Category: Piracy

MPAA Forges Voluntary Anti-Piracy Agreement with Donuts

We’re about to start seeing a lot more diversity in web names.  With its slogan “welcome to the not com revolution”, the Bellevue, Washington based Donuts is the largest provider of new domain name registrations with uniqe extensions that offer site owners more options to express their identities via their URLs.  For instance, the company has over 67,000 registrants with the extension .GURU; and as described on their website, Super Bowl 50 was a “coming out party” of sorts when viewers were directed to visit GodsofEgypt.MOVIE to learn more about the release of this major motion picture.

This morning, Donuts has also placed itself at the forefront of OSPs taking voluntary measures to mitigate large-scale online piracy.  In a joint announcement with MPAA, the two organizations have forged a voluntary agreement, which outlines specific conditions under which the MPAA will be treated as a “Trusted Notifier” when reporting sites registered with Donuts that are engaged in large-scale piracy.  Conditions of the agreement place the burden on the Motion Picture Association to provide clear evidence of large-scale piracy of the works it is ahtorized to represent; and it must make a good faith effort to make direct contact with the site registrant prior to notifying Donuts.  Once presented with a referral, Donuts maintains the right to act at its own discretion in determining whether or not the site registrant is “clearly devoted to clear and pervasive copyright infringement” in violation of their Acceptable Use and Anti-Abuse Policy, in which case it may put the domain on hold or suspend it.

Both copyright interests and digital rights activists should applaud this voluntary measure, which could serve as a model for other rights holding entities to adopt similar agreements with major OSPs.  In principle, these private-sector agreements provide tangible options for mitigation of large-scale piracy, but their voluntary nature and structure should mute the usual hew and cry of “slippery slope to censorship” that tends to come with legislative proposals. Absent the opportunity to invoke the boogeyman of “government”, it would seem that any complainants about voluntary measures of this nature will have their rationales reduced to just admitting that they like piracy. At least that would restore some refreshing honesty to the discussion.

Ultimately, this type of voluntary measure is a positive step forward for consumers. The Web has grown fast, and the major designers of our experiences and engagement with digital life have, in a a matter of years, attained the kind of market dominance that historically takes decades.  And that’s fine.  But while scaling rapidly in a free-for-all, Wild West environment is exciting, makes happy shareholders, and yields all manner of free apps and platforms for consumers, we are also lately beginning to recognize significant weaknesses that come with adopting a purely laissez-fair approach to the digital market.

When search results lead users to a nest of clickbait and malware; when advertisers lose value in the digital ecosystem; when seeking information becomes algorithmic manipulation; and when digital predators can exploit the environment to do anything from wasting your time to invading your privacy to taking your money, then the Web fails to be what we need it to be.  OSPs, major businesses, consumers, and start-up entrepreneurs all have a stake in a sustainable digital market; and voluntary measures are an expression of that mutual interest.

Russian Filmmaker Sees Piracy as Path to Obscurity

With few exceptions, a short film has almost no market value today.  Certainly, a short can be the occasional prelude to work that might have market value—either as a calling card for the filmmaker or as a “proof-of-concept” draft for a would-be feature.  But in general, most of the best short films are in a category of their own—conceived and executed as purely artistic expressions with small audiences and limited avenues for revenue-based distribution.

So, when a short film is nominated for an Academy Award, it’s a really big deal.  Particularly at a time when the Academy is justifiably being criticized for a lack of diversity among feature-film nominees, the shorts, documentaries, and foreign films are at least three Oscar categories in which recognition is better immunized against the PR machine that influences the bigger movies.  Almost more importantly, the festival circuit matters a lot. It’s where a short can be seen on a big screen by audiences who truly love cinema, including fellow filmmakers with whom the film’s creator wants to network.  All of this activity ultimately produces more great works through various collaborations and exchanges of ideas.

