MPAA : Criminals, redux

From IMDB Studio Briefing:

The MPAA has set up a decoy website aimed at snagging pirates, according to the website blorge.com (whose motto is “technology with attitude”). According to the website, Media Defender, operating on behalf of the MPAA, has set up a site dubbed MiiVi.com that offers “fast and easy video downloading all in one great site” including software that it says speeds up the downloading process. However, according to blorge.com, the software actually searches the computer for other copyrighted files and sends the information back to Media Defender.

Yet another example of an illegal tactic being used by the entertainment industry (if you look at the legal precedents in which accessing another person’s computer is tantamount to criminal trespass. I don’t personally think this is totally legitimate, but if it applies to one group (hackers) it certainly should apply to another (the entertainment industry). Also, this ignores the fact that it is perfectly legal to have copyrighted files on your computer. While the entertainment industry doesn’t like to admit it, it is legal to rip CDs and DVDs for personal use.

Technorati Tags: mpaa, media defender, filesharing

File this one under RIAA: Cluelessness of

I wrote a really fun paper last semester for Faye Ginsburg’s Anthropology of Media class on Google Idol (see some of my del.icio.us links here). I got really into Henry Jenkins’ work on participatory culture and ended up heralding these types of sites as examples of new fan-created content that moves beyond derivative works and towards entirely creative and interesting new types of media.

In a brilliant scheme guaranteed not to anger anyone, the RIAA has decided that lipsynching YouTube users are a huge threat to their rapidly sinking profits and have started sending C&D letters to violators. Let me see, how can I make this more clear?

1. The lipsynchers obviously already own the song if they are lipsynching to it.

2. They are obviously fans of the song.

3. They are basically doing free promotion of the song.

4. Nobody in their right mind would *not* buy a Backstreet Boys CD because they had a copy of the Two Chinese Boys lipsynching to it.

5. Everyone already hates the RIAA, and even Hilary Rosen has stated that she thinks suing customers was a bad idea (no!! you think??). At a time where forward thinking companies are starting blogs to talk directly to their consumers, holding remix contests (see the Pretty Girls Make Graves video contest on YouTube), working with Google Idol to promote their songs, and the like, cracking down on fifteen year old girls lipsynching to Little Mermaid lyrics is stupid, counterproductive, and just plain mean.

I will be glad to see these companies crumble and die. They deserve it.

class presentations

My “Values Embedded in Communication Technologies” class had the first half of our final presentations yesterday and they were really excellent. Two of my classmates analyzed Napster (the first, dearly-departed P2P network, and the second, mostly ignored pay-to-rent service) from the perspective of Yochai Benkler, who wrote The Wealth of Nations. I haven’t read this book, but from what I understand, Benkler divides economies into two kinds, the network information economy (new model), and the industrial information economy.

Network information economy:

1. Fosters critical and self-reflective culture
2. Promotes individual freedom
3. Is a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere not hyperbolic or anything
4. Is a platform for better democratic participation

Industrial information economy

1. Centered in collecting information
2. Engaged in cultural production - I’m assuming this means the economy is engaged in cultural production. I think I need to read the book to understand this.
3. Focused on the manipulation of symbols

Their analysis was astute and it made me write a little chart in my margin:
Napster –> Audio Galaxy (which I loved) –> Soulseek –> Torrents
Am I missing anything? I was never a big Limewire fan.

Michael Gallope and Betty Ng presented on iTunes and Michael presented a very Benjamin-esque analysis of the application.. he’s a PhD student in ethnomusicology and he classified iTunes as a postmodern technology of consumption.

If we assume that modernity is represented by the Phonograph, popular around the turn of the last century, we can classify music consumption as collection, whereas iTunes, as a technology of post-modernity (I prefer the Giddens classification of late modernity, but I know what he means) is about being a librarian of your own music collection. Whereas the physical object of the CD is posited to have authenticity intrinsically (by existing), what happens when this is transformed into an object in a database without an external referent?

I also liked his discussion of music and identity. It used to be that you’d go into someone’s apartment or dorm room and squat down next to their music collection to see what they had. I’d hide my cheesy CD’s (Marilyn Manson if you must know) so prospective swains wouldn’t see them and taint what I had carefully cultivated to be a strong indie music collection. And now you have no idea, unless you go through their iTunes, and we all assume that you have mp3s of stuff you don’t like that much. I have the entire LedZep discog in a moment of nostalgic weakness for high school, for example. I also liked the point that in iTunes you can create your own genres and classification systems, and that you can publish your playlists to your coworkers or wifi’d coffee shop denizens.

