We’ve pointed it out numerous times in the past. Despite the rampant piracy, Hollywood and other entertainment industries continue to break revenue and sales records year after year.

In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.

The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.

A summary of some of the key findings:

* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.

* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.

* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion

* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.

* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.

In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.

In large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.

via What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is BOOMING! | TorrentFreak.

The delays and queue restrictions are part of an overall effort by Warner Brothers to boost its ailing DVD sales. The company thinks that by lengthening the time it takes for a movie to reach other platforms, it will increase demand for the DVD, and in turn make more money. Once a move reaches rental services and streaming video platforms, Warner Brothers stands to make far less revenue.Not allowing Netflix users to conveniently wait out the delayed availability of new DVDs fits within Warner Brothers new strategy. The company clearly wants consumers to feel the inconvenience and discomfort of not being able to watch these newly released movies immediately because it makes the option of buying the DVD much more attractive.

via Warner Bros. now adding restrictions to your Netflix DVD queue | VentureBeat.

The idea of alternatives to copyright should not sound strange. There already is a vast amount of work supported through universities, private foundations and different levels of government. While the existing channels of funding are not sufficient to replace copyright-supported work, they can be expanded to fill the gap.One route would be to allow individuals a modest refundable tax credit — an artistic freedom voucher AFV — that would allow them to give $75-$100 a year to support creative work. This money could either go directly to the worker or to an intermediary that supports specific types of creative work e.g. an intermediary may finance action films, jazz music, or mystery novels.

via Dean Baker: The Surefire Way to End Online Piracy: End Copyright.

Mostanra a hazai lakosság körében is megkezdődött a digitális televíziós videótár térhódítása, és a trend folytatódásával 2012-ben széles körűvé válhat az otthonról távkapcsolóval megrendelhető videótartalmak fogyasztása. Ez állapítható meg a UPC és az ITHAKA Információs Társadalom- és Hálózatkutató Központ online kutatásának eredményeiből, illetve a UPC saját VOD-statisztikáinak összevetéséből.

via 2012.01.19. – Feljövőben a digitális videótárak.

The new “Mission: Impossible” film has made ten times more money than smaller films like “Young Adult.” If greater demand is supposed to move prices, why does a ticket to each movie cost the same?

via Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same? – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic.

As I noted in my previous post with a reading list, I found it really hard to find good bibliographies when trying to figure out what was important to read. The best sources were obviously the notes sections of books and current articles, and it required a lot of compilation! I see no reason not to share the fruits of my labor; there’s no value to a list of books.

Below is my working bibliography for the dissertation. This is just the foundational stuff: almost all of them books, with a few articles thrown in that I’ve needed to cite in my proposal. If I missed anything, put it in the comments or email me!

via Reading List: Media Industries, History and Convergence (Radio/TV/Film/Internet) | Televisual.

From the perspective of copyright holders, piracy represents lost revenue. In this article we argue that piracy nevertheless has important generative features. We consider the range of commercial opportunities that piracy opens up outside of the media industries, identifying four overlapping fields of legal anti-piracy enterprise: technological prevention, revenue capture, knowledge generation, and policing/enforcement. Our analysis notes the commercialization of these activities and their close relationship with the informal media economy. A case study of recent “speculative invoicing” lawsuits demonstrates the extent of this commercialization and its detachment from the mainstream content industries.

via The Business of Anti-Piracy: New Zones of Enterprise in the Copyright Wars by Ramon Lobato, Julian Thomas :: SSRN.

Digital copyright has become a key site of debate and dissent as a generation of consumers accustomed to file-sharing of proprietary content seeks to assert its rights more aggressively. A vocal anti-copyright movement has emerged, rallying around a free-speech defence of piracy honed in opposition to the hardline approach to intellectual property (IP) enforcement pursued by the US entertainment lobbies. This article discusses recent attempts at collective legitimation within this movement, with a focus on the implicit critiques of copyright that underpin pro-piracy discourse. I conclude that if this kind of popular copyright critique is to be more than a pet cause for early adopters, it needs to begin with an inclusive philosophy of access that does not reify the creative consumer as the normative citizen of the information society.

via Constructing the pirate audience: on popular copyright critique, free culture and cyber-libertarianism – Swinburne Research Bank : Open Access Repository.

Recently, Senator Ron Wyden asked CRS if it could explore the state of the movie industry today as compared to 1995 on a variety of different criteria. You can read the full report embedded below, but here are a few key points. First off, despite the industry’s regular attempt to play up its contribution to GDP and employment, the report found that the combined GDP contribution of both the “motion picture and sound recording” industries was a whopping 0.4% in 2009. Back in 1995… it was also 0.4%.

via Congressional Research Service Shows Hollywood Is Thriving | Techdirt.

