Category: Piracy

Producer De Laurentiis of “Hannibal” Speaks Out Against Piracy

Veteran film and TV producer Martha De Laurentiis was on Capitol Hill yesterday to take part in an event called Meet the Producers, presented by CreativeFuture in conjunction with the Creative Rights Caucus.  Specifically, De Laurentiis has been motivated to speak in opposition to the false belief that piracy doesn’t cause harm to real people.  As the executive producer of the hit TV series Hannibal, she notes in a corresponding OpEd in The Hill that the show was the fifth-most illegally downloaded program and suggests that the level of piracy was just enough to contribute to the cancellation of the series after three seasons.  “With more than 2 million viewers watching our show illegally, it’s hard not to think online pirates were, at the very least, partly responsible for hundreds of crew members losing their jobs and millions of fans — who watched the show legitimately — mourning the loss of a beloved program,” writes De Laurentiis.

To put two million viewers in perspective, a hit like The Daily Show has had roughly one million regular viewers at its peaks. So De Laurentiis is hardly being whimsical when she implies that Hannibal had technically earned enough viewers to sustain itself, but that if too many viewers choose unlicensed platforms, they can kill off production.  Above all, I’m glad to see De Laurentiis focus her attention on the skilled workers who make these shows happen.  The “small screen” is indeed enjoying a golden era, with writing and production values that were historically the exclusive bragging rights of feature films.  But nobody should kid themselves into thinking those production values are cheaper to achieve today because of digital technology.  They’re not. And anyone who says otherwise simply has no idea what the hell he’s talking about.

The number of skilled technicians involved in achieving a specific look, mood, and style—and then maintaining those qualities consistently for the hours of footage that become a TV series—would still surprise most viewers. Their names go by in credits we don’t read, in type that can’t even be read on a tiny screen, if that’s how you view; but there is absolutely no way to produce quality shows without these people. And some of their skills take years to develop under the apprenticeship of master technicians and craftspeople.

Skilled workers don’t get cheaper over time, and neither should we want them to.  We want wages for everyone, no matter where they work, to keep up with the cost of living. To wish otherwise is self-destructive.  And, as I have tried to argue in the past, killing off otherwise viable TV shows through piracy isn’t just about the shows themselves; it’s about the lighting crew guy in your neighborhood who tightens his belt and doesn’t patronize your place of business as a result. It’s how we kill a whole segment of the middle-class economy.  And we have enough problems in that regard as it is.

We know what the middle-man pundits usually say to observations like those of De Laurentiis.  They say, “adapt”.  They say, piracy can’t be stopped, so change the business model to adapt to the market we have.  But there is only on rational response to these voices, and that’s to tell them to shut the hell up.  These people are idiots, and it’s time for more professionals who know what they’re talking about to call these pundits out for their idiocy.  If with my zero years of experience in aircraft manufacturing, I told executives at Boeing that their supply chain management needed retooling, I would sound like an idiot.  That’s what people who’ve never been anywhere near a film or TV production sound like when they say “adapt”.

Martha De Laurentiis is herself a part of film industry royalty, if you will.  The widow of legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis, cynics and piracy-apologists could choose to dismiss her as just a member of the Hollywood elite. But where does that excuse get us exactly?  If there is to be film and television at all, there will be producers and executives and studios and networks of one type or another. And these producers will still need to hire thousands of skilled workers with years of training in lighting, camera work, production design, wardrobe, make-up, post-production, and the management skills to oversee the insanity of coordinating all the many departments into an on-time, on-budget delivery of the show you want to watch.

I’ve been on a fair number of shoots. And whenever these have been location shoots, I’ve noticed a consistent habit among passers by.  Film crews attract a crowd, but people rarely stop for long because they quickly realize there’s nothing to look at most of the time. It’s a bunch of people doing what seem like uninteresting tasks; maybe a guy is carrying some cable while another adjusts a light by an inch and half; a handful of people are discussing the next setup or a change in the schedule; a few guys wait on the backs of open trucks while some grab coffee.  If it’s really exciting, the 1st AC is marking focal points on the lens while the DP looks through a filter at the clouds passing overhead. If onlookers were able to watch a montage intercutting among each individual or group doing their jobs, it would seem fast-paced, which is how it feels as a member of the team.  But the wide shot from the outsider’s view is usually slow and static. It’s like watching a construction crew. It’s just a bunch of people working hard, doing things that not everyone knows how to do. And it’s the only way this stuff winds up on the screen.

