Last week, London-based NetNames released a report entitled Sizing the piracy universe, which reveals substantial evidence that piracy of entertainment media increased substantially over a 15-month period of study. The author of that report is Dr. David Price, Director of Piracy and Counterfeit Analysis at NetNames. Dr. Price was kind enough to take about an hour of his time for ...
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch (Paul Newman) sits astride his horse outside the same boxcar of the same train he’s successfully robbed over and over. Frustrated by the railroad owner’s ceaseless but futile attempts to thwart the hold-ups, Butch proclaims, “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing ...
Piracy only hurts big corporations, so who cares? That’s how the saying goes, but then I don’t understand why so many corporation-hating “file sharers” insist upon giving Google free money, especially when Google is bigger than all the major Hollywood studios combined. The report conducted by Milward Brown Digital contains this observation in its executive summary: 58% of queries that ...
Since the days of Napster, the technosenti have been insisting that the entertainment industry simply needs to stop complaining about copyright theft and innovate. Setting aside the fact that exploitation is not a form of innovation, I like to remind people that with regard to filmed entertainment, the technology for reliable, high-quality streaming is about five years old, which may ...
Attorney and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig considers the current copyright system to be generally antagonistic to contemporary culture. In fact, any number of common assertions about copyright’s supposed obsolescence in the digital age are very likely derivative of something written or said by Lessig, who has devoted a fair amount of energy promoting the value of the remix. In at ...