And me? I presented on ID 2.0, which is coming along okay. I still have some data collection to do. I spent a ton of time last week puzzling over Infocard, and all I can say is.. are you kidding? I’ll post my full critique later, but it’s really hard to imagine that customers are going to go for this technology. It’s way too Microsofty, not very cool, and seems to add another level of complexity for the user without protecting against some of the identity issues that are the most annoying. I can’t say I’m very jazzed about LID or SXip either but at least they’re not an entire other layer of infrastructure that everyone will have to slog through just to browse around. Obviously I have issues besides usability, but I think that very few people in this space are really considering the user in all this. And not the user like me or like your friend who works at Microsoft, the user like your mom or your grandpa. More later.

using the internet

I’m writing a book review of the classic internet ethnographic study, creatively titled The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, by Daniel Miller and Don Slater. Despite the nondescript name, the book is a very rich text about internet use in Trinidad. The authors find much higher internet penetration rates than they had expected, and they find that Trinidadians (at the time) used the internet in a very wide variety of ways, in cybercafes, at neighbors’ houses, with friends. They write:

This degree of diffusion was impressive, but does not convey the shock of walking past the yard dogs in front of a squatter’s corrugated iron-and-plank built hut with no running water in order to ask the self-evidently daft question, “Do any members of your household use the Internet?”, only to find oneself in a very well-informed conversation about email, paying for computer courses, career prospects in IT and library access.

I’ve been thinking about the way that internet use is embedded in people’s lives. I know that now that I work at home, I surf the net in an entirely different way than I did when I was a 9-5er with plenty of free time on my hands. When I’m laptopping around the country, I use the internet very differently from when I’ve just got my machine on so that my giant torrent of The Amazing Race Season 3 can finish up. Anyway, I was reading this article¹ by John Carey on how people actually use the web, and I came upon this paragraph:

Lifestyles of people in the study group had a strong impact on how and when they usethe Web. Consider first a group of three recent college graduates who shared anapartment in Manhattan. They have very hectic and irregular schedules. On any given evening, one might be at a gym; another out on a date; or the three of them might be visiting a local sports bar. Much of their media use moved later into the evening and their apartment was crammed with media options: multiple televisions, PCs, cellphones, videogame consoles and MP-3 players. They also had broadband access to the Web and a wireless network. To reach them, media had to fit flexibly into their irregular schedules because they might not be available when regularly scheduled media were playing. Television was limited by having a schedule; the Web and other media such as videogames were generally schedule-free and therefore fit more easily into the routines of people with hectic, irregular schedules.

This basically describes me and everyone I know. Let’s look at TV: there are a few people I know who will make sure they see a certain program, and make it part of their weekly routine: folding laundry while watching Desperate Housewives, for example. But for most of the people I know, there are two options:

1. Pay for a DVR
2. Get all your media from the web.

Since 2 is basically free, since we all have broadband anyway, there’s not much compelling reason to do 1. When I’m watching TV on my computer, it becomes just another website that I’m looking at, often in a corner of the screen, movies and TV shows from past and present, US and abroad, cult and mainstream, cable and network are all undifferentiated.

I read something recently which referred to the “post-network” era of American broadcasting, which I think describes right now just fine. I don’t remember the last time I watched a sitcom. I watch a fair amount of TV: I download Grey’s Anatomy, Veronica Mars, the Amazing Race, and the Sopranos every week, and I work through the back catalogs of other shows that interest me. All of those shows, by the way, I got into by watching them on the web first (with the Sopranos, it was Netflixing DVDs, since it launched pre-torrent). This means that of all my friends, even if we’re all watching a show, one person is likely to be catching up on back DVDs, one person may TiVo it and watch it day of, and I may be three weeks behind because I haven’t bothered to download the torrents yet.

I’m more than happy to see the era of network TV lumber to a close, which may be hypocritical, because I still want to get entertainment products that I like and watch them when I want to. If I could pay a $10/mo fee for all-internet TV, with no DRM and total time-shifting, I’d probably do it just for the convenience, and because then I could watch shows that I really like, such as Made, which are never on the torrents.

