Lots of people have been saying this for years - now the the economists are proving it;

Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society.

 This study are tackles a number of myths about p2p and file sharing such as that a download does not equal a lost sales (also noted here), that more music and films than ever before have been created.  Worth a read.

Here's an interesting development - the turning of digital issues into votes;

When the Swedish Pirate Party was founded in early 2006, the majority of the mainstream press were skeptical, with some simply laughing it away. But they were wrong to dismiss this political movement out of hand. Today, the Pirate Party accomplished what some believed to be the impossible, by securing a seat in the European Parliament.

With 99.9% of the districts counted the Pirates have 7.1 percent of the votes, beating several established parties. This means that the Pirate Party will get at least one, but most likely two of the 18 (+2) available seats Sweden has at the European Parliament.

The BBC and ITV