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United Press International - NewsTrack - Entertainment - 'Spider-Man 3' opens in China before U.S. Annotated
As international day-and-date releases have become more popular, the openings for U.S. films released in China, instead of trailing U.S. opening dates by months, have moved steadily closer to simultaneous release.
Hollywood studios are choosing to open anticipated blockbuster films in China on or near their worldwide premiere dates to thwart piracy efforts, Yuan said. Despite government crackdowns, pirated DVDs of first-run movies are widely available on China's streets for less than $1 a copy.
Viacom Asks YouTube to Remove Clips - New York Times
In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming...
The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far...
YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.
These developments are important to note, but the following comment jumped out at me and formed a synergy of thought about intellectual property and property rights in an age where the frontier no longer exists and natural resources of the world have become scarce.
"They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, " said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.
It is no secret that totalitarian governments like the one in China use filtering software designed and sold by western companies, headquartered in liberal democracies.
I am not suggesting that Google’s use of filtering software in the context of this New York Time’s article is totalitarian. It’s not. The thoughts that flowed within me after reading the article and which will follow do not directly relate to the content of the article itself.
NB I do know Google's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is complicit when Google agreed to filter the Internet in order to secure their place in the oxymoronic "opening" of the Chinese market(s). Who knows? I suspect they rationalize that their decision to do so is part of China's long term transition to liberal democracy brought about by the eventual increase in the economic and consequent political power or the Chinese middle class: in other words, a slow revolution or political evolution. That model is certainly documented in human history. I hope they are right.
In terms of any technology, for example, it is not the knowledge of how to split the atom that creates ill, it is the contextual use of technology that creates both good and evil.
More to my ultimate point, I was more struck by the description of the filtering technology's application and the way in which its reference in the article further illuminated to me my own age and its philosophical dilemmas.
Perhaps, the mention of filtering technology describe within reminded me of how its benign application for Google could be used in other contexts. Certainly, Viacom has the right to protect its intellectual property however it wishes. But what about this notion of intellectual property and ideas itself, the life blood our political and economic discourse?
The rise of fundamentalism and the changing post "Cold War" world order has been studied and described by others more accomplished than me, including Samuel P. Huntington in his "Foreign Affairs" essay and then book, The Clash of Civilizations.
News, media and politics are interdependent organisms...and certainly many political scientists focus on their relationship to one another both in terms of the political cycle of nation states (elections), but also their political economy, in other worlds the market place. The West increasingly depends on sectors like entertainment, research and development, and defense for its continued economic growth, and its overall political economy is direct responsibility for much of the West’s political stability and power.
We live in an age where entertainment and defense are curious bedfellows. For example, entertainment software, as I have said elsewhere on this site, drives the technological development of the processors used by the defense sector.
I have never heard anyone, however, flesh out the dilemma of Locke's notion of property rights in his "Second Treatise on Nature" (the philosophical underpinning of our own democratic republic is this notion of property rights) vis a vis intellectual or abstract property rights, central themselves to our creative economy, the underpinning of the West's continued economic growth.
When intellectual property becomes the central driver of our economy, as it has, and the organs of information that distribute that property are consolidated (as they naturally are. See Creatonomics), what does this mean for the average citizen? For those who poo poo these ideas as too high brow for the mass, or somehow separate mass culture from the philosophical debates of our time, I say, “Forget the forest or the trees, you, my friend, are missing ecosystem of the forest.”
Will our citizen own his plot of land in the media and entertainment landscape, or will he be forced to rent space from the company owned tenement, distribute his goods by the company owned railroad, and buy his supplies from the company owned store? What does self-protection, natural to Locke’s notion of natural rights mean for the individual and social group within society?
More importantly, the growing factionalism of our political discourse and the ceaseless polemics of extremist ideas are not simply a rehashing of polemics from times before. These extreme polemics are manifest because of the underlying conflict and philosophical dilemmas of our time, the repercussions of which are experienced through every organ of society, including its central organs of information and ideas, mass media, entertainment, and art.
There is no save haven or neutral space for the tolerant in a world with less resources and no frontier to escape to. This is the philosophical dilemma of our age and we must understand the dilemma as such. Our liberal democracy depends upon it. Our economic innovation, which drives our nation’s wealth, also depends upon that neutral and open space.
