Piracy is so bad, according to the MPAA, that we need special legislation to target the dastardly college pirates who are destroying the business. It's so bad that Weekly Reader subscribers will learn about the $7 billion a year "lost" to Internet piracy. It's so bad that the MPAA wants ISPs to ignore years of common carrier law and the promises of "safe harbor" and start filtering their traffic, looking for copyright violations.
The real world isn't quite this simple, of course. It turns out that the MPAA's college numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came after years of hiding the study's methodology but continuing to lobby Congress with its numbers. There's no possible way that the MPAA can truly know what it "lost" to piracy, either, as it has no real idea what percentage of downloads would have resulted in sales. And, with the notable exception of AT&T, no other major US ISP has publicly entertained the idea of filtering traffic.
Certainly the MPAA has the right to fight illegal downloads of its material, and it certainly has the right to go after those making a profit by ripping off its DVDs. But the rhetoric around "piracy" (a term used far too broadly) simply doesn't fit with reality. If piracy is killing the movie business, it's doing so in exactly the same way that home taping killed the music business in the 1980s.
Swapping movies over the Internet was more of a niche practice back in 2001 as bandwidth constraints made it impractical for many. Certainly it's much simpler now, and advanced P2P protocols like BitTorrent (combined with free trackers like The Pirate Bay) make it relatively simple. But the movie business did $9.63 billion at theaters alone in 2007, a substantial increase over 2001's $8.13 billion. US box office has also risen for the last two years, and international growth rates have been much higher and more constant.
DVD piracy and file-swapping pose problems for the industry, no doubt about it, but the entire issue deserves to have the rhetoric scaled back a bit. As Dan Glickman, the MPAA boss, admitted, "Ultimately, we got our Hollywood ending. Once again, diverse, quality films and the timeless allure of the movie house proved a winning combination with consumers around the world."
So break out the champagne (for the MPAA execs) and the dog biscuits (for Lucky & Flo); home taping didn't kill the music business, and file-swapping isn't destroying theatrical revenue.
Full Article
Thursday, March 06, 2008
The little Miss Sunshine
Hard to find in reality a family so unblessed.
The grandfather is a drug addict, the wife's brother a broken gay who tries suicide, the son mute since years for reaching the goal to become a pilot and later finds out he will never be able to because he is colours blind, the father who tries desperately to prove that losing in life is just a matter of not believing in oneself and inconsequentially goes bankruptcy.
All together they travel 800 miles in an old family van to bring the daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant "Little Miss Sunshine".
Hard to believe the van breaks on the road, the father dies for an overdose, while they manage to arrive a few minutes later, when the admission to the contest is closed.
In the name of the strength of the "winning spirit" the father, on his knees, manages to be able to admit the small daughter, who, trained by the sex obsessed grandpa performs in an indecent dance.
Conclusion: they have to agree to "no any more pageant in California" to get out free of charges.
It is a true elegy to the "in spite of", and the proof that, whatever you believe, life is hard and luck or no luck, it is not enough to believe to fulfil your dreams.
Defeat of goals, but victory of family's love.
Patrizia The Movie Whisperer
The grandfather is a drug addict, the wife's brother a broken gay who tries suicide, the son mute since years for reaching the goal to become a pilot and later finds out he will never be able to because he is colours blind, the father who tries desperately to prove that losing in life is just a matter of not believing in oneself and inconsequentially goes bankruptcy.
All together they travel 800 miles in an old family van to bring the daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant "Little Miss Sunshine".
Hard to believe the van breaks on the road, the father dies for an overdose, while they manage to arrive a few minutes later, when the admission to the contest is closed.
In the name of the strength of the "winning spirit" the father, on his knees, manages to be able to admit the small daughter, who, trained by the sex obsessed grandpa performs in an indecent dance.
Conclusion: they have to agree to "no any more pageant in California" to get out free of charges.
It is a true elegy to the "in spite of", and the proof that, whatever you believe, life is hard and luck or no luck, it is not enough to believe to fulfil your dreams.
Defeat of goals, but victory of family's love.
Patrizia The Movie Whisperer
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
The music of the wind
One of the sounds I love is the sound, better, the music of the wind.
How can you listen to it?
With a wind chime.
It is something you usually hang out of your home, made by hollow or solid metal or wooden tubes, meant to be played by the wind.
They can be made also with other materials like bamboo, and be a good example of fine crafter's work like the beautiful wind chimes of Unique Outdoor.
The ones I like best are the glass type.
They remind me of the old crystal "Drops Lamps" and the sound is quite "ethereal".
There is nothing nicer than closing your eyes and dreaming at their music, while sitting in your garden.
And the loveliness of their song comes with the beauty of their stained glass.
The rainbow of colours sparkling with the sun's rays is the perfect match of the lovely sound.
How can you listen to it?
With a wind chime.
It is something you usually hang out of your home, made by hollow or solid metal or wooden tubes, meant to be played by the wind.
They can be made also with other materials like bamboo, and be a good example of fine crafter's work like the beautiful wind chimes of Unique Outdoor.
The ones I like best are the glass type.
They remind me of the old crystal "Drops Lamps" and the sound is quite "ethereal".
There is nothing nicer than closing your eyes and dreaming at their music, while sitting in your garden.
And the loveliness of their song comes with the beauty of their stained glass.
The rainbow of colours sparkling with the sun's rays is the perfect match of the lovely sound.
Google: the value lies in the page view
"Google's corporate philosophy is based on the model which brought them success: organizing and giving away other people's content, creating space for advertisements in the process.
The enormous success Google found with that model in the search engine business spurred it to try and impose it in every arena. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless.
No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you're selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer.
And ultimately the content is valued at nothing. And here, finally, is the larger problem posed by Google's actions. Books are not in any important sense user-centric. Whether or not a book has readers matters little. Books stand on their own, over time, as ideas and creations. In the world of books, it is the ideas and the authors that matter most, not the readers.
That is why the copyright exists in the first place, to protect the value of these created works, a value which Google is trying mightily to deny.
As much as any other American business, Google is the corporate embodiment of the Internet's first principles. And as with so much else on the Internet, the promise of Google Book Search lies somewhere off on the horizon, while the dangers it poses today are very real."
Hiawatha Bray
Technology Reporter
Boston Globe
The enormous success Google found with that model in the search engine business spurred it to try and impose it in every arena. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless.
No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you're selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer.
And ultimately the content is valued at nothing. And here, finally, is the larger problem posed by Google's actions. Books are not in any important sense user-centric. Whether or not a book has readers matters little. Books stand on their own, over time, as ideas and creations. In the world of books, it is the ideas and the authors that matter most, not the readers.
That is why the copyright exists in the first place, to protect the value of these created works, a value which Google is trying mightily to deny.
As much as any other American business, Google is the corporate embodiment of the Internet's first principles. And as with so much else on the Internet, the promise of Google Book Search lies somewhere off on the horizon, while the dangers it poses today are very real."
Hiawatha Bray
Technology Reporter
Boston Globe
A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: March 4, 2008
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government...
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall’s sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him....
Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control “over a great deal of speech — none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.”
“OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,”
Published: March 4, 2008
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government...
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
Either way, there is no dispute that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall’s sites without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him....
Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control “over a great deal of speech — none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.”
“OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,”
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