But back to the internet: it becomes so hard to differentiate types of “media” from one another. Going physically to the movies, to me, is a fun activity to do with friends that displaces going to a club or a show if we’re feeling tired or there’s something really cool on. It’s not like I choose between going out to the movies and watching TV. Internet, video games, TV, DVDs are all kind of part of the same thing for me, and since I’m online most of the time, I’m usually working, taking a brief surfing break, working, watching an episode, working, etc. This is a pattern of media use that just doesn’t fit within old media models.

Big Media seems to be slowly stumbling into the sunlight and realizing they need to regroup; I have to say that the TV studios have been a lot less assly about P2P than, say, Jack Valenti or the RIAA. Anyway. Back to book review.

1.The Web Habit: An Ethnographic Study of Web Usage Patterns. Carey, John. Conference Papers — International Communication Association, 2005 Annual Meeting, New York, NY, p1-18.

Comedies of Fair Use Conference at NYU April 28-30

Lots of cool people I know are working on this. If you’re in the New York area, worth stopping in.

The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University will host “Comedies of Fair U$E: A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars,” Fri., April 28 through Sun., April 30 at NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall (100 Washington Square East at Washington Place). The conference will feature copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, artist Art Spiegelman, filmmaker Errol Morris (“Fog of War,” “Thin Blue Line”), novelist Jonathan Lethem, essayist Lewis Hyde, U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, and dozens of others. It is sponsored in association with the NYU Humanities Council.
Read the rest of this entry »

Blogs I’d Like to See

BitTorrent Blog:
Picks out cool or unusual torrented content (this week featuring the UK version of “Project Catwalk”; tomorrow a rare copy of “Decline of Western Civilization Part II”); keeps track of new trackers or tracker closings; announces new torrent accessories like TvTad or if Tape It Off the Internet ever launches.

YouTube Blog:
Same thing. I guess that Screenhead already does this, sort of, except they tend toward the funny/juvenile and I’m more interested in rare commercials and music videos and scenes from Saved by the Bell.

The good thing about really wanting something on the internet is that given enough time, somebody almost always creates it.

Theater owners to Steven Soderbergh: Drop Dead (not really)

Steven Soderbergh (director and tiara favorite) is releasing his next movie in theatres, on DVD and on TV simultaneously. “Bubble”, which was shot on high-definition film, cost only 1.6 million and is about “a murderous love triangle at a small-town doll factory. “In Wired, he pointed out that movies are already pirated the day they come out (think of “zero day” releases on .torrent networks) and that he wants to take control of the process. He also maintains that the audience that will go see a movie on the big screen will do that no matter what, and won’t compete with the DVD market. Considering that film companies make more money off DVD sales than they do theatrical releases, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Except to theater owners, who aren’t happy with this at al. They are threatening not to show the film if he continues with this strategy.

My friend’s boyfriend is a filmmaker who maintains that the current studio system is on its way out. The decrease in big-budget moviegoing (which the studios have been lamenting about ad infinitum), combined with the increase in ease of self-distribution, will lead to a 70’s esque system in which almost all pictures are independent releases. At least, that’s his theory. He explained to me that the cost of distributing physical film reels to theaters is so great that once movies switch to digital distribution, it will greatly facilitate self-distribution, as well as decreasing movie budgets in general. With Netflix and torrents, most of us have access to a far greater array of films than we did five years ago, when you were pretty much stuck with whatever was at your local video store (and we all know about Blockbuster’s charming practices of censoring films and not stocking, say, gay-interest flicks). Soderbergh is very smart and forward thinking to be at the forefront of this change, and I’m not surprised that theater owners are balking.

Once more with feeling: The public is not responsible for propping up a failing business model. Adapt or die out.

Breaking News II: Don’t be dickly to your customers

I love this Fortune article on the anime industry and how its success is at least partially due to its close relationship w/ fans and customers.

Examples:

• Attending fan conventions
• Hiring fans as consultants for adaptations
• Not shutting down fan webpages (hey FOX)
• Not suing their customers (hey RIAA)
• Allowing respectful filesharing, and even studying that filesharing to see what’s popular and what they can make more money off of releasing on DVD (hey every single television network in history, maybe this is a good idea?)

And naturally this has made them lots of money, even with piracy, the threat of video games, greedy customers, filesharing, or whatever other heap of garbage the motion picture and recording industries are claiming is the cause of their rapidly sinking profit margins. What a shock.