New Study Indicates Piracy is Not Promotion

Last month, I shared some thoughts on the subject of piracy as a tool for promotion, and I won’t repeat all that here.  Suffice to say, I’ve never understood why this particular argument has ever be taken seriously—other than the obvious reason that it offers a plausible sounding rationalization. But, even without thinking too deeply about the matter, just the anecdotal evidence hardly seems to support the premise at all.  Major works like blockbuster movies, which remain the most pirated content, don’t need piracy for promotion; if piracy only promotes to other “consumers” who also don’t pay, it’s a weak argument to make in the first place; and of course, there remains the inescapable logic that if the producers’ of the work didn’t ask pirates to promote for them, it’s not really a service, is it?

Still, the preposterousness rages on in the blogosphere, with any number of writers presuming to school creative producers in the orthodoxy of the future, including vague suggestions to “harness the power of piracy” rather than seek to eradicate it.  It’s a silly and often circular argument because, of course, nobody has ever really studied the comparison between direct loss vs. promotion attributable to piracy.  Until now.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have, for the first time, compared the effect of cannibalization (i.e. box office losses) with the effect of promotion due to to piracy.  Conducted by Liye Ma, Alan L. Montgomery, and Michael D. Smith, their findings reveal that although piracy does have a promotional effect on actual sales, this positive is substantially outweighed by the negative effects of cannibalization.  Comparing both effects to the counterfactual of a market without any piracy at all, the study indicates that, without piracy, producers would have seen a 15% ($1.3bn) increase in box-office sales for the period from 2006-2008 and a 14% increase from 2011-2013.  Meanwhile, their findings indicate that piracy-related promotion contributes to 1.5% of current box-office sales.  So, piracy puts a little bit back, but nothing compared to what it takes away.

As with my post about the Singapore Study, I cannot comment with any authority on the methodologies use in this report.  My last math class was in the 11th grade, and I don’t know what this means:  X = ⎡⎣U C S+ S− I R ⎤⎦ʹ But the study’s conclusions do jibe with the common-sense assumption that black markets probably harm legitimate markets.

What Exactly Does the EFF Want?

As stated in my post announcing a voluntary agreement between MPAA and domain-name service Donuts, both rights holders and digital rights proponents should applaud this kind of B2B approach to mitigating online piracy.  That doesn’t mean I thought the latter parties actually would applaud it. And with the stalwart predictability of a honey badger, Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation fired off this missive, eager to criticize the agreement just hours after it came out of the shrink wrap.  The conditions of the agreement are so straightforward that it seems to me any honest acknowledgment of its terms might have stayed Stoltz’s hyperbolic pen before describing Donuts in this context as the “copyright police” or before beginning his post as follows:

“The companies and organizations that run the Internet’s domain name system shouldn’t be in the business of policing the contents of websites, or enforcing laws that can impinge on free speech.”

Right off the bat, Stoltz misrepresents the process as described in the agreement.  Donuts will not be “policing” any content at all.  Instead, the agreement outlines very specific conditions under which the MPAA may send a referral, backed by evidence, to Donuts regarding a domain that is “clearly and pervasively” engaged in large-scale piracy. At that point, Donuts has full discretion to choose to investigate further and to consider taking mitigating action consistent with its own Terms of Service.  That’s not quite the same as engaging a private company to “enforce the law” as Stoltz states. It is a voluntary effort by a company to uphold or comply with the law in its practices, which is consistent with the internal policies of corporations all over the world.  So, why is the broader rationale different with a domain name service provider? I know.  Because the Internet is special.

Meanwhile, shutting down, delisting, or blocking sites dedicated to enterprise-scale piracy via court-ordered injunction has occurred repeatedly for at least 15 years, and yet free speech has endured. So, it is hard to imagine how the free speech calculus changes if a private company—which has a clear, vested interest in keeping domains online—decides to not support a specific enterprise engaged large-scale infringement. But as we’ve seen in other contexts, the EFF is a place where imaginations run wild.  For instance, Stoltz writes:

“Taking away a website’s domain name means interrupting all of the speech that takes place on that site. It creates a much greater danger of censorship than suppressing individual pages or files. And the domain name system only works so long as most Internet users trust it to direct them to the websites they ask for, not only those that politically connected companies and repressive governments want them to see. That’s why domain registries and registrars shouldn’t take part in policing the contents of websites and services. And that’s why we’ll continue to fight the website-blocking power grab.”