The role of art, information, propaganda, and communication are the new frontier and the battleground in our ‘New World of Information’. Is there an alternative to the increasing space that extremist polemics take up in our nation’s intellectual life? Any alternative must ultimately float the complex tensions of political correctness and fundamental secularism that is equally damaging, in my opinion, to the fabric of our society.
Understanding these questions is the work of my generation and those living whose experience and wisdom can guide our society’s safe passage. There are always consequences, even to inaction, so the focus of those who are interested need not be filled with petitions for the lazy.
When the pilgrims came to North America, they were escaping religious persecution in the Old World. A war of ideas is not new to human history, the epoch that we are in, however, is critical to the very existence of those organisms that we take for granted in the West.
I continue to look to the former dissidents of eastern bloc countries, like the former Czechoslovakian, Vaclav Havel, 'playwright and antipolitican' later president of the democratic Czech Republic, for insight into the post-modern world order.
For example, Havel wrote in the 1981 in his famous essay the "Power of the Powerless” about the post totalitarian state: where ideology is the tyrant (not the Politburo) and how the line of complicity runs through each citizen, including the grocer who puts up his seemingly benign poster which states, "Workers of the World Unite".
All of us live in interesting times, but those of us involved in media have a tremendous responsibility for those who come after us. I look forward to investigating and understanding these questions myself and in the timely work of my generation and others more capable and experienced than me. More on these ideas later.
Excerpts:
"Fears of fueling the rampant movie piracy business in places like China and Hong Kong likely prevents Apple from offering movie downloads in most of Asia."
"Licensing agreements also have caused problems for Apple, as recording labels in Japan have shunned iTunes in favor of other outlets. A weak presence in the rapidly expanding Asian Internet market keeps Apple from profiting from that userbase."
"'We cannot comment on the specifics but it is true that iTunes is not available in Asia,' Tony Li, Apple's marketing director for Asia, said Wednesday. 'That goes for music and movies.'"
"Without iTunes in Asia, there is little motivation for consumers there to purchase an iPod. China's Internet userbase has been estimated at over 100 million people. It's hard to believe there aren't enough of those users willing to try iTunes and buy an iPod to make it profitable for Apple."
Apple rules out iPod movies for Asia - Yahoo! News
Excerpts:
"The California company launched the latest addition to its hugely successful Music Store online download service in the United States this week, offering scores of movies old and new owned by the Disney corporation."
"In the Asia-Pacific region, iTunes is available only in Australia and Japan, the world's second largest consumer of music after the United States. Even in Japan, some labels have refused to allow their songs onto the service."
"The new movie download service will allow US users to buy current movies for 12.99 dollars in the first week of release and 14.99 dollars after through the iTunes programme. Archived movies will sell for 9.99 dollars."
"So far only movies from Disney -- including films from Pixar, Touchstone, and Miramax studios -- are available but other companies are in negotiation to provide content."
"Through iTunes, Apple has about 70 percent of the music download market."
MySpace, YouTube targeted by Universal Music Group
Excerpts:
"YouTube and MySpace may be next on the music industry's hit list, according to Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris. Labelling them "copyright infringers," Morris said that the label has plans to deal with the popular web sites and their hosting of infringing videos."
"YouTube "respects the rights of copyright holders," according to the Copyright and Inappropriate Content section of its Help Center. However, it puts the onus on its users to ensure that the material they post is not infringing. Given the type of content available on the site, it's clear that users aren't too concerned about who owns the rights to the material they are uploading. That said, YouTube readily takes down copyrighted material once it is notified."
"The law does provide some protection for both YouTube and MySpace. Since they merely host material, they fall into the category of online service providers under US law, which gives them some basic protections under the DMCA. Once presented with the infamous DMCA Takedown Notice, YouTube and MySpace can avoid further trouble by immediately removing the infringing material."
"Questions of profitability muddy the water. If YouTube and MySpace are shown to be profiting from hosting infringing materials, then the liability question may have a different answer. If the labels can demonstrate a financial loss from the infringement, then the sites' defense becomes a trickier proposition."
"Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the situation is that YouTube represents a huge opportunity for the record labels. The massive amounts of older and obscure music videos available on the site—as well as newer stuff—demonstrates that there is an underserved market here. The question becomes whether the interested parties will be able to come up with a way to profit from the demand or whether the goose that lays the golden eggs will be served for dinner instead."
In the same article Wallace goes on to say:
Rupert Murdoch, who in early 2004 gave a speech proclaiming that "the potential for China to become a new global center for media and entertainment is slowly becoming more real." By last September, one month after Beijing's decision to re-tighten regulatory controls on foreign media, Murdoch was publicly lamenting that News Corp.'s China business had hit a "brick wall." When it came to foreign media, he complained, China's political leadership was "quite paranoid about what gets through."All this reminds me of what Simon Cowell remarked to Larry King in March this year when asked about the prohibition of "American Idol" like shows in China. Says Cowell:
"Well, because it's a democracy, isn't it? You know, I mean, it's the public voting. So you can understand why they're getting slightly nervous about it. Because it wasn't our show in China, it was the laughing cow, so-and-so, so-and-so competition. And the public got to vote. And suddenly there were demos, and it was democracy. And I think the government went, we don't want this. So then they put out a stupid comment like that. You know? It's that we must control the public. Crazy.
I am not a China believer, yet. AP reports on Chinese TV stations rampant piracy.
Chinese filmmakers accuse TV stations of film piracyExcerpts:
BEIJING — Chinese moviemakers are accusing Chinese TV stations of becoming part of the nation's thriving movie piracy industry.The Chinese Movie Copyright Association says TV stations here air up to 1,500 pirated Chinese movies a year, costing studios up to $9.4 million in lost revenues, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.
Digital trail on silver screen
Excerpts:
Hrithik Roshan’s latest flick, Krish seems to have opened a new digital window for Bollywood. As it mopped up Rs 70 crore in the first week of release – considered the biggest opening in the history of Indian cinema – it is leaving a trail behind.
Analysts predict a big part of tinsel town’s growth, expected to touch Rs 15,000 crore by 2010, will come from digital cinema and multiplex boom in the country.
Digital cinema server makers embed Thomson watermarking - Hardware - www.itnews.com.au
Excerpts:
Digital cinema server manufacturers are embedding forensic watermarking technology from Thomson to protect movies shown in theaters from being pirated.
Servers from Doremi Labs have already begun shipping with Thomson's NexGuard technology, while GDC, QuVis and Tamedia are finalising the processes.
The technology embeds date, time and place of projection into the digital movie image and soundtrack as the movie projects on the theater screen. The information is picked up by the camcorder trying to record the movie, said Pascal Marie, Thomson's vice president for Content Security.
QuVIS vice president of engineering Michael Paulson says the company evaluated a few watermark technologies, including Philips, and thought Thomson's matched their architecture best. "We had to modify the audio portion or the server," he said.
Thomson requires a specific audio digital signal processor, so QuVIS created a new audio module in the server that will install into movie theaters.
How'd they know I downloaded Meet the Fockers? By Daniel Engber - Slate Magazine
Excerpt:
In general, the movie and recording industries search out illegal file-sharers by hiring security firms to monitor popular file-sharing communities and report back on any activity that appears illegal. A company like MediaSentry, for example, will hop on to a file-sharing network and start searching for specific files. (The client provides a list of copyrighted material to check up on.) Investigators use customized versions of standard torrent trackers to sniff out the IP addresses of anyone who makes a given file available. Then they'll take snapshots of all the other files those users offer. They may also try to connect to one of these targets to see if they can make an illegal download.
Guardian Unlimited Business | | MTV hooks up with Google
MTV is to supply segments of its programmes to the thousands of websites and blogs affiliated with search giant Google.
Excerpts and Highlights:
Questions had been swirling for months about whether the upstart, which now dishes up 100 million daily videos, was crossing copyright boundaries by letting its members upload videos with little oversight. What was surprising was that it was an individual who fired the first shot -- Robert Tur, an independent photographer famous for filming the 1992 Los Angeles riots -- instead of a big Hollywood studio or major music label.
