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Piracy ravages Spain – Entertainment News, International Top Story, Media – Variety

Online piracy cost the Spanish media biz an estimated E5 million ($6.3 billion) in the second half of 2009, according to a new study.

The study, carried out by IDC Research Iberia, the Spanish arm of U.S. consultancy IDC, covered the piracy of music, movies, vidgames and books.

It was commissioned by Spain’s Coalition of Creators and Content Industries, an umbrella lobby for most of the country’s film and TV trade associations.

Polling 5,911 Spaniards, the report found that piracy accounted for 83.7% of all online movie consumption and 95.6% of that for music.

IDC reported that 58.4% of Spanish users would pay for music and 54.8% for movies.

Media Hungary is the annual meeting place for media professionals in the Hungarian market. I was invited to participate in a panel on content piracy.

Technology | guardian.co.uk

I’m not suggesting that the only way the electronic book industry can succeed is by promoting piracy. But without it, there’s no whip to crack. There’s no easy cause and effect to startle the publishers out of their leather armchairs and into action.

I suspect that the real change will come as more authors who are already part of the digital age push for new things. But that’s a generational shift, and we’re still a long way from it.

It’s not that I don’t believe electronic books can’t be a success – just that without an outside factor that can push things faster than the industry is comfortable with, progress is always going to be very, very slow.

GigaOM

So while Zuckerberg was announcing Facebook’s ambitious plans, Dixon and some like-minded programmers were cooking up their own launch: an open-source standard for recommendations called Open Like. The idea behind the project, which is still in its embryonic stages, is that websites and services would be able to federate recommendations or “likes” by adopting a uniform standard for the data. In the same way that OAuth (which Facebook is now supporting) is an open standard for sharing user information, and OpenID is an open standard for logging into websites and services, Open Like would allow anyone who adopts the standard to make use of recommendation data.

“I feel like everyone is falling asleep while Facebook and Twitter are taking over,” Dixon said in a phone interview. “I love Facebook and Twitter — I think I’m even an investor in Twitter through some venture funds I’m a shareholder in — but I just think it’s a bad thing for the web. What if HTTP or SMTP were owned by one company?” What Facebook is trying to do with its open graph protocol might be good for Facebook, the Hunch co-founder says, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for anyone else. “They’re acting in their economic interests — there’s nothing evil about it,” he says. “But people who think that it’s some kind of move towards being open are just naive.”

Music Ally | Blog Archive

Brindley from Music Ally now (I feel like Paxman on University Challenge). He talks about where should the crackdown on piracy come – suing your own consumers hasn’t worked in markets like the US. “When you start taking action against them, that tends to lead to some pretty bad PR,” he says. And he points out that taking action against the file-sharing sites hasn’t worked well either. Yet pressuring the intermediary – ISPs – is dangerous. “When you start playing around with people’s connections… that’s a pretty severe intervention.” He thinks that actually cutting people off from accessing the internet in their own homes – “when that’s going to become just like electricity, water – a basic human right… I’m not sure it’s worth that battle

ez egy magyar nyelvű szöveg

and this is in english

Electronic Frontier Foundation

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a group known as the “U.S. Copyright Group” has quietly targeted 20,000 Bit Torrent users for legal action in federal court in Washington, DC. The targets are accused of having downloaded independent films, including “Steam Experiment,” “Far Cry,” “Uncross the Stars,” “Gray Man” and “Call of the Wild 3D,” without authorization. The group plans to target 30,000 more individuals for legal action in the coming months.

This time, the lawyers involved are being explicit about their motivations: it’s all about the money. “We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,” said one of the attorneys involved. The cases are taken on a contingency basis, designed so that quick settlements will prove lucrative for both the firm and the copyright owners involved.

Adobe Labs – Stratus

dobe® Stratus 2 enables peer assisted networking using the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) within the Adobe Flash® Platform. RTMFP is the evolution of media delivery and real time communication over the Internet enabling peers on the network to assist in delivery. Stratus was first introduced in 2008 as a rendezvous-only service that allowed clients to send data from client to client without passing through a server. Adobe Flash Player 10, which debuted peer assisted networking, has been adopted today by over 90% of all internet connected PCs.

The Technium: How to Thrive Among Pirates

What do these gray zones have to teach us? I think the emerging pattern is clear. If you are a producer of films in the future you will:

1) Price your copies near the cost of pirated copies. Maybe 99 cents, like iTunes. Even decent pirated copies are not free; there is some cost to maintain integrity, authenticity, or accessibility to the work.