As reported this week, Russian filmmaker Konstantin Bronzit is literally begging fellow Russians not to pirate his Oscar-nominated short We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, after a festival screener was stolen, digitized and uploaded onto Russian social media.   Of course, Bronzit’s plea isn’t about financial loss, but rather that his film can be disqualified from various festivals around the world.  This is because many of the major festivals have fairly strict entry requirements, limiting the types of exhibition a film is allowed to have before being shown at their venues. And on this matter Bronzit’s choice of words as they appear in the Hollywood Reporter are revealing:

Bronzit called on Russian users to stop illegitimate distribution of We Can’t Live Without Cosmos. “Without festival play, the film will just go into obscurity,” the director said. “Save my film and my work of four years.”

Obscurity.  I’ve heard that word somewhere before. It’s that market purgatory from which piracy supposedly rescues all manner of creative works.  We’ve heard the cliché repeated many of times, even by some creators:  “My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”  Yet, here is a filmmaker who offers one very concrete example as to why piracy can damn his film to obscurity, even if lots of people see it online. Counter-intuitive?  Not if you understand the filmmaker’s needs or can at least respect them. Clearly, the standard rationalization for piracy—the rich movie studio trope—doesn’t apply to Bronzit, and since the filmmaker himself is saying he doesn’t want piracy’s “promotional help,” maybe that particular justification for “sharing” his film doesn’t hold water either.

Meanwhile, Adam Leipzig reports for Cultural Weekly, that a new study on the estimated cost of piracy to independent film reveals measurable, economic harm.  Because these smaller films can expect relatively narrow margins–a factor I have cited repeatedly on this blog–the conservative estimates used in the study reflect tangible losses of what Leipzig calls “life and death money for an indie filmmaker.”

Of course, what Konstantin Bronzit’s story throws into sharp relief—and this a basic concept piracy apologists simply cannot seem to grasp—is that what the media pirate and its users do in every single case, regardless of money, is rob the author of his right to choose.  And, if the sanctimonious, faux-progressive, sharing-economy piracy proponents can produce a rationalization for doing that, maybe it’s time they just admit they don’t give a damn about the works or their creators.

On Piracy and Promotion

Charlie:  Dad, how can you hate The Colonel?

Stuart (Scottish accent):  Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly, Smart Ass!

– So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) –

As mentioned in much older posts, my father was an advertising professional, principally a creative director but also a manager.  And one lesson he preached to his colleagues, employees, students, and even to his clients was that good advertising can only sell a bad product one time.  In particular, there was one client I remember that probably danced with every agency in Los Angeles at one time or another, convinced that a fresh campaign could sell a particular offering to a certain audience they were simply never going to attract.

I think Dad’s axiom remains sound. If consumers really don’t want something, advertising can’t make them want it—at least not more than once.  In fact, I imagine this principle is more acutely understood in the digital age, given the diffuse nature of all communications; scattered consumer attention; and the capacity of social media to provide rapid-response word-of-mouth that either endorses or criticizes a specific product or service.  This does not mean, of course, that advertising is unnecessary.  Apple, which is arguably in a class by itself as a brand, also had a reported advertising budget of $1 billion as of early 2013.  Anyone who thinks Apple can just turn that spigot off and let social media platforms enable consumers to “market for them” is smoking both ends of his crack pipe.

Interestingly, marketing a theatrical feature film is a bit like selling a product just one time. The production cost of big movies can be so high and the attention span of the market so brief, that opening weekend, box-office revenue has become an even more critical threshold for many films than it was just ten years ago.  Naturally, Hollywood studios did not create the pressures of this market alone; they had help from the same digital technologies that today provide us consumers with myriad other options to entertain ourselves on any given weekend—or even the opportunity to pirate films rather than to see them in theaters.  So, yes, the marketing urgency is fraught with the need to capture the fickle audiences that remain willing to go to the movies. But advertising is still not going to drive consumers to do anything they don’t want to do.

Nevertheless, a strange, complementary sentiment to the trope that piracy is good for promoting movies is one that wants to believe that the official marketing of theatrical features is nothing but a grotesquely expensive effort to “cram lousy entertainment down people’s throats.”* Some readers may immediately notice the contradiction that if the entertainment product itself is assumed to be lousy and unwanted, there’s really no point in discussing its promotion, either by traditional or piratical means. Yet, this rather obvious hypocrisy is overlooked when the pirate user or promoter effectively says,  “I hate Hollywood and its terrible movies, and besides piracy is good for promotion.”