A short article on SOPA in one of the most influential weeklies in Hungary

http://magyarnarancs.hu/tudomany/vege-a-szolasszabadsagnak-amerikaban-77994

“Amazon’s released their list of 2011′s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books. The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. ‘It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,’ notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only ‘Singles,’ including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s ‘Reamde’ was Amazon’s #99 best-selling print book of 2011, though it didn’t even make it onto their list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year. ‘People who own Kindles are just reading different books than the people who buy printed books,’ reports the Kindle site, which adds ’2011 may be remembered as the year that hundreds of new voices finally found their audiences.’”

via Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters.

http://www.mindennapi.hu/cikk/szubjektiv/szekely-kalozok-szevasztok-/2011-12-13/10724

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

via WordPress › Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS.

Earlier today, Megaupload released a pop video featuring mainstream artists who endorse the cyberlocker service. News of the controversial Mega Song even trended on Twitter, but has now been removed from YouTube on copyright grounds by Universal Music. Kim Dotcom says that Megaupload owns everything in the video, and that the label has engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to sabotage their successful viral campaign.

This morning we published an article on a new campaign by cyberlocker service Megaupload.

Site founder Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak he had commissioned a song from producer Printz Board featuring huge recording artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige. These and others were shouting the praises of Megaupload.

By this afternoon #megaupload was trending on Twitter as news of the song spread. Little surprise interest was so high; Megaupload is described as a rogue site by the RIAA and here are some of their key labels’ artists promoting the service in the most powerful way possible – through a song.

And then, just a little while ago, the music stopped. Visitors to YouTube hoping to listen to the Mega Song were met with the following message.

Mega Song Blocked

TorrentFreak immediately contacted Kim to find out what was happening.

“Those UMG criminals. They are sending illegitimate takedown notices for content they don’t own,” he told us. “Dirty tricks in an effort to stop our massively successful viral campaign.”

So did Universal have any right at all to issue YouTube with a takedown notice? Uncleared samples, anything?

“Mega owns everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign,” Kim told TorrentFreak.

“UMG did something illegal and unfair by reporting Mega’s content to be infringing. They had no right to do that. We reserve our rights to take legal action. But we’d like to give them the opportunity to apologize.”

“UMG is such a rogue label,” Kim added, wholly appreciating the irony.

A few minutes after this exchange Kim contacted us with good news. After filing a YouTube copyright takedown dispute, the video was reinstated. But alas, just seconds later, it was taken down again.

“We filed a dispute, the video came back online and now it’s blocked again by UMG and the automated YouTube system has threatened to block our account for repeat infringement,” Kim explained.

TorrentFreak spoke with Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at EFF, who says this type of copyright abuse is nothing new.

“This appears to be yet another example of the kind of takedown abuse we’ve seen under existing law — and another reason why Congress should soundly reject the broad new powers contemplated in the Internet Blacklist Bills, aka SOPA/PIPA.

“If IP rightholders can’t be trusted to use the tools already at their disposal — and they can’t — we shouldn’t be giving them new ways to stifle online speech and creativity,” McSherry concludes.

Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director at Public Knowledge, worries that this type of sweeping power would only be augmented with the arrival of the SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US.

“If UMG took down a video it has no rights to, then what we have here is exactly the sort of abuse that careless, overzealous, or malicious copyright holders can create by abusing a takedown law,” he told us.

“What makes this even worse is that UMG, among others, is pushing to expand its power to shut people down by fiat–SOPA lets rightsholders de-fund entire websites with the same sort of non-reviewed demand that removed this video,” he concludes.

Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom informs us that he has now submitted an international counter notification to YouTube, informing them that UMG has no rights to anything in the video and that the label abused the YouTube takedown system to sabotage the company’s business.

“It’s ridiculous how UMG is abusing their intervention powers in YouTube’s system to stop our legitimate campaign. They are willfully sabotaging this viral campaign. They own no rights to this content,” Kim insists.

“What UMG is doing is illegal. And those are the people who are calling Mega rogue? Insanity!”

Streisand Effect, here we come again.

Update: “The fact that this expression could be silenced by a major label — without any apparent infringement — should be seriously troubling to anyone who cares about artists’ speech rights,” says Casey Rae-Hunter, Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition. “If this can happen to Snoop Dogg and others, it can happen to anyone.”

via Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label” | TorrentFreak.

Movies and TV are one of America’s biggest exports and biggest employers, with over 2 million Americans working in the entertainment community. But today, this American success story is facing a threat like never before – content theft. Content theft costs U.S. workers $5.5 billion annually in lost earnings. The real victims aren’t stars or studios or networks; they’re middle class people in all 50 states who make their living in film and television.This Creative America documentary explores this important issue and what you can do about it. Visit creativeamerica.org to learn more.

via Content Theft: The Big Picture on Vimeo.