2) Milk the uncopyable experience of a theater for all that it is worth, using the ubiquitous cheap copies as advertising. In the west, where air-conditioning is not enough to bring people to the theater, Hollywood will turn to convincing 3D projection, state-of-the-art sound, and other immersive sensations as the reward for paying. Theaters become hi-tech showcases always trying to stay one step ahead of ambitious homeowners in offering ultimate viewing experiences, and in turn manufacturing films to be primarily viewed this way.

3) Films, even fine-art films, will migrate to channels were these films are viewed with advertisements and commercials. Like the infinite channels promised for cable TV, the internet is already delivering ad-supported free copies of films.

GIGAOM

There are still significant gaps in the catalog.
I still can’t merge things I own with things I just want to stream.
Ownership of music still provides a smoother listening experience.
I can only share music with fellow subscribers.
I can still hear things that I don’t already own without paying for them.

Gramofon Online

YouTube Blog: Broadcast Yourself

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube — and every Web platform — to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

Nothing could be further from the truth. YouTube has long been a leader in providing media companies with 21st century tools to control, distribute, and make money from their content online. Working in cooperation with rights holders, our Content ID system scans over 100 years worth of video every day and lets rights holders choose whether to block, leave up, or monetize those videos. Over 1,000 media companies are now using Content ID — including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label — and the majority of those companies choose to make money from user uploaded clips rather than block them. This is a true win-win that reflects our long-standing commitment to working with rights holders to give them the choices they want, while advancing YouTube as a platform for creativity.

We look forward to defending YouTube, and upholding the balance that Congress struck in the DMCA to protect the rights of copyright holders, the progress of technological innovation, and the public interest in free expression.

Posted by Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel

Internet piracy taking big toll on jobs | Reuters

A study into Internet piracy by a Paris-based consultancy published on Wednesday showed that 1.2 million jobs in the European Union could be lost over the next five years if more is not done to clamp down on illegal downloading.

The study by TERA Consultants for the International Chamber of Commerce focused on piracy in Europe’s music, film, television and software industries.

Those industries generated 860 billion euros ($1.186 trillion) and employed 14.4 million people in 2008. But in the same year, 10 billion euros and 186,000 jobs were lost to piracy, the study found.

If that trend continues — and the rapid increase in illegal downloads and advancing piracy techniques suggest it will — then up to 1.2 million jobs and 240 billion euros worth of European commerce could be wiped out by 2015.

“In the near future and even today in 2010, we observe increasing bandwidth, increasing penetration rate in terms of the Internet,” said TERA Consultant’s Patrice Geoffron, explaining that piracy was only likely to escalate.

“If we combine all those elements, obviously the impact in a few years won’t remain stable compared to what it was in 2008.”

ARTISTS SUFFER

The bulk of illegal downloading targets music, television and video sites, with consumers using “peer-to-peer” formats to download songs and video clips onto their laptops and home computers from websites without paying a fee.

In that respect it has a disproportionate impact on the creative industries, with musicians, actors and artists standing to lose the most from unfettered downloading, experts say.

Agnete Haaland, the president of the International Actors’ Federation, believes consumers need to be made more aware of the damaging economic and social impact of their illegal activity.

“We should change the word piracy,” she told reporters at the unveiling of the report on Wednesday.

“To me, piracy is something adventurous, it makes you think about Johnny Depp. We all want to be a bit like Johnny Depp. But we’re talking about a criminal act. We’re talking about making it impossible to make a living from what you do,” she said.

Haaland, whose group supported the study, said one of the best ways to reverse the situation would be stricter EU legislation to enforce existing laws against piracy.

IT | Tudomány: Százból csak öt magyar blogol – HVG.hu

Saját bevallásuk szerint a netezők fele legalább heti rendszerességgel oszt meg és tölt le főként zenét, illetve filmes tartalmakat, több mint egyharmada legalább hetente tölt fel képeket. Minden második internetező már rendszeresen vesz igénybe online banki szolgáltatásokat, és egyharmaduk a számláit is a weben keresztül fizeti ki. A megkérdezettek fele ugyanakkor soha nem intézi hivatalos (adóbevallási vagy más ügyfélkapus) ügyeit az interneten.

Ars technica

Access to the Internet is a fundamental right to nearly four out of five adults across the globe, and those in South Korea, Mexico, and China seem to have the strongest feelings on the topic. This is according to a report (PDF) by the BBC World Service, which polled 27,973 adults on their feelings about, usage of, and concerns about the Internet. Although users are somewhat divided on whether the Internet should be regulated, they are in agreement on its usefulness for learning and information discovery.

Across all 26 countries, 79 percent of Internet and non-Internet users said that they felt that Internet access should be “the fundamental right of all people.” When isolated for people who already use the Internet, that number went up to 87 percent. Almost universally (90 percent), respondents said that the Internet was a good place to learn and almost 80 percent said the Internet brought them greater freedom.