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Movie and Music Copyright Cops Themselves Infringe Intellectual Property
The giant movie and music corporations – and their water-bearing politicians – pushing draconian copyright laws are hypocrites.
According to TorrentFreak, members of the RIAA, Department of Homeland Security, Sony, Universal and Fox may have illegally downloaded files from BitTorrent.
Lamar Smith – the Congressman sponsoring SOPA – used a pirated photograph on his official campaign website.
TechCrunch reports today:
VEVO, the music portal owned by some of the biggest record labels in the US, had a pirated NFL playoff game playing on screens throughout its ‘PowerStation’ venue.
The incident was immensely hypocritical, given that VEVO is owned in part by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment (with EMI licensing its content to the service) — the same music labels that have made a habit of attacking consumers over alleged acts of piracy.
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Imagine what the music industry would say were it on the other side of this. Is there any doubt it would dismiss these explanations and, lawsuits in hand, cry foul over such an overt act of piracy?
Furthermore, this seems no different than an accused pirate explaining that they left their Wifi open, only to have it used by someone else to download content illegally. Which happens to be a defense the RIAA has previously fought vigilantly against, when it sought to make owners of ISP accounts liable for any infringing activity, even if the owner had no knowledge of it. Hypocrisy, indeed.
The movie and music studios also allegedly encouraged people to use file-sharing software for pirating copyrighted material, made hundreds of millions of dollars in the process and are now suing people using the software they pushed.
And the very foundation of the Hollywood movie industry was intellectual property infringement. Specifically, inventor Thomas Edison owned the patents for movie cameras and for several types of movie film. Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (known as the “Edison Trust”) with Kodak and others, and this trust controlled every aspect of movie-making: from cameras to film to distribution.
As Wired notes:
Edison assembled representatives of the nation’s biggest movie companies—Biograph, Vitagraph, American Mutoscope, and seven others—and invited them to sign a monopolistic peace treaty. Since 1891, when the Wizard of Menlo Park filed his first patent on a motion picture camera/film system, his lawyers had launched 23 aggressive infringement suits against other production outfits.
Sometimes Edison won. Sometimes he lost. But the costs of these battles overwhelmed his rivals, and that was the intent.
“The expense of these suits would have financially ruined any inventor who did not have the large resources of Edison,” one of his lawyers boasted, “and it could hardly be expected that he would be able to prosecute simultaneously every infringement as it arose.”
Thus his victims sold their patents, making the Edison movie empire ever larger.
But the old man wanted it all, so he assembled his rivals and proposed that they join his Motion Picture Patents Company. It would function as a holding operation for the participants’ collective patents — sixteen all told, covering projectors, cameras, and film stock. MPPC would issue licenses and collect royalties from movie producers, distributors, and exhibitors.
To top it all off, MPPC convinced the Eastman Kodak company to refuse to sell raw film stock to anyone but Patent Company licensees, a move designed to shut French and German footage out of the country.
“The negotiations were finalized in December,” Gabler notes, and by early January, “the company made its announcement that the old laissez faire of the movie business was being abruptly terminated.”
The Edison trust was based on the East Coast. In order to escape the onerous restrictions of the trust, independent filmmakers fled to Hollywood. Because travel was so much slower back then, Hollywood filmmakers would have plenty of time to close up shop if they got wind that the trust’s enforcers were coming to visit:
If Edison ever sent agents to California, word would usually reach Los Angeles before the agents did, and the filmmakers could escape to nearby Mexico.
In addition, the federal courts in California were also less eager to enforce patent rights.
As Armando Franco writes:
•These actions led several independents to flee to the West Coast. California was remote enough from Edison’s reach that filmmakersthere could pirate his inventions without fear of the law.
•But because patents grant the patent holder a truly “limited” monopoly (just seventeen years at that time), by the time enough federal marshals appeared, the patents had expired. A new industry had been born,in part from the piracy of Edison’s creative property.
AND BULLIES ...
It used to be a widespread practice for music companies to unlawfully bribe radio stations using “payola” to play their songs. Indeed, the practice is still ongoing (at least as of a couple of years ago). See this, this, this and this. Indeed, many have alleged that the music industry is still riddled with organized crime.
It is also well-known in the entertainment industry that movie studios use fraudulent accounting – widely known as “Hollywood Accounting” – to cheat writers, actors and others who are not on the favored list from getting paid. There are many famous examples where writers and actors have been paid little or nothing on films which made billions of dollars. And see this.
And TorrentFreak notes:
The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.
Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.
The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. “The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,” the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. “We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs. the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs. little Aussie battlers’ sequel.”
Whether or not these two industries are actually run by criminal cartels, it is beyond dispute that they are acting like bullies.
