Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - More of your freedoms are being taken away

SecretMethod70 · 05-01-2003, 01:09 AM

Saw a related article today:

Quote:

Heading off film piracy

Movie trade group staying one step ahead in lobbying efforts

Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, April 28, 2003

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...8/BU269543.DTL

Three weeks ago, technology groups and digital rights advocates were startled to discover that the motion picture industry had successfully pushed legislation in several states that strengthened cable TV piracy laws.

Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Consumer Electronics Association claimed the new laws could potentially turn consumers into criminals. But just as alarming for these groups -- which are normally on top of such developments -- was the fact that they hadn't noticed that Hollywood had been pushing the bills since 2001.

Even critics had to begrudgingly tip their caps to the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's powerful trade group, for its sophisticated, multifaceted approach to protecting Hollywood from the kind of digital piracy that has put the recording industry on the ropes.

"These guys are everywhere," said Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights advocacy group in San Francisco. "They're pushing their agenda in places we haven't even begun to look at."

"Everywhere I turn over a stone, there's been a bevy of MPAA people who have been working that area for years," he added. "I almost never encountered that with the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America)."

The MPAA's efforts run the gamut, from joining arcane groups like the Content Protection Technical Work Group, which writes standards for future technology, to producing a series of antipiracy movie trailers, featuring stars like Ben Affleck, that are due in theaters next month.

The industry lobby has even stationed people with night-vision goggles in theaters to stop pirates from recording movies.

HOLISTIC STRATEGY

Indeed, the MPAA in the last three years has quietly crafted a holistic strategy to take charge of its digital future, said Scott Dinsdale, a former record label executive hired by the MPAA in early 2001 to organize its anti- digital piracy efforts.

For the $13 billion per year industry, it was a simple business decision: Take proactive steps to guard its valuable content or sit back and become subject to Napster-type assaults.

"The great foresight was watching the music industry go through the tunnel first and not necessarily recognizing that the light at the end of the tunnel was in fact a train," said Dinsdale, the MPAA's executive vice president for digital strategy.

The U.S. recording industry, meanwhile, has seen sales drop by nearly 14 percent since reaching a high of $14.6 billion in 1999. The international recording industry puts much of the blame for its three-year decline in sales on the rise of online file-sharing programs like Napster and its successors.

To be sure, the movie industry hasn't been immune to piracy. The MPAA estimates that studios lose more than $3 billion in potential revenue annually from piracy. The industry does not have an estimate for losses due to Internet piracy. One research firm has said as many as 600,000 films are downloaded each day, still a relative handful compared with the millions of song files being swapped online.

CUMBERSOME ADVANTAGE

Still, the movie industry has enjoyed a major advantage over its record industry counterparts because it's still technically cumbersome for most average consumers to share movies online as easily as they can songs. But Hollywood isn't content to rest on that.

Later this week, the focus of this continuing battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley will shift to San Francisco, as a federal judge considers arguments in a case involving a Missouri startup, 321 Studios Inc.

The company filed a pre-emptive civil suit against seven major movie studios to have a judge rule that its products, DVD X Copy and DVD Copy Plus, are legal ways for consumers to make a backup copy of a prerecorded DVD movie they already own.

The movie industry has prepared a strong legal challenge, with a team headed by Russell Frackman, the attorney who headed the record industry's successful bid to shut down Napster Inc. of Redwood City. The MPAA argues 321 Studios' products are blatantly violating copyright laws, especially the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

321 Studios' products aren't runaway mass consumer hits like Napster or its successors, but in Hollywood's view, the programs are a dangerous first step toward rampant piracy.

On another legal front, the MPAA and the RIAA were dealt a surprising blow on Friday when a Los Angeles judge ruled that the distributors of online file- sharing programs Grokster and Morpheus could not be held liable for copyright infringement. The movie studios and record labels plan to appeal.

However, lawsuits are only a portion of the MPAA's strategy.

BRIDGES NEEDED

The MPAA wants to make sure that as technology gives consumers new ways of seeing movies, the transition doesn't throw the economics of the industry out of whack, Dinsdale said.

"We need bridges to the next cliff, not just a canyon in between," Dinsdale said. "We always have to be thinking three to five years ahead of ourselves."

