Tag Archives: DRM

Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

Silliness

I pay for Prime Video, but I had to download Bosch S6 from other sources to watch it, as it’s not available in Australia at the moment, even though it was released in the U.S on April 17, 2020.

What the.

I paid for a PS4 game disc (the NBA one) and then the kids had to spend three hours downloading something from the PS4 web store before they could even play it. It sure takes the joy out of it. There is no way that you can just buy a game and play it straight away.

The game makers are using a legally purchased disc as a piracy protection measure. No wonder people download games illegally on jailbroken consoles as well. Look at the work they do to get around these measures.

Remember DRM (Digital Rights Management) platform Denuvo. They got a lot of game makers to sign on and pay huge amounts for its unbreakable anti-piracy software.

The game makers put this DRM on their games and then they released the games. The unbreakable DRM was cracked on the day the games were released. But some game makers got even more creative by putting on another layer of DRM to some of their games, which basically made the legally purchased game unplayable for the consumer.

What a great way to treat a law abiding customer?

But piracy is still an issue.

Yeah right. More like dumb organisations are an issue.

The major labels tried this exercise back in 2003 to 2005. They even went further. Those legally purchased discs had malware on them and if you put the disc into your computer it would install malware on your hard drive, which led to a class action lawsuit against Sony and the other labels.

I was catching up on some movies I purchased a while back. So I put on a legally purchased DVD or Blu-ray (in this case it was the movie “Children Of Men”) and I am confronted by those stealing movie ads. Remember those.

They would say, you wouldn’t steal a car so don’t steal movies because piracy is a crime. So the movie studios are creatively trying to link the downloading of copies to actually stealing a physical product.

And I can’t skip it. I need to watch it.

So this is the punishment that people get for doing the right thing?

No wonder people go and download illegally as the ads are removed and as soon as you press play, you get to watch. No advertisements and no copyright rules on a black screen.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Piracy

Musicians can’t be immune to reality – Say Hello To The Entrepreneur

Piracy can never be handled with a one size fits all business model. Each product that is released needs to have its own strategy to combat piracy.

Sending a million takedown requests to Google will not solve the problem. It is a waste of money and resources. Even a recent study by the Computer and Communications Industry Association challenges the long-held perception that search engines actively promote unlicensed content. According to the paper, even if all capability to search for pirate sites is removed, sites like Isohunt and The Pirate Bay would still survive.

So how will artists get paid?

If the artists’ works are copied, does it mean they need to be paid and if artists are not paid, is going after the people who shared their content going to get them paid?

The answer is NO. The only ones who get paid are the lawyers.

So if artists are not paid for the songs they write and record because, hey, they spent money doing these songs, so they should be paid. If they are not getting paid then the industry needs to get powerful people to write up laws that give those same powerful people even more power and we will say it is for the poor old artist who will still not paid.

In the end, once artists start looking for sales of their recorded music they start to become entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is an individual who organizes and operates a business, taking on the financial risk to do so. As an entrepreneur you have to offer something which somebody else wants to buy. If you want to make money you need to provide something of value that somebody else wants to pay for. I want to show the difference between the mentality of the majority of artists and a software developer.

John Saddington is a software developer from the U.S. He loves to snap photos of his life. As a WordPress blogger, Saddington grew restless with the services available for uploading images to his blog and the lack of ownership he had over them. So what did Saddington do? He decided to build his own iOS app. Read the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/toyota/2013/08/19/entrepreneur-develops-new-way-to-share-images-online/

Saddington started doing it part time, then went on a Kickstarter campaign, got backers/funding and has now spent all his time working on the app. By July 2013 it was in testing. He wants to monetize the app, however he wants to avoid advertising and purchases inside the application. Saddington is also looking for venture backers, however many are waiting to see whether the app gains traction after its August launch in 2014.

The last part of the story is a great piece of advice for any artist starting out:

“In the end I may be called a simple-minded fool, a perennial idealist that believes in a simple rule that seems to work quite well: If you reward and treat your users with respect and create exceptional value for them that they will return that in spades,” Saddington said. “The challenge is finding a way to extract that tangible value without offense. That’s the entrepreneur’s challenge, that’s their mission, that’s the goal. It’s a noble one, at the very least.”

The reason why I am highlighting the above example is to show artists the amount of work that has gone into this iOS application and there is no guarantee that it will make any money apart from the $56K it got from KickStarter. However a lot of misguided musicians and record label executives believe that just because they spent their time and money writing and creating a song they need to be paid, over and over and over again for it.

Musicians can’t be immune to reality. If they want to stay in the game, they need to innovate on the rules that came before. NOT FOLLOW THEM. Innovate on them. Great artists innovate. Entrepreneurs innovate. Entrepreneurs take what has come before them and create something new. Hell, that is the Steve Jobs model.

Singing generic songs about relationships and heartbreak over and over again is death. How many times is David Coverdale from Whitesnake going to search for love or ask for love to be given or to be in love? Is there any motivation to create something different.

