High Court throws out Internet Piracy case

Mr Dalby said the entertainment industry could help solve the problem by providing reasonably priced and easily accessible content to consumers around the world in a timely manner.

Yeah...& you'll have a better chance of seeing God & Jesus doing the Macarena on Dancing With The stars than ever seeing that happen.

Originally Posted by Neil Gane

No best model in the world can compete with free

First of all, it is competing. It's losing badly in China where the entertainment industries both don't try to compete and are very constricted from being able to compete. But in other nations, usually developed ones, where there are entrepreneurial strides in content distribution and handling of licensing they are not losing.

In the U.S., great efforts have been made in the competition against privacy and I would say they're even winning against it. I'm not talking about litigation or policy making, I'm talking about Netflix, Hulu, movie rental boxes in grocery stores, in device implementation services like Roku boxes, PS3 and XBOX, tablets, mobile phones, etc. Most consumption of entertainment media in the U.S. is done by legal means, piracy varies among whether you're accounting for music, movies, software and T.V. shows (in descending order). Even biased/fudged statistics show that most of that is below 30 %. These industries only consider a victory if it reaches zero, and they don't like having to compete.

The bittorrent protocol, adapted use of protocols that predate the invention of the internet, look at all the distribution methods developed by amateur individuals and collaborative groups. From access to the content to the development and popularization of the compression methods for music and movies, have been largely innovated by non commercial interests. The entertainment industries have invested all their money into content control and ignored the user experience. Surely a prudent and sane approach would be to focus their efforts on the end user experience.

They could easily develop more convenient, fluid, and innovative ways that outshine amateur efforts. Instead, they keep spinning their hamster wheel expecting consumers to fill up their water bottle every time they take a break. So in closing, Mr. Gane, you have ignorantly decided to concede to the principle of mediocrity. What do you really expect to change with that kind of attitude? Then again, I guess you're not being paid to think ahead, rather, your being paid to uphold an archaic approach to anti-consumerism. You've probably already made out like a bandit, nothing to feel good about but I doubt you'll actually find anything to complain about either.

I posted in-depth recently regarding my switch from solely downloading as my means of acquiring television and movies to watching Netflix (for a mere $8 per month) about 85% of the time. It is only in the case of shows that are UNAVAILABLE through content controls by (primarily CBS in my case) by media companies that I download television at all. Other than that, I grab a few of the "attention grabbing" new releases in the movie section of BT.

Netflix can turn a substantial profit at $8 a month. Its guide, suggestions, and vast content library, along with IMMEDIATE access (no more downloading entire movies that I delete in the first 10 minutes) and EASE OF USE will keep me a customer for as long as they continue to offer this level of service. I would gladly pay $20 to watch the programming that I currently do. As macky mentioned, these services are quite popular.

There are 100 million households in the US alone. Multiply that by the additional $12 a month I would pay, and there will be MORE than enough to support "the artists". Once the Industries realize that this is no longer a supply driven market, they won't have to spit poison, bile, and lawsuits at their customer base.

"while the company did not support illegal downloading, it was not its role to monitor or punish the behaviour of its customers by terminating internet access"

American companies should follow suit.

Originally Posted by playerone

"while the company did not support illegal downloading, it was not its role to monitor or punish the behaviour of its customers by terminating internet access"

American companies should follow suit.

It's common sense though, providing a service doesn't mean it's there job job to watch every you do nowadays. It' like the government suing Reebok if I commit a crime while wearing them, possibly a vague metaphor there but hopefully you get my point lol.

Originally Posted by duke0102

Originally Posted by playerone

"while the company did not support illegal downloading, it was not its role to monitor or punish the behaviour of its customers by terminating internet access"

American companies should follow suit.

It's common sense though, providing a service doesn't mean it's there job job to watch every you do nowadays. It' like the government suing Reebok if I commit a crime while wearing them, possibly a vague metaphor there but hopefully you get my point lol.

exactly my thoughts. the first thing that came to my mind was something like a bank suing the highway/transportation department (or whatever it is) because a criminal used it in the process of robbing a bank. its ridiculous but i think eventually all their attempts will be for naught.

