistics Report for 2009 shows that global box office receipts reached an all time high of $29.9 billion, an increase of 7.6% over 2008, and almost a staggering 30% from 2005!

However, the MPAA, no doubt aware of its double-speak, tried to temper the good news.

“While the motion picture industry continues to face tremendous challenges elsewhere in our business, we’re reminded again this year that the cinema is the heart and soul of our industry and it is thriving,” said Bob Pisano, President and Interim CEO of the MPAA.

John Fithian, President and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners, seems to be the only one fully cognizant of the situation.

“Four straight years of box office growth– the last three each setting a new record – show the enormous appetite audiences continue to have for great and entertaining movies in the best way to enjoy them – on a big screen with a big crowd,” he said.

Exactly. Movies like “The Dark Knight” or “Wolverine,” despite being heavily pirated, were still big box office draws.

Why? A PC monitor is no match for the sights and sounds of the big screen (Avatar anyone?). Fears of piracy and illegal file-sharing are simply false pretenses created by the MPAA to get members of Congress to enact legislation that increases its control over content and distribution. Its recent victory against Real Networks DVD backup software is a perfect example of this.

With sales up 30% over the last 4 years it’s hard to imagine anyone would take the MPAA’s piracy fears seriously, especially when they’re seeking ISP-level content filtering.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Four co-founders of the venerated Swedish BitTorrent tracker site learn the date of their appearance before the Svea Court of Appeals to appeal their conviction for copyright infringement.

The four co-founders of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, have finally learned when they’ll appear before the Svea Court of Appeals to appeal their conviction for copyright infringement.

They’ve been given nine days, from Sep 28th to Oct 15th, to make their case and avoid their earlier sentence of one year in prison sentences and fines of 30m kronor ($3.3m US).

However, Sunde points out that political hijinks are at play being that the trial will take place AFTER the Swedish Parliamentary elections scheduled for Sep 19th.

He wrote on Twitter:

#tpb case set to be heard AFTER Swedish election. We’re only available before the election. Who said this case is NOT political? LOL!

Considering that the Swedish Pirate Party’s ranks swelled after The Pirate Bay’s conviction it’s not too far fetched to conclude that politicians are nervous about rocking the electorate boat any further, especially when the Pirate Party garnered 7.1% of the votes in last year’s EU Parliament elections for which it captured 2 seats.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Arrest six admins connected with the site, once the 13th most visited in the entire country with some 155,000 daily visitors.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), police in Greece have closed down, pending trial, BitTorrent tracker site Gamato.info over accusations that it helped facilitate copyright infringement.

“Gamato.info was facilitating the illegal distribution of music, film, games and books,” said Jeremy Banks, director of anti-piracy at IFPI. “It is the perfect illustration of how such illegal operations are damaging a wide range of creative industries in Europe.”

What he doesn’t say is exactly how P2P is damaging European creative industries, nor does he even offer a shred of proof to support his claim. The truth is nobody knows.

The closure followed a series of raids in Athens, Salonika, Larissa and Aridaia that led to the arrest of six people though to be the site’s admins.

Officers acted after tip-offs from IFPI Greece, which represents the local recorded music industry and MPA, which represents the film industry internationally.

“The Hellenic Police swiftly recognized this was not a victimless crime and took action against those who sought to shamelessly profit off the back of others’ creative work,” added banks. “This skillfully executed action by a highly knowledgeable police force should act as a real deterrent to others in Greece considering engaging in online piracy.”

Again, his comments are laughable. He suggests that the site’s admins were making a profit, perhaps making the same argument used at trial against the long defunct BitTorrent tracker site OiNK. In that case they said donations paid by users to help cover server fees, maintenance costs, etc. were instead used to enrich the site admin Alan Ellis. I guess it thinks BitTorrent tracker sites run on hopes and dreams. Somebody has to pay the costs.

As for the closure acting as a deterrent, I’m sure users moved to an alternative long ago, at least perhaps as far back as January when it closed for a few weeks after a similar BitTorrent tracker site in the country was closed, and the site admins arrested.

Gamato was once estimated by alexa.com to be the 13th most visited website in Greece before its closure, and Statbrain.com calculated that some 155,000 users visited the site daily.

The game of whac-a-mole continues.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

CBS Sports offers live, free streaming of every March Madness game from the first round through the championship.

NCAA college basketball’s March Madness is fast approaching and many of you I’m sure have been wondering where you can tune in online to watch your favorite teams compete on-demand for free.

Well, it’s simple. CBS Sports has a great high quality video streaming site called March Madness on Demand up and running that lets you watch not only live games, but lets you watch highlights from recently played games as well.

It requires installation if Microsoft’s Silverlight browser video plugin, but works effortlessly in Mozilla’s Firefox.