Knowing how to play and writing a song is not enough these days. The public needs a point of view, something of substance. Musicians need something to say. This is getting harder in an era where people are concerned more about stardom. Just because music saves your soul and rocks your world it doesn’t mean that the rest of the population is interested.

Dream Theater recently had a listening party in New York. In the show bags given out, the attendees got a CD. Those CD’s had the attendees name on it. It also had a certain form of DRM. The only way to play the CD was via a good old fashioned stereo. If the disc was put into a computer CD tray it wouldn’t play. You can say that this is a way to control any leaks of the album.

So let’s just say that if I put the CD through the stereo and plugged the stereo output into the computer. I think I would be able to record the music on my hard drive. I also believe that it would be decent quality.

Or let’s just say that if I put the CD through the stereo, cranked it, had the microphone out and recorded the album into the computer. I think I would have a pretty decent recording on my hard drive as well.

So what Roadrunner Records would have done is given some company a lot of money for this form of DRM and charged it back to the band. To be honest it can be easily circumvented if people WANTED to do it.

Piracy is hard to be stopped however it can be competed against. Piracy is a service issue. Pure and simple.

Read this story from the Economist. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21583688-internet-really-so-different-phonograph-pennies-streaming-heaven

The internet is just another disruptive service to the entertainment industries; you know like the time that the VCR was going to destroy Hollywood. Instead the VCR opened up a whole new ownership and rental income stream for Hollywood. Or when Cassette tapes came out and home taping was said to be killing the music industry. With all new technologies, the entertainment power brokers try to destroy it at first. When they release that they are going to fail, it then becomes part of the new market. In 2012, recorded music had its first year of small growth.

Music-streaming services will reduce piracy. The free option is already there for Desktop users. It is ad supported. The next step is to move this free option to smart phones as that is where the market and subscriber base resides. Otherwise, you will lose the customers to YouTube, which is unlicensed.

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Copyright, Music

Creative Accounting = Piracy Losses

There is an excellent post over at the excellent Techdirt that talks about DRM’s in gaming and how it really doesn’t stop people from copying the game, however what it does do is hinder the real paying customers.

The part that got my attention is the comments about the losses due to piracy.  I am one of those people who doesn’t believe the crap the MPAA, RIAA and others spin on losses due to piracy.  If a movie comes out that i really want to watch, i will take my family and pay $80 to watch it.  If a band releases a song or an album that is worth buying, i will buy it.  There are also the bands that i buy before i even listen to a song.  I have a PAY TV subscription, that doesn’t cater for my needs and timetable, however i still keep it.

The reason why I am mentioning all of this, is that there are millions of others that are just like me.  Fans of art.  Fans of culture.  However, we the FANS of art are ignored by the legacy industries and their stupid lobby groups.  We the FANS are the PEOPLE and we form the PUBLIC.  We the PUBLIC are not mentioned when the legacy industries try to extend copyright or pass stupid far-reaching bills like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, CISPA, etc…

In the post, the Super Meat Boy developer mentions that, “Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.”

That’s the whole argument in a nutshell.  How many profit and loss statements or balance sheets are issued that show a loss due to piracy.   How can the record labels or movie studios quantify accurately what a piracy loss is, so that it can be an audited item on a balance sheet.

Commentor Josef Anvil suggested the following;

Since lawmakers have swallowed the “loss” argument from the content industry and want to pass more enforcement, then they should walk the walk.  They should begin allowing companies to write off their piracy losses on their taxes every year. One year of that and we would see if governments actually believed in those “losses”.

Can you imagine that?  A few years back the MPAA stated that piracy losses amounted to $58 billion.  Imagine the taxman seeing that amount as a loss on a profit and loss statement from Disney.  I am sure it will raise a few eyebrows.  Do you reckon the losses that Bon Jovi will get on their new album What About Now is due to piracy or due to a really bad album? 

What about the losses Disney suffered on John Carter?  It’s funny that when a movie is really bad the talk about piracy disappears.  $200 million is a lot of money to lose.  Let’s blame piracy.  The money that EA Games is going to lose over its stupid DRM on Sim City. Let’s blame piracy.  The money that Bon Jovi is going to lose over its crap album.  Let’s blame the pirates.

I remember seeing that Transformers 1 (T1) and (T2) where the most pirated movies over Bit Torrent.  Guess what T1 made $710M and T2 made $840M.  T3 wasn’t even on any all time torrent list and it made $1.3 Billion.  Why is that?

Maybe because the people that downloaded a torrent of T1 and T2 became fans and paid to watch T3.  Maybe those little kids that downloaded T1 and T2 because their parents wouldn’t take them to watch it, became fans and are now old enough to go to the cinema on their own and watch it.

One thing is certain, piracy is a load of bullshit, designed by the lobby groups so that they can get stupid legislation passed that puts them back in control of the distribution.

 

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