Tag: piracy

Why Does Google Love Piracy?

In yesterday’s post, I referred to the Android-based service called Google Now, which is about as close as your mobile device comes (so far) to reading your mind and anticipating your wants and needs.  By gathering data from contacts, emails, destinations visited, searches made, etc. the algorithms applied by the Now service essentially learn a user’s interests and then prompts him with what Google calls Cards, containing information or recommendations that may be either general or timely.  As Andy at TorrentFreak reports, “Google Now and its ‘Card’ notifications often pop up at the most opportune times, offering advice about things that haven’t yet happened in a users [sic] life – but are about to.”

As stated yesterday, I cannot personally imagine the benefits of this type of service outweighing the utterly invasive ickiness of it, and Andy also acknowledges that Google Now may be getting too close for comfort for many users.  But the headline reason TF was citing the service is that one of their regular readers noted that Google Now had recognized his interest in the character Deadpool and so delivered a Card recommending that he can view the recently-released feature film on a major torrent site. Andy writes, “Obviously there isn’t a team at Google hand-crafting Google Cards designed to promote unauthorized torrents. However, this does appear to show that Google’s algorithms are smart enough to put together interesting advice based on multiple and diverse information sources.”

Right.  Google surely is not “hand-crafting” Cards to promote piracy; but as usual, it isn’t making any effort to mitigate it either.  I know. I get it.  If the user shows an interest in Deadpool and also regularly visits torrent sites, Google’s algorithm is going to cross-reference these data and somewhat blindly produce the result described.  But that doesn’t mean the search giant doesn’t have the capability to limit or even stop themselves from pushing infringing sites like mints at the drug store register.  We know they have this capability.  In fact, I bet a user could read dozens of articles about human trafficking all day long without ever once receiving a Google Card suggesting where he can buy a slave.  (Please let me be right about this.)

Google is apparently addicted to pushing mass copyright infringement at every opportunity.  The difference between a search yielding legal and informative results about Deadpool and a search yielding a list of infringing sites offering the film hinges on whether or not you put the word “watch” in front of the title.  And even if nobody cared about the fact that this multi-billion dollar company is effectively pushing content theft, it also happens to be offering really crappy search service. I mean heaven forbid a user who isn’t attuned to the darker aspects of the Web simply wants information about a movie, and Google has decided that if he uses the word “watch” in his query, he gets to be vulnerable to links that are increasingly loaded with malware.  That’s cracker-jack service from the biggest search engine in the world.  But Google Now takes the problem a step further.  Rather than the user explicitly searching for information, and then navigating around useless and predatory results, Google Now can actually push a recommendation that is not only illegal, but potentially hazardous to the user.

More broadly, what does this story say about the larger promise of these platforms to create new opportunities for commerce and entrepreneurism?  Because an interest in a hot new film like Deadpool is an opportunity to drive a consumer to comics, merchandise, fan sites, or (call me crazy) any number of legal platforms to watch the movie! So, any prompt that would send the consumer to a torrent site is pure opportunity cost for the legitimate market.  Considering how leading-edge applications like Google Now really are, it seems like a one hell of a precedent for the company to set given all their pretensions to be great innovators.  Then again, this is SOP for Google, isn’t it?

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.