Site features:

• Live video of every game from the first round through the championship
• Westwood One radio broadcast of every game
• Game highlights and full game archives

This year CBS is also offering a new HQ (high quality) player option that promises a widescreen video player with “dramatic high quality video” and game highlights from all live games as they happen.

So check out CBS’s NCAA March Madness on Demand and watch every game from the first round to the NCAA Championship online for free!

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

MARCH MADNESS ON DEMAND

Join consumer advocates, MPs, prominent academics, and others in an open letter to the House of Lords criticizing recent proposal to amend the Digital Economy Bill in order force ISPs to proactively block websites suspected of copyright infringement.

A number of UK ISPs have joined forces with consumer advocacy groups, prominent academics, filmmakers, actors, and even websites eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google to forge an open letter to the House of Lords criticizing the recent proposal to amend the Digital Economy Bill.

Amendment 120a, as written, would use the threat of “injunctions” against those ISPs that have “actual knowledge of another person using their service to infringe copyright,” but has failed to “prevent copyright infringement content being accessed at or via that online location or taken reasonable steps to remove copyright infringing content from that online location (or both).”

What it doesn’t spell out is exactly how ISPs are supposed to verify claims of copyright infringement (a new ISP detective bureau?) or the means of appeal. Some site operators may be falsely accused of copyright infringement and subsequently erroneously sanctioned by their ISP.

It’s already been observed that it would cause a “chilling effect” on the Internet, but these signatories add that it would “have unintended consequences that far outweigh any benefits it could bring.”

“Put simply, blocking access as envisaged by this clause would both widely disrupt the internet in the UK and elsewhere and threaten freedom of speech and the open internet, without reducing copyright infringement as intended,” they add.

In fact, they argue that the amendment threatens the “reputation of the UK as a place to do online business and conflict(s) with the broader objectives of Digital Britain.”

The signatories include:

• Tom Alexander,Chief Executive, Orange
• Richard Allan,Director of Policy EU, Facebook
• Neil Berkett,Chief Executive, Virgin Media
• Matt Brittin,Managing Director, Google UK and Ireland
• Charles Dunstone,Chairman, Talk Talk Group
• Stephen Fry
• Jessica Hendrie-Liaño,Chair, Internet Services Providers Association
• Jill Johnstone,International Director, Consumer Focus
• Jim Killock,Executive Director, Open Rights Group
• Mark Lewis,Managing Director, eBay UK
• Ian Livingston,Chief Executive, BT Group
• Sarah Oates,University of Glasgow
• Jenny Pickerill,University of Leicester
• Mark Rabe,Managing Director, Yahoo! UK and Ireland
• Paul Reilly,University of Leicester
• Jess Search,Founder, Shooting People independent film makers
• Ian Walden,Queen Mary, University of London
• Tom Watson MP

The real problem with the amendment is that it could shutter websites with merely the threat of action since there’s no mechanism to make a case or even appeal the findings. All one has to do is be accused of copyright infringement to run afoul of the law.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Incorporates AVG Anti-Virus software into the P2P program for the price of $34.95.

You have to hand it to LimeWire for trying to do all it can stay relevant in an ever increasingly crowded file-sharing app marketplace. While all other P2P software is pretty much free (Usenet aside) LimeWire’s still trying to give file-sharers a reason to fork over as much $34.95 for its PRO version.

To further their efforts its now been announced that LimeWire has licensed the use of the AVG Anti-Virus engine to integrate its anti-virus/ anti-spyware protection into LimeWire PRO.

“Through this partnership, all files will be scanned before LimeWire Pro will allow them to play or execute on an end user’s computer, which prevents infected files from harming machines,” reads a press release. “LimeWire PRO users will see the ‘Protected by AVG’ assurance whenever a downloaded file is safely scanned and cleaned.”

It’s certain to be a marked improvemenmt from the current system which allows inexperience users to download harmful content to their PC, but that’s only if they’re convinced to fork over the $34.95.

“Peer-to-peer networks have come a long way. People are using peer-to-peer networks to share files and documents, and we are pleased to be protecting them,” said Rocco Donnino, SVP of Global Strategic Alliances, AVG Technologies. “AVG is committed to securing our online world, whatever it takes.”

The ad hoc architecture of P2P networks affords no central point where security policies can be enforced, making the networks vulnerable to infected files, adware, spyware and other malware creeping into the system. It is incumbent upon users to secure their computers in order to protect both their own computers and the general health of their peer-to-peer network.

“LimeWire is committed to providing peer-to-peer’s best user experience and we are vigilant about user security,” said Jason Herskowitz, VP Product Management, LimeWire. “We are always looking for ways to improve, and with AVG’s seamless integration into LimeWire, we will be providing users with peer-to-peer’s most secure technology.”