Originally Posted by mjmacky

Originally Posted by Neil Gane

No best model in the world can compete with free

First of all, it is competing.
In the U.S., great efforts have been made in the competition against privacy and I would say they're even winning against it. I'm not talking about litigation or policy making, I'm talking about Netflix, Hulu, movie rental boxes in grocery stores, in device implementation services like Roku boxes, PS3 and XBOX, tablets, mobile phones, etc. Most consumption of entertainment media in the U.S. is done by legal means, piracy varies among whether you're accounting for music, movies, software and T.V. shows (in descending order). Even biased/fudged statistics show that most of that is below 30 %. These industries only consider a victory if it reaches zero, and they don't like having to compete.

The bittorrent protocol, adapted use of protocols that predate the invention of the internet, look at all the distribution methods developed by amateur individuals and collaborative groups. From access to the content to the development and popularization of the compression methods for music and movies, have been largely innovated by non commercial interests. The entertainment industries have invested all their money into content control and ignored the user experience. Surely a prudent and sane approach would be to focus their efforts on the end user experience.

They could easily develop more convenient, fluid, and innovative ways that outshine amateur efforts. Instead, they keep spinning their hamster wheel expecting consumers to fill up their water bottle every time they take a break. So in closing, Mr. Gane, you have ignorantly decided to concede to the principle of mediocrity. What do you really expect to change with that kind of attitude? Then again, I guess you're not being paid to think ahead, rather, your being paid to uphold an archaic approach to anti-consumerism. You've probably already made out like a bandit, nothing to feel good about but I doubt you'll actually find anything to complain about either.

i completely agree. theres an article i read somewhere, i dont recall where, that postulated that piracy is fundamentally a service issue, which seems a lot like what you are saying. it made some really good points. take pc games and drm for example. a lot of today's drm today actually, albeit unintentionally, promotes piracy by crippling the user experience. when has a game's drm ever really stopped it from being cracked and pirated? none that i can think of. yet how many times has a game's drm caused a legitimate user some sort of frustration or technical issue that rendered the game unplayable or caused other such determent to the consumer experience? too many times to recall. so why on earth would a user bother to pay more for a worse experience? there are similar such service issues in many other areas affected by piracy like you mentioned. they say no business model can compete with free and thats false. they just arent being competitive and instead are really just making things worse for themselves by pushing their own customers away with these tactics. in general piracy gives the user a more convenient, more satisfying experience. instead of trying to compete with that they attack their own customer base. in fact they try everything they can to avoid competing because they perceive that as threatening to their profit share. why compete when you can just remove the competition through litigation and behind the scenes deal making? they are trying to do that with streaming services now because they finally recognize them as competition and therefor a threat. the foolish thing is they think they can defeat piracy the same way. you cant stop piracy like you can a competing company. you use those tactics on a company, it loses money and it dies. companies operate on money but piracy, for the most part, does not. you do that with piracy and it exacerbates your problem because (and this is something they refuse to recognize) the pirates and piracy consumers are your customers. customers turn to piracy for the superior experience it provides, so instead of trying to give them a better experience to come back to, they attack the customers with drm, lawsuits, cumbersome technologies that make the experience worse. its like an overbearing parent. ever seen a child with an overbearing parent that spends more time at a friend's house who has parents that are much more tolerable than at home? and the more overbearing the parents become, the more that child avoids home.

Originally Posted by chalices

Originally Posted by megabyteme

I posted in-depth recently regarding my switch from solely downloading as my means of acquiring television and movies to watching Netflix (for a mere $8 per month) about 85% of the time. It is only in the case of shows that are UNAVAILABLE through content controls by (primarily CBS in my case) by media companies that I download television at all. Other than that, I grab a few of the "attention grabbing" new releases in the movie section of BT.

Netflix can turn a substantial profit at $8 a month. Its guide, suggestions, and vast content library, along with IMMEDIATE access (no more downloading entire movies that I delete in the first 10 minutes) and EASE OF USE will keep me a customer for as long as they continue to offer this level of service. I would gladly pay $20 to watch the programming that I currently do. As macky mentioned, these services are quite popular.