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In a way this may benefit people (outside of the blantant power grab of ISPs to make you pay for stuff they don't provide, see facebook, youtube, etc) as people that wanted to produce their own movies/shows would gain popularity similar to how musicians can now use the internet/YT to gain fame without record labels.
It's a bit like the MLB killing any videos of baseball on youtube. It just kills interest in their product. It's complete stupidity.
Go ahead and make us pay for movies. We'll search for cheaper alternatives that will thrive in your absense.
All the contents you mentioned in post is too good and can be very useful. I will keep it in mind, thanks for sharing the information keep updating, looking forward for more posts. Thanks.
music distribution
Bill Cosby once said that there are people in the world who know exactly how to raise kids because they don't actually have any of their own. Similarly, there are many people who think it should be OK to steal music and movies, aren't actually artists.
We are independent artists - associated with no major label - and we make our living selling our music and other digital content directly to consumers. When we last released an album, it was available online in 48 hours for 99 cents with no royalties paid thanks to auto-scraping and file sharing software. We welcome that someone is at least trying to do something to enforce copyrights.
As for the 9 year limit, we'd go for that as long as retirement systems are wiped out for everyone else as well. Not sure why our inventions and creations should have less protection than others. Before anyone starts spouting about time to market, understand that we hold 3 masters degrees between us that were a huge investment of time and money and we are working our behinds off to capitalize on that investment.
So if anyone wants the property we have created, they can buy it. If you don't want ours, buy someone else's. But we'd appreciate it if you not steal it or promote or protect the idea that stealing it is OK. We can always point to how others have done something hypocritical or screwed up but that never justifies our own behavior. Our behavior is our own responsibility.
If you are stealing music, movies or other digital music, when you look in the mirror, you'll see a thief and have no one to blame but the one you are looking at.
Bide your time a bit, the web paradigm is changing fast. Google turned content into a commodity, which is bad for everyone except Google. Their search results are now a mess of garbage, useful if you're looking for treatment for renal cancer but not for most of what people want to do. So the Google index search model is fading, replaced by an "app-based" paradigm led of course by Apple, with phones and pads as the device. The entry point is apps, not index search. Looking something up? Wikipedia; looking for your friends? Facebook; for career? Linked In; for travel? TripAdvisor; for a date? Match.com; for a restaurant? Yelp. The list goes on. Engaging, functional activity specialists provide the entry point, not generic, choked, difficult Google 1,238,411 search results. Power flows back to content and experience creators and monetizable and differentiated models are everywhere.
http://blog.ted.com/2011/11/12/6-ways-to-save-the-internet-roger-mcnamee...
End Game
"If you are stealing music, movies or other digital music, when you look in the mirror, you'll see a thief and have no one to blame but the one you are looking at."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
The IT Crowd - Series 2 - Episode 3: Piracy warningIf you don't want ours, buy someone else's.
How do I know you're not selling junk? Can I get a refund if I don't like it?
If there is something of high quality - I buy it. If it’s junk – I down load it. Just went through this the other day. I downloaded a movie and it was stooooopid, complete garbage, never even made it to the end.
You can try and stop it and try to fight it but you’ll never win. You may win a battle but you’re going to lose the war.
Theoretically, copyright was supposed to encourage further creative output, and not necessarily as a retirement system for superannuated artists, and their successors and assigns.
To justify the system we have now, you'd have to get ole Walt out of the chest freezer, cure his cancer, and prop him in front of a drawing board to make some more Steamboat Willie episodes.
Urban Roman
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/11/marveldisney-wages-petty-vic.html
Marvel/Disney wages petty, vicious war against Ghost Rider creatorBy Cory Doctorow at 3:17 pm Saturday, Feb 11
This much is certain: Gary Friedrich created the Marvel comics character Ghost Rider. Freidrich sued Marvel (and its new owners, Disney) because he claims that he never signed away the rights to his character, and thus the feature film based on the comic was illegal. Freidrich also apparently launched his own, rival line of authorized Ghost Rider merchandise.
Disney/Marvel has countersued Freidrich, claiming that the boilerplate legalese on the back of his paychecks were all the assignment they needed to assert ownership of his character. What's more, Misney has broken with the industry-standard practice of turning a blind eye to creators doing sketches of their own characters for money at conventions, and singled out Freidrich for punitive, retaliatory legal claims for doing what every artist in the field does.
Finally, Misney has sought to prohibit Freidrich from publicly identifying or marketing himself as the creator of Ghost Rider, on the basis of the ancient legal principle of fuck you I said so and I can afford more lawyers than you so shut up.
Marvel forces Ghost Rider creator to stop saying he's Ghost Rider creator
I'm starting to hyperventilate in anticipation of those new Steamboat Willie vids. Though I suppose they can't be on YouTube.
