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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoia

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Piracy is a Service Problem

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Enrique Dans writes about Popcorn Time, the great movie application created by a group of Argentinean hackers that allowed users to search and view torrent movies, according to Time, in an interface better than Netflix’s.

Basically, it’s the version of Netflix that you’ve always wanted — and maybe have been willing to pay extra for — but that Hollywood may never allow.1

Popcorn Time

Popcorn Time gained an incredible traction in a short time and challenged the movie establishment. But its creators decided to shut it down and release the code into the public domain, because _standing against an old fashioned industry has it’s own associated costs. Costs that no one should have to pay in any way, shape or form._2

Some days later, YTS –one of the main torrent sites– announced that they are taking over the project. Popcorn Time is again available for free.

Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. A problem created by an industry that portrays innovation as a threat to their antique recipe to collect value.2

When Apple launched iTunes’s music store in 2003, it demonstrated to the music establishment that people were willing to pay for music in .mp3 format, if they could do it easily and securely. (Up to then, the music industry had been fighting music in .mp3 format.) Results? Apple became a new player in the music distribution business. Since February 2008, Apple’s store has become the biggest music vendor in the United States, and since February 2010 the biggest music vendor in the world. On January 2009, Apple announced that it was removing DRM3 from its music catalog4.

The way to stop movie piracy is to offer the movies in digital format, for a price, the same day they appear in movie theaters.

  1. Popcorn Time Is So Good at Movie Piracy, It’s Scary. ↩
  2. Popcorn Time closing letter. ↩ ↩
  3. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is a technology that prevents digital files from being copied to other devices that the one where they were originally purchased, and is intended to prevent media piracy. ↩
  4. cfr Wikipedia, iTunes Store. ↩

Working around territorial restrictions in book publishing

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Jack Cheng is a Shangai-born, Michigan-bred, Brooklyn-based writer, as he describes himself. His recently published novel, These Days, sells on Amazon, the iBook Store, Barnes and Noble and Kobo. The problem is that if you live outside the US, you can’t buy the digital edition (be it Kindle, ePub or whatever) from those sellers.

Not available in Peruvian Store

I live in Perú, so now and then I run into this problem1 when trying to buy an electronic book.
Being Jack a smart guy and knowing about this limitation, he offers his book directly and copy-protection free (DRM) on his website. You can get it here: http://jackcheng.com/these-days

  1. See, for example, Copyright nonsense: some publishers restrict ebook editions outside US. ↩

Adapt or be forever forgotten

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The Pirate Bay announced some days ago that they are fully embracing the Cloud. Not only that: they are taking measures to make it difficult and pointless to seize their data centers:

Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.
All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.

Seems like a plot taken from Daemon, the book by Daniel Suárez .

Copyright infringement in events broadcasts

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Last Sunday, UStream‘s automatic copyright infringement monitor shut down the live broadcast of the Hugo Awards at Worldcon.

As Neil Gailman’s award for his script of Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s wife” was being announced, the screens on stage showed clips of the nominated episodes. The monitor system detected the copyrighted material and decided —automatically— to shut down the stream.

Some days later, UStream’s CEO Brad Hunstable made a public apology. Among other things, he explained that broadcasters can be white listed:

Users of our paid, ad-free Pro Broadcasting service and those free broadcasters who notify Ustream in advance they have copyrights permissions (…) are automatically white listed to avoid situations like this and receive hands-on client support.

Automatic infringement monitors are becoming widespread. While I find them annoying, the Hugo Awards’s organizers should have notified UStream that they had permissions to broadcast the event and the copyrighted clips.

Piratería: no es sólo por el precio

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SSRC ha publicado un estudio interesante sobre la piratería en países emergentes, financiado por el Gobierno Canadiense y la Fundación Ford: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. (La descarga es gratuita para uso no comercial en países en vías de desarrollo.)

Una de las conclusiones es que, comercialmente hablando, la piratería como negocio tiene el mismo dilema que las distribuidoras de media: no es negocio porque no puede competir con las descargas gratuitas.

Dicho esto, si bien el precio influye en la decisión de comprar una película pirata, no es el único factor. Anne Sweeney, en ese entonces co-chair de Disney Media Networks, decía ya el 2006:

We understand now that piracy is a business model (…) It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do -through quality, price and availability.

Traducción: “Ahora entendemos que la piratería es un modelo de negocio… Existe porque satisface una necesidad en el mercado de consumidores que quieren contenido a pedido… Los piratas compiten del mismo modo que nosotros: en calidad, precio y disponibilidad.”

(Don’t make me steal: Digital Media Consumption Manifesto menciona otros factores interesantes en la decisión de piratear o comprar. En español)

Pero las películas originales en DVD siguen saliendo a la venta recién cuatro meses después de haber sido estrenadas:

  • Por ejemplo, la ganadora de cuatro Óscares este año, El discurso del Rey, fue estrenada en USA a fines de diciembre y en Perú el 17 de febrero (y hoy aún sigue en cartelera en cuatro horarios). Pero recién podrá comparse en Amazon en formato DVD/BlueRay a partir del 19 de abril.
  • The Pirate Bay la ofrecía en calidad DVD ya a mediados de febrero. (Es un “rip” de un DVD de los que dan a los críticos de películas antes del estreno, por tanto se ve muy bien.)
  • No he verificado en los canales de venta pirata en Lima (Polvos Azules, el Hueco, etc.), pero seguramente que no están esperando al 19 de abril para vender la película.
  • El 7 de marzo, El discurso del Rey seguía estando segunda en el ranking de películas más descargadas de internet (piratas, se entiende).

Los piratas compiten en calidad, precio y disponibilidad… y siguen ganando.

Via BoingBoing y O’Reilly Radar/Publishing.