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

British Phonographic Industry-funded study finds that bundled digital music services could earn ISPs £203 million ($303.9m USD) by 2013.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is once again trying to lure in UK ISPs to help it fight illegal file-sharing on their networks, this time by releasing the results of a study it funded that found ISPs there could earn as much as £203 million ($303.9m USD) by 2013 if they launched a bundled digital music services for their subscribers.

It also said the offering could help ISPs reduce the cost of “subscriber churn,” that a simple 10% reduction could help a big ISP with around 3.5m customers would generate indirect value of more than £20m per year ($30m USD).

“It’s increasingly clear that it isn’t smart to be a ‘dumb pipe,’” says BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor. “This report shows that the revenue potential of digital music services alone makes sound economic sense for ISPs. UK music companies want to innovate and develop exciting new digital offerings. ISPs such as Virgin Media have recognized that legal digital music services offer a more exciting and profitable future than continued widespread piracy.”

It’s ironic that it would cite Virgin Media as an ISP willing to offer digital music services considering the ISP spent years and a staggering eight figure sum developing “Virgin Music Unlimited” only to see it fall apart thanks to last minute by major record labels. Virgin Media later came to an agreement with Universal Music last June, but the service, promised to appear towards the end of last year, is still nowhere to be found, so it should hardly be held up as an example by the BPI.

Further damaging the credibility of their statements is the fact that the BPI tries to suggest that ISPs could make even more from bundled digital music services if only they were “offered to consumers in tandem with meaningful action to tackle illegal music downloading. ”

In other words, if they get on board with the BPI’s proposals to fight illegal file-sharing ISPs could make a lot of money.

In response to the study UK ISP TalkTalk, which claims to be the country’s largest broadband provider with over 4.25 million customers, sarcastically thanks the BPI for its “strategic business advice,” but says the £203 million ($303.9m USD) figure glosses over the fact that it would have to criminalize the behaviors of many of its customers in an ultimately “expensive” and “futile” pursuit.

“Though some may question the value of such insight from an industry which has failed to acknowledge the impact of new technology on its own business models and is pressing the Government to criminalize its biggest customers. As it happens TalkTalk does offer a legal download service (emusic), as do other ISPs,” it said in a statement. “Perhaps there is a goldmine for ISPs in legal downloads but that will not alter the fact that the copyright protection proposals being proposed threaten human rights. They will penalize innocent broadband customers. They are expensive, unwieldy and utterly futile.”

It’s silly that the BPI is even offering such “innovative” ideas for others to follow when it can’t seem to come up with any for itself. It’s like getting workout tips from a couch potato.

One has to wonder why people would even want a bundled digital music service when they already have, in the BPI’s own words, more than 35 legal online digital music services to choose from.

The BPI ought to commission more studies that find out what consumers actually want, and try to give it to them. Instead the music industry seems to continue doing the opposite, first figuring out what it wants and giving consumers only what it’s forced to to make a profit, but even then profits are secondary to control of access.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Researchers create BitStalker, an efficient “active probing strategy” for finding copyrighted material on large BitTorrent tracker sites, but fact that the research was funded “in part” by PolyCipher, an ISP consortium, should make some nervous about what it plans to do with it.

Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a new technique for fighting the distribution of copyrighted material on BitTorrent. Current monitoring employs passive methods that are prone, as we all know, to a variety of errors and false positives.

To mitigate the potential for false positives they investigated the feasibility of using active methods to monitor extremely large BitTorrent swarms like those found on public tracker sites like The Pirate Bay. For this they developed BitStalker, a new active probing framework that identiï¬es active peers and collects “concrete forensic evidence” that an individual was involved in sharing a particular copyrighted ï¬le.

“We ï¬nd that the current investigative methods produce at least 11% false positives, while we show that false positives are rare with our active approach,” they say in their paper, “BitStalker: Accurately and Efficiently Monitoring BitTorrent Traffic.”

They claim that BitStalker can monitor over 20,000 peers in 5 minutes using only 14.4–50.8KB/s of bandwidth. Using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) they estimate one could monitor the entire Pirate Bay with some  20 million peers for only about $12.40 p/mo.

So how does it work?

First it gathers a list of peers in a given BitTorrent swarm by querying a tracker. For each IP address it and port number returned it then conducts a series of “light-weight probes” to find out if a peer really exists and is participating in the file transfer.

• Establish a TCP connection with another peer.
• Exchange handshake messages with the correct SHA1 content hash and receive handshake responses.
• Exchange bitï¬eld messages and receive bitï¬eld responses.
• Request and receive a 16KB block of ï¬le data.

The researchers say that by following these steps BitStalker can make false positives a thing of the past.