One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.

swissIn Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.

In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.

The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.

Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that.

Distribution method or not, the entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.

“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.

The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money. To reach this conclusion, the researchers extrapolated the findings of a study conducted by the Dutch government last year, since the countries are considered to be similar in many aspects.

The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

The Swiss report then goes on to review several of the repressive anti-piracy laws and regulations that have been implemented in other countries recently, such as the three-strikes Hadopi law in France. According to the report 12 million was spent on Hadopi in France this year, a figure the Swiss deem too high.

The report further states that it is questionable whether a three-strikes law would be legal in the first place, as the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right. The Council specifically argued that Hadopi is a disproportionate law that should be repealed.

Other measures such as filtering or blocking content and websites are also rejected, because these would hurt freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. The report notes that even if these measures were implemented, there would be several ways to circumvent them.

The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die. They see absolutely no need to change the law because downloading has no proven negative impact on the production of national culture.

Aside from downloading, it is also practically impossible for companies in Switzerland to go after casual uploaders. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP-addresses of file-sharers, making it impossible for rightsholders to gather evidence.

via Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal | TorrentFreak.

What would it mean in terms of revenue if ALL BitTorrent traffic moved to Netflix?If we assume that BitTorrent and Netflix users consume roughly the same amount of content again an assumption favoring the movie studios, then this is an easy calculation. Netflix would generate a third more revenue. Based on the shareholders report of the last quarter of 2010 where most of the torrent stats in this article are based on this translates into $198 million additional revenue for Netflix.Based on more recent stats contained in Netflix’s third quarter filing of this year, the increase in revenue would be $266 million for that quarter.

via MPAA Costs Hollywood More Than US BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak.

What should we call this ad hoc association of Silicon Valley businesses, venture capitalists, law professors, civil libertarians, and avid Internet users? Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute told me he’d brand it a “populist technocratic coalition,” which is somehow both oxymoronic and apt. Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, says it calls to mind the old buzzword Netizens. My preferred term: the geek lobby.

via Stop Online Piracy Act: Can the geek lobby stop Hollywood from wrecking the Internet? – Slate Magazine.

ReDigi bills itself as “The World’s First Online Marketplace For Used Digital Music,” but the RIAA is not impressed. Categorically rejecting the “first sale” doctrine as a safe harbor, the Recording Industry Association of America has sent the ReDigi digital music resale site a letter (PDF, hat tip: Cnet) that effectively demands that the company abandon its business and open its sales records to RIAA’s lawyers. Cease and desist your “infringing activities,” the missive warns. But that’s the least of it.

via RIAA wants ReDigi out of the business of selling “used” iTunes tracks.

A major new survey of American attitudes to online copyright infringement has found that 70 percent of all 18 to 29-year-olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. But almost no Americans are hardcore grog-swillers, and two-thirds of those who do acquire copyrighted material without permission also acquire content legally.The new research comes courtesy of a forthcoming report called Copy Culture in the US and Germany, and it was done by some of the same researchers who worked on the groundbreaking Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report earlier this year. Data comes from a Princeton Survey Research Associates telephone poll of 2,303 American adults during the month of August; a Google grant funded some of the research.The poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy, but that young people skew the numbers significantly. And while it found that piracy is common, it also found that most is relatively casual. Only 2 percent of Americans are “heavy music pirates” with more than 1,000 tracks of infringing music; only 1 percent of Americans are heavy TV/movie pirates with more than 100 infringing shows or films.For most people, downloading music and video goes hand-in-hand with acquiring it legally; less than one-third of admitted pirates copped to owning an entire collection of illicit material. And large numbers of pirates have already altered their behavior in response to more attractive legal services for acquiring content. When it comes to music, 46 percent of American pirates said that they grab unauthorized music less than they used to thanks to legal streaming services and the survey was done before Spotify launched in the US. For video, 40 percent of pirates have already curtailed their activity thanks to legal alternatives like Netflix.As for video game pirates, they’re negligible. Only 3 percent of homes with game consoles have machines modified to accept pirated discs.The takeaway: Americans pirate, but few are engaged in some kind of principled War Against Copyright. Most just want easy access to legal material and are willing to pay reasonable fees to get it see the success of iTunes, Netflix, and the Kindle for examples of this in action. Indeed, only 16 percent of Americans believe that it’s acceptable to upload pirated content to sites where anyone can download it, only 8 percent say posting pirated content to Facebook would be acceptable, and only 6 percent think selling copies of pirated content is okay.Oh—and piracy isn’t gendered. The survey found that “men outpolled women by 2 percent or less” when it came to piratical behavior.

via It’s official: America a land of young, casual pirates.

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