One such effort on the part of the MPAA is a series of bills critics have dubbed "super-DMCAs," complaining that they extend the reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Critics only became aware of this effort late last month, when telecommunications industry lobbyists in Texas and Massachusetts began looking at proposed amendments to state criminal laws on signal theft, legislation designed to make it tougher to steal cable TV signals, von Lohmann said.

The lobbyists discovered that similar bills, proposed by the MPAA since 2001, had already passed without opposition in six states -- Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wyoming -- and were pending in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee.

The amendments were based on model legislation drafted by the MPAA, banning the use or connection of any device to a communication service without the consent of the communications service provider.

The digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation claims that the bills as they are worded could allow cable TV providers to "limit subscribers to using only certain brands of VCRs and could ban TiVo in favor of their own proprietary PVR technologies."

Intellectual property attorney Evan Cox, a partner at Covington & Burling in San Francisco, agreed the bills were "tremendously open-ended and create theoretical and potential criminal liabilities for just about anybody on the planet."

They also cover future devices "that can't be imagined now," Cox said.

Critics like Electronic Frontier's von Lohmann say Hollywood is the "quintessential special interest group" and is using the threat of piracy to grab more control of every new technology. "It's not about piracy. It's about being able to control the pace and nature of innovation," he said.

News of the super-DMCA legislation also drew a sharp rebuke from groups like the Consumer Electronics Association, which represents about 1,000 electronics firms.

"These bills are wolves in sheep's clothing," the association's president, Gary Shapiro, said in a statement April 3. "It's clear that Hollywood's new strategy is to sneak around Congress and go to state legislatures, hoping to gain the anti-consumer restrictions that they have been repeatedly denied on a federal level."

By April 7, after meetings between consumer electronics makers, the MPAA and individual studios, the association softened its stance, saying it is hopeful the MPAA is ready to work on striking "the right balance between protecting against theft of service and interfering with other activity."

The MPAA has offered changes to the proposed amendments that would allow for legal uses of multipurpose devices and would require an intent to defraud to prove a criminal case.

DVD SUCCESS STORY

The MPAA's Dinsdale noted that the spectacular rise of the DVD is a good example of how dialogue between Hollywood and technology firms can benefit all parties. DVD players, now installed in more than 50 million U.S. households, were made possible by agreements in the mid-1990s between software makers, manufacturers and Hollywood that protected prerecorded DVD movies from illegal copying.

"DVDs are protected to the hilt," he said "It plays by the rules and ends up being a great consumer experience."

In another sign that Hollywood is trying to stay ahead of the curve, Disney Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner announced plans earlier this month to test a new digital video-on-demand service, now dubbed "Movie Beam," later this year.

"At Disney, we are mindful of the perils of piracy, but we will not let the fear of piracy prevent us from fueling the fundamental impulse to innovate and improve our products and how they are distributed," Eisner said in a speech at a broadcasters' convention. "To be blunt, if we don't provide consumers with our product in a timely manner, the pirates will."

Entertainment industry observers said his comments were significant because they sent the message Hollywood is ready to embrace new distribution technology.

This stands in sharp contrast to the strategy of the recording industry, which relied on obstructive litigation, "as opposed to creating a new business, " said Ryan Jones, an analyst with the Yankee Group. "Their attempts to solve the problem became more frantic, so they became less effective," he said.

Hollywood, however, doesn't face as immediate a threat because most consumers are still not ready or willing to download huge movie files, which can take hours, if not days.

"So that gives (the movie industry) time to figure out an elegant solution, " Jones said.

TYPES OF MOVIE PIRACY

Optical disc: Pirated laser discs (LD), video compact discs (VCD) and digital versatile discs (DVD) are inexpensive to manufacture and easy to distribute. In 2000, more than 20 million pirate optical discs were seized.

Internet: Pirates offer film files using online communication avenues such as chat rooms, FTP sites, newsgroups, file-swapping utilities and Web sites.

Videocassette: Illicit duplicating facilities often are capable of producing hundreds of thousands of illegal videocassette copies each year.

Signal: Pirates have made businesses out of supplying consumers with illegally tampered cable decoders or satellite descramblers.

Theatrical print: Though extremely rare, theft of a 35mm or 16mm film print allows the pirate to make a relatively high-quality videotape, which then serves as the master for the duplication of unauthorized videocassettes.

Source: MPAA

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.