I recall seeing some underground art several years ago, clearly depicting popular Disney characters doing, um, biological things that weren't in an official release. Come to think of it, I followed a link from BoingBoing to that artwork. The site's probably not even on tarchive.org any more.
GW, be sure to introduce yourself when they march you past our cages in Gitmo; you can screw with the bankers, but nobody screws with MPAA and RIAA without paying.
You're half right. No one of us can screw with them. Let all of us stop buying for a month though, and they'll crawl back begging us to buy their (all too often) shit.
The bankster government has been cracking down with economic repression and picking winners and losers. The big boys in all sectors, not just the media, are just lining up to curry favor and be among the winners. There are Jon Corzines in all industries now and the rules do not apply to them and only enforced against their potential competition.
In the media, remember that the major news outlets and old media newspapers are pushing for $60 billion in taxpayer funded subsidies so they can survive. The major MSM outlets have lost 50% of their viewers in the last ten years. It will be a de facto government takeover and GOV.com media if government forces taxpayers to subsidize them. They already push the neo-fascist propaganda in hopes they can feed at the trough and survive.
THATS ENTERTAINMENT ......a fraud
I remember when Universal/MCA told James Garner that The Rockford Files lost money, despite an almost 10 year run; he sued and won. And one of the first, if not the first, fimmaker who went to CA to escape the Edison cartel was some guy named DeMille.
lamont cranston
http://www.deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-potter-pic-loses...
STUDIO SHAME! Even Harry Potter Pic Loses Money Because Of Warner Bros’ Phony Baloney Net Profit AccountingEXCLUSIVE: Signing a deal that makes anyone a net profit participant in a Hollywood movie deal has always been a sucker’s bet. In an era where studios have all but eliminated first dollar gross and invited talent to share the risk and potential rewards, guess what? Net profit deals are still a sucker’s bet. I was slipped a net profit statement (below) for Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the 2007 Warner Bros sequel. Though the film grossed $938.2 million worldwide, the accounting statement below conveys that the film is still over $167 million in the red. (Text continues below…)
I ran the data above by several attorneys and agents, who are so accustomed to seeing studio accounting wave magic pencils over hit movies that they weren’t surprised even a Harry Potter film that grossed nearly $1 billion would fall under the spell. Dealmakers say studio distribution fees are a killer, as are incestuous ad spends on studios’ sister company networks. They also cited the $57 million in interest charges, an enormous pushback on profitablity. Since Warner Bros didn’t invite in a co-financing partner on the Potter films, has the studio borrowed money from parent company coffers? Are they paying that interest to a bank, or to themselves? Bottom line: nearly $60 million in interest for the estimated $400 million required to make and market Harry Potter, charges carried for about two years, is a high tariff.
As one dealmaker tells me: “If this is the fair definition of net profits, why do we continue to pretend and go through this charade? Judging by this, no movie is ever, ever going to go to pay off on net participants. It’s an illusion to make writers, and lower-level actors and filmmakers feel they have a stake in the game.”
And yet Warner Bros isn’t doing anything differently here than is done by every other studio. Clearly, nothing has changed since Art Buchwald successfully sued Paramount over the 1988 hit Coming to America when the subject of net participation was scrutinized, and a judge called studio accounting methods “unconscionable”.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/whither-gold
Sat, 02/11/2012 - 23:59 | 2150276 caconhma
Vote up!4
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One must see this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc
"federal courts in California were also less eager.."
The good old days.
Thomas Edison: inventor of the light bulb, and patent trolling.
And direct current power distribution.
And leaving us with the <strike>appliance maker industrial powerhouse military contractor multinational financial institution bank</strike> bailout recipient GE.
Still brightening our lives in so many ways ..
Leave it Jeff Omelete to kill all ideas and be richer with no end in sight. GE, the scam company of the 21st Century
The Light Bulb Conspiracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5DCwN28y8o&feature=player_embedded
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When your business model is outdated, and management incompetent, its time to criminalize the competition and prove it.
Love, the [payola] 1%.
It was illustrative uploading. The createors of content are still beyond reproach, as is Congress.
Great piece indeed. The music industry will not be sorely missed
Great piece.
The European pirate parties actually have a lot correct.
Maximum royalties etc. should be nine years on anything ... after that, any book or movie or invention or anything else of this type, should be free for all the world, especially for all the world's poor, to enjoy and benefit from and use for their growth and enlightenment. At zero charge.
The only thing that should remain, is the simple right to have it accurately stated, WHO created a wonderful thing.
Really creative people - whose ultimate goal is to GIVE to the world - have no problem with this.
This is how it is already the case in Russian culture and in some of the Asian mentality already ... Your creation being pirated, means YOU are VALUABLE and people are glad to hire you and have you around.
Zero charge for Zero Hedge, or Washington's Blog, and look at all the GOOD they have done!
When you impose your will on others .. it changes giving into taking.