There are 100 million households in the US alone. Multiply that by the additional $12 a month I would pay, and there will be MORE than enough to support "the artists". Once the Industries realize that this is no longer a supply driven market, they won't have to spit poison, bile, and lawsuits at their customer base.

The most stupid part is the big media companies had plenty of time to make that Netflix experience their own, they could easily have banded together and created a company to deliver what Netflix delivers years ago.

I believe there was a recent oped in Times magazine stating that people and older companies don't change their MO, despite changes because changes creates risk and there's an aversion to risk. so unless the present model is doing very badly they're not going to innovate.

Originally Posted by yingleebt

Originally Posted by chalices

The most stupid part is the big media companies had plenty of time to make that Netflix experience their own, they could easily have banded together and created a company to deliver what Netflix delivers years ago.

I believe there was a recent oped in Times magazine stating that people and older companies don't change their MO, despite changes because changes creates risk and there's an aversion to risk. so unless the present model is doing very badly they're not going to innovate.

Otherwise, growing pains, which are not in any way unique in free enterprise. Basically when the consumer is not being satisfied, the industry suffers, then they innovate. The entertainment industries are doing something different. They are directly attacking their consumer base rather than innovating to survive.

Filesharing with large media wasn't exactly headache-free 10 years ago (music is the obvious exception here). Now the easy protocols and clients have been refined, the filesharing communities have been established, built up, and grown. All this time while the entertainment industry were focused on content control, licenses and DRM. They basically offered no competition to free methods. Think about it this way. If the paid distribution networks were affordable, easy and at your fingertips, without complicated cumbersome restrictions, how much of an interest would there have been in the development of software in the filesharing area? Not enough to innovate as much as they have. Lack of any real legal entertainment distribution left a huge vacuum, and it's really easy to innovate in a vacuum.

Just the bittorrent methodology alone is amazing when you think about it. For instance, from what I remember that's how Blizzard was deploying WoW downloads, Facebook, Twitter, universities are using this to synchronize their server update, etc. There's so much untapped upstream when you ignore this protocol. I used to think Zune for XBOX was great a few years ago, I didn't feel the DRM portion of it, it felt like a pleasurable rental experience. But instead of speeds getting faster, they got SLOWER, instead of becoming more streamlined, the restrictions became more convoluted. On top of that it was more expensive to stream a digital movie than it was to head out to Blockbuster (rest in unrest) to rent a disc.

Another major problem, it used to be significantly more expensive to "rent" the viewing rights of a digital HD version of a TV show than an SD version? The cost investment on their end (encoding, storage, bandwidth) for digital media is basically the same (would only amount to pennies, how much does a GB cost, how much does serving 500 kB/s for an extra 90 minutes cost?), so you're only buying a license to view. Now the costs are closer together, guess how they did it? It's now more expensive to buy and rent SD. That's right, digital prices for SD content have risen. Take a new movie purchase on Zune, e.g. Underworld Awakening (assuming similar for Apple and Amazon), it costs $20 to by HD, $17 to buy SD (if I can recall the price distribution before would have been like $20/$12). That's basically the price of a Bluray and DVD (after distribution and profit is made from the reseller). For the latest episode of South Park, $3.00 for HD and about $2.50 for SD.

On top of all that, you get all setup and start downloading, despite the $60 you spend on fast internet, your HD movie is going to take a couple of hours to download. More surprises, you'll only be able to watch the HD version on your XBOX, no PC or device viewing. If you wanted to watch it on your PC, you have to buy the SD version, and you'll need to acquire the license through the Zune program before you can watch it on any other player (by any other, I meant Windows Media Player and only Windows Media Player). What the fuck, right? It's similar with Amazon, no HD for PCs, need their Unbox software for viewing (however it does have wide device implementation that allows for HD viewing).

It's a big fucking insult. I can only imagine how hard it is to "compete with free" when you first unload a minigun on your foot. I could go on really, but I guess I didn't vent out enough of facts, examples, and opinions my first time around to be satisfied. Fuck you know what, I hope piracy becomes bigger and undoes the whole industry. No more big production films for anyone, I wouldn't fucking mind. It's not going to happen though, is it? They cry as they will but there's big fucking dollars in it, they aren't losing.