(What’s that you say? DRM is causing record labels to lose money? No kidding. (This article is mostly anecdotal, but meanfriend in the forums makes a good point (slightly edited for clarity):

Online vendors like Amazon will play a big part in enabling end-users to identify and shun products that have crap they don’t like, like DRM.

Being able to browse comments from other buyers and getting feedback based on their experiences can be valuable. Sure, you always have to take what you read with a bucket of salt, but if hundreds of people are dumping on a product because of it’s DRM, it’s probably something you shouldnt ignore.

It would be like if we could all go to Best Buy and put Post-It notes on the products we’ve bought for others to see. Not everyone knows what to look WRT DRM labelling, and not all DRM is created equal.

And I’m sure the artists themselves take a keen interest in how their albums do on Amazon etc. Watching their latest work tank in the rankings and being able to read the customer feedback to see why has got to be an eye opener. Even the biggest technodummy could see how draconian DRM has hurt their fanbase and they might take more interest in how their future works are published…

True dat. Also a good point: DRM isn’t at all about preventing privacy, but about controlling what the customer can or can’t do w/o permission.)

By the way, there’s an article in Entertainment Weekly this week bemoaning the dearth of Oscar-worthy performances this year by women. This is blamed, in the article, on: women not going to theaters enough, female actors not acting well enough (I’m not kidding), “chick flicks” not having wide enough appeal, and all these things happening despite the presence of multiple female studio heads (subtext: we don’t need to hire women, because even if we do, nothing changes).

A few brief points:

1. Studio heads notwithstanding, the rest of the movie business is male dominated, from the grips on up to the directors and producers. (”In the last four years, the percentage of women working as directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors on the top 250 domestic grossing films has declined from 19% in 2001 to 16% in 2004.” See The Celluloid Ceiling for more eye-opening statistics like these.)

2. There are still far fewer roles for women than there are for men, thus less opportunities for women in film (I can’t find an accurate statistic, but it’s somewhere between 3:1 and 7:1 in terms of the number of male roles vs. female roles).

3. Anything with men in it is still seen as the default, while anything with women in it is seen as a niche product. For example, if you reverse the roles in Ocean’s 11 so that it stars like 11 women and 1 man who played the kind of incidental boyfriend to the main character, it just doesn’t work. It would never get made. And if it did get made, it would be marketed as a women’s movie not a movie (but it would still be awesome).

(Here’s my test for whether a role is sexist: if you reverse the gender of the role and the character seems totally preposterous, it’s a stock sexist role. This is not the same as a stereotype. Indiana Jones, for example, is a stereotypical action hero, but I could totally see an female Indy-type; in fact, that’s Tomb Raider for you. J.Lo in the Wedding Planner playing a maid who is pretending to be rich so she can marry a rich guy, on the other hand, is sexist.)

4. There are way less showpiece roles for older actresses, who tend to be more accomplished than younger actresses. Oscars are primarily given to women in their 30’s and men in their 40’s. Sure, there are a few every year, but compare the number of movies made by women in their 50’s and 60’s to the number of movies made by vet actors Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, etc.

Bite me, Entertainment Weekly. I’m also mad at them for their headline about shocking! political! movies! — like ANY movie’s not political! Returning to J.Lo, Maid in Manhattan is chock full of political statements. Just because something supports mainstream, status quo, conservative politics doesn’t mean it’s apolitical.

(How did I get here, again? Note to self: stay on topic.)

News: Music Industry Still Clueless

Sony/BMG CDs secretly install rootkit level DRM software, everyone pissed. Genius move, guys. You’d think after five years of desperate schemes to prevent the inevitable, record companies would finally figure out that treating their customers like thieves and implementing hair-brained DRM has the dual effect of doing nothing about privacy and making customers angry. Installing super-sekrit shady software that only power users can uninstall (and with many rootkits an XP reinstall is the only safe removal method) is not exactly the way to get people clamoring for your product. Why not channel all that technological innovation into finding out a way to make money in the current business climate? The changes you guys fear have already happened. Did you hear Apple sold a million video downloads in the last ten days or so?

For the billionth time: dinosaur business models are extinct, these ridiculous tactics are counter-productive, and treating users like criminals is bad PR.

I’m so glad I haven’t bought a CD in a year (what I’m listening to: leaked Madonna advance, DFA1979 remix album, Tammy Wynette’s Greatest Hits and Wolf Parade).