So, here’s the bottom line of the agreement vis-a-vis Donuts’s role, with some important words in bold:

If Donuts is satisfied that the domain clearly is devoted to clear and pervasive copyright infringement, Donuts may, in its discretion and as permitted under its Acceptable Use and Anti-Abuse Policy, suspend, terminate, or place the domain on registry lock, hold, or similar status as it determines necessary to mitigate the infringement.

I have to admit the ability to translate that into “interrupting speech” or to invoke “repressive governments” is actually something of an art-form.  The EFF should probably give an award for Best Post Making a Mountain out of a Molehill (of course, I’ve never been invited to one of their dinners, so maybe they do).  Anyway, is Stoltz actually suggesting that if Donuts—and by extension other services—were to suspend domains under these types of guidelines, that this is a slippery slope toward censorship by order of a repressive government?  Why? How? Which repressive government?  China?  The Web is already massively censored in China, which is a human rights issue that has nothing to do with the mechanisms in this type of voluntary, anti-piracy initiative.

Here’s a news flash:  free speech doesn’t exist in several other countries.  And where free speech doesn’t exist, it cannot be infringed or chilled; it is instead a right yet to be won—a struggle largely separate from the exigencies of either Hollywood studios or Silicon Valley Internet companies, though both industries have a vested interest in a world where speech ultimately prevails. Meanwhile, in this country, there can be consequences for actually stifling someone’s speech, so Donuts has legal and financial incentive to proceed with due diligence in regard to any referral it receives. Moreover, it will be the case that any domain meeting the standards for referral by the MPAA will be an enterprise-scale infringer operating in a foreign country–not somebody’s blog.

Speech simply does not belong in this discussion, but since it is the perennial excuse for piracy, I think it’s worth mentioning, that piracy champions love to say that no measure can stop the major infringing sites because they will always move around the Web; but this same observation is never made about free speech itself, which is considerably more agile and infinitely larger in scope. The EFF might notice that there are trillions of expressions made every hour on the Internet, and no legislative or private-industry measure—at least in this country—is likely ever going to stop that.

At the same time, we might also keep in mind that the platforms we use for most of this speech–like the one I’m using right now–belong to corporations, and corporations sometimes fail.  In this regard, the EFF might consider that the Internet it so staunchly defends can be corrupted by piracy, which has been linked to malware and other scams that harm users and weaken the faith of advertisers in the digital ecosystem. After all, the major Internet companies don’t have hundred-million-dollar valuations because they’re platforms for free speech; they’re valued in the stratosphere because they are advertising and data mining businesses. And that’s fine, I guess, but let’s shed the illusion that these sites are run on principle.  Wall Street doesn’t invest in principle. They like money.

In this regard, I have to call particular attention to Stoltz’s statement that “the domain name system only works so long as most Internet users trust it to direct them to the websites they ask for ….” Indeed. But it’s disappointing that the EFF does not acknowledge the loss of trust in the system that occurs when search for quality information or legitimate resources yield top results that include piracy and SPAM.  At the very least, the user’s time is wasted; and at most, clicking on these links can expose him to malware leading to identity theft and other hazards. Perhaps more benignly, we know that in walled gardens like Facebook, our feeds are no longer chronological but rather represent what that company’s algorithm has determined we “want” to see.  And similar manipulation of results in Google search “tailored” to our apparent preferences continues to be studied as a means to influence political debate or effect the outcome of an election.  If the EFF wants to fuss about free speech, these seem like far more acute areas of focus than the hypothetical shutting down of a handful of criminal operations.

And so, I return to my lead question:  What in blazes does the EFF want?  They don’t like law-enforcement remedies for online piracy, and they apparently don’t want to see voluntary cooperation between OSPs and rights holders either.  At a certain point, it seems we have to conclude that what they want most of all is to maintain their relevance by constantly finding a problem for every solution.