They continue:

A successful TCP probe indicates that the peer is listening on the correct port. However, an effective counter-strategy could be to register arbitrary IP addresses with ports that are opened (such as web servers). The subsequent handshake probe is more conclusive, as it indicates that the BitTorrent protocol is running on the correct port and also identiï¬es the content being shared by a SHA1 hash. The bitï¬eld probe provides stronger evidence still, since it describes all pieces that the peer has downloaded, which implies active sharing. Finally, requesting and subsequently receiving a block of the ï¬le provides the strongest form of concrete evidence for ï¬le sharing.

It’s welcome news that researchers have figured out a way to find conclusive proof that a person was involved in illegal file-sharing, but it does, as they acknowledge, raise “general legal issues that this type of monitoring exposes.”

In particular, a speciï¬c deï¬nition of what constitutes “evidence” in the context of illegal ï¬le-sharing.

Most troubling is that the research was “funded in part” by PolyCipher, an ISP consortium created by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications. With the MPAA and RIAA trying to get ISPs to become voluntary copyright police one has to wonder whether BitStalker may go active in the near future.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Consumer Focus also says that 85% can only name two, iTunes and Amazon, but UK music industry, in typical fashion, emphasizes that more than 35 exist and touts own study that found 96% awareness of iTunes and Amazon.

Consumer Focus, the UK govt-backed consumer advocacy group, has long tried to illustrate the deficiency of the country’s copyright laws and the dramatic learning gap consumers have of them.

In fact, just last month it found that almost 3/4 of the population doesn’t know what they’re legally allowed to copy or record, and that’s practically impossible to not infringe copyright laws as part of their daily lives unless they don’t use digital technology.

Part of the problem has always been the music industry’s reluctance to offer consumers viable, legal alternatives as a means to fight online copyright infringement, but as it’s slowly begun to roll them out over the years new research from Consumer Focus shows how the music industry is failing to properly promote them.

Their research found that a staggering 20% are unable to name a single legal online music service at all, and that 85% could name only two – iTunes and Amazon.

“The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal online music services,” said Jill Johnstone, the group’s International Director. “If file sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort in to promoting the legal alternatives? Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options.”

Consumer Focus, in addition to recommending reform of the country’s copyright laws, is also calling for reform of its copyright licensing system in order to make it easier to create more legal online music services with streaming, “all you can eat”, micropayment, advertisement or subscription based models.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) counters that claims of low brand awareness are a “fallacy,” pointing out that survey could’ve included people who don’t even have an Internet connection or interest in music.

This argument makes sense, but the BPI goes on to remind people that there are more than 35 legal online digital music services in the UK. That may be so, and I challenge even die-hard music fans to name more than 6, but it doesn’t mean they’re offering consumers what they want.

It also cites its own study from last November that found 96% of the Internet users surveyed knew of iTunes and Amazon among others (not stated is the actual number per individual).

“It’s just not credible to suggest that people who are downloading illegally haven’t heard of iTunes, Amazon or other legal music services,” countered Geoff Taylor, BPI’s Chief Executive. “Our much larger, more recent and targeted online survey shows that awareness of legal music services among internet users is almost universal. The measures in the Digital Economy Bill are precisely what is needed to encourage illegal downloaders to move across to those legal services.”

By “encourage” he means disconnecting households from the Internet via a “three-strikes” graduated response system proposed as part of the emerging Digital Britain Bill. So rather than figuring out what they actually want, or even conducting surveys to that end, it instead is focusing on a removing digital music customers altogether (disconnection), banning open Wi-Fi, and a proactive ban on websites suspected of infringing copyright.

These certainly aren’t very effectives way to “encourage” people to become new customers, especially since “illegal downloaders” are most likely already adept at avoiding detection by copyright holders (VPNs/Usenet).

Finding out what they want and offering it to them, the mark of any good business, is the only solution.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Use BitTorrent to download all of the MP3 files publicly available on the SXSW website as of March 6, 2010.

It’s that time of year again with the 2010 SXSW music festival fast approaching. The annual event held in Austin, TX has always been a showcase for some of the latest and greatest music artists around, and this year is no exception.

As part of the event MP3 files are sporadically made available on the site to showcase some of the artists that are scheduled to appear during the 5 day extravaganza.

Greg Hewgill has been kind enough to compile all of those MP3 files into two handy dandy torrent trackers, some 1038 files totaling 5.43GB worth of free music in all!

• SXSW_2010_Showcasing_Artists_Part1.torrent – 646 files, 3.35GB
• SXSW_2010_Showcasing_Artists_Part2.torrent – 392 files, 2.08GB

In case you missed last year’s music or any of the years going back to 2005 when the music was first compiled into torrent trackers as a BitTorrent download, they’re still available here.

Enjoy.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com