Surely, if both of these statements are true, then one would want to avoid “helping” the industry one hates. But of course both statements are not necessarily true; and in a macro sense, neither statement is true.  If millions of viewers had, for example, no interest in seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, these same uninterested viewers would surely not be eager to watch ripped versions of the film on little screens. No, the reason the widely reported, pre-release piracy of this movie was a big deal is because the film is already a big deal—and it’s not the piracy that made it big.  Tarantino’s track record and his cast of famous actors were not exactly suffering from obscurity when the group calling itself Hive-CM8 decided to leak the film ahead of its theatrical release. And the suggestion that this kind of blockbuster film needs the pirates to “promote” their movie is adorably silly.

Fueling this rationale, though, it seems it has become more common for consumers—or at least piracy apologists—to feel they have been “ripped off” whenever a film is disappointing.  This trend, if it is a trend, is a strange way to approach the experience of moviegoing.  A film isn’t a fifteen-hundred-dollar appliance you rely on in your home every day; it’s two hours of entertainment shared with family or a date or friends.  It’s an experience that, even if it’s bad, provides a basis for discussion or thought or criticism or ridicule. I say this as someone who likes far less mainstream fare than many viewers; and so I don’t really understand the “consumer protection” attitude being applied to entertainment through the filter of rationalizing piracy.  After all, I would never walk into an Avengers film expecting anything other than spectacle and fight scenes and banter; but I would also never walk into a Spike Jonze movie thinking, “Man if he doesn’t deliver as well as his last film, I’m going to demand my money back.”  That just isn’t how it works.

When I took the family to see the new Star Wars film, I was exactly as entertained and ambivalent as I expected to be because I have never been a big Star Wars fan (cue hate mail). Yet, despite knowing this about my expectations when I entered the theater, I didn’t haggle with the guy at the ticket booth and say, “Look, I’m only half as eager to see this film as that dude wearing the wookie shirt, so I think I should pay half price.” Neither did I go see The Force Awakens against my will because its marketing made me do it. General curiosity and something to do with the kids is ample reason to go to the damn movies.

Cultural experiences, whether high or low-brow, don’t come with warranties. They are, by nature, experimental.  And, it’s very rare to find creators who produce great stuff without also producing not-so-great stuff. Meanwhile, audiences differ on their views about the “best work” anyway. So, as with most advertising, motion picture marketing is largely about letting consumers know the product is out there, while a prospective viewer often knows his/her own interest level the moment a film is announced to be in pre-production or even development.  Beyond that, it’s a huge damn gamble, and when it comes time to release, the marketing professionals are asking themselves, “How do we get a critical mass in the seats on opening weekend?” But they still know that if that first wave of viewers walks out tweeting “This film sucked,” that’s the ballgame.  A $100 million investment that can be DOA in a single night—whether you love or hate the film itself—is a marketing challenge predicated on exactly the opposite logic of “forcing” unwanted products onto the consumer. It’s knowing the consumer will make or break you with the swipe of a thumb and praying you’ve met or exceeded her expectations.

If piracy were really about promotion or exposure, then the pirate sites would ignore Hollywood blockbusters and pre-releases of big films—which are apparently all bad products “forced” onto the public anyway—and the most-pirated films would be independent, small, and obscure works that are simply never going to be hugely popular. (Not that I advocate pirating these works; I’m simply alluding to a hypocrisy in the promotion argument.)  I recognize of course that there are viewers who use pirate sites to access harder-to-find or “out-of-print” titles, but if the piracy market were limited to these audiences alone, the entire ecosystem would shrink by orders of magnitude overnight; and this whole conversation would be very different.  As it stands today, though, there would be no movie piracy without Hollywood blockbusters; and those films really don’t need help with their marketing.

*One finds this theme more often in comments sections than in the body of articles and posts, but it is not an uncommon theme.