Brute force copying of HD DVD and Blu-ray successful
Excerpts and Highlights:
Still, any form of encryption is only as strong as its weakest link. This was made clear earlier this year when the Xbox 360's extremely strong encryption scheme was bypassed by a modification to the firmware in the DVD-ROM drive. Now, according to the German technology magazine c't, it seems as if the strong protection on both HD DVD and Blu-ray movies has been worked around by not attempting to crack it at all.
Wired piece on Shaw Hogan, who chose to fight an MPAA lawsuit against him for allegedly downloading intellectual property on BitTorrent.
From the piece:
"This has left several controversies unresolved, including the lawfulness of how the associations get access to ISP records and whether it’s possible to definitively tie a person to an IP address in the age of Wi-Fi.
Hogan, who coded his way to millions as the CEO of Digital Point Solutions, is determined to change this. Though he expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it’s a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. “They’re completely abusing the system,” Hogan says. “I would spend well into the millions on this.”
Of course, the MPAA isn’t backing down either. “I hear Mr. Hogan has said, ‘I’m absolutely going to go to trial,’ and that is his prerogative,” says John G. Malcolm, the MPAA’s head of antipiracy. “We look forward to addressing his issues in a court of law.” Look for a jury to weigh in by next summer."
Excerpts:
Beginning on Tuesday, March 21 in Las Vegas, the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) will host a technology booth at TelecomNEXT, featuring several companies who will display some of the latest online distribution platforms and filtering tools which could assist the telecommunications industry and play an important role in the emerging legitimate digital content distribution markets. This is the first time that the MPAA has had a presence at this event which is important in bringing business and technology of communications and entertainment together.
Representatives from Audible Magic, BitTorrent Inc., CacheLogic, Peer Impact, Red Swoosh and Thomson Content Security will be on hand to demonstrate methods their companies have developed to facilitate legal online movie distribution and to protect copyrights in a digital environment.
Since its inception as catalyst for cinema’s transformation from black and white to color, Technicolor’s history now spans ninety years in the motion picture industry. Even as parent, Thomson, leverages the rainbow’s magic brand to advance its digital cinema venture, Technicolor still processes over five billion feet of motion picture film a year. DreamWorks, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century Fox have all signed agreements to use digital projection systems from Technicolor Digital Cinema on five thousand screens in the United States and Canada; and under the terms of a strategic understanding with Century Theatres, Technicolor will begin to install digital projection equipment with a beta-test deployment of ninety to hundred-and-twenty screens, in the first quarter of 2006. With an initial rollout plan for complete digital projection systems on up to five thousand DCI-compliant screens over the next three to four years, Thomson intends to deploy at least fifteen-thousand digitally-equipped screens in the United States and Canada over the next ten years.
As president of Technicolor Electronic Distribution Services, Joe Berchtold is responsible for the strategic development, growth, and operations of the Thomson Services division worldwide, including all aspects of Technicolor’s digital cinema initiatives, on-demand content, and IPTV distribution services. Since joining Thomson in 2003, Berchtold has been co-head of strategy and acquisitions, leading key initiatives that include the acquisition of DirecTV’s set-top box business; the company’s investment in Content Guard with Time Warner and Microsoft, where he now sits on the board of directors; and the forging of an agreement with VeriSign to jointly develop an online content authentication and authorization service bureau to support secure delivery of electronic entertainment content over digital networks.
Alexa O’Brien
Do you think digital cinema will reverse the declining box office trend?
Joe Berchtold
Well, I think that the hope of that is what has driven a lot of the energy behind digital cinema over the past year. I think people have come to realize that the savings from digital cinema on the cost side are some ways out, and the real opportunity here is the top line. It's getting customers back. If you think about a movie theater as a retail business, it’s among the most constrained retail businesses you can imagine from a merchandising standpoint; because as a physical reel of film is tied to a physical room, there’s just no flexibility. Digital inherently creates a lot more flexibility. People are talking about some of the things. You can add more screens. You can move screens. All of which will help on the margin. But, we also think, and I’m not creative enough, but we also think that five years from now, what are some of the most creative people in the world going to have figured out to be able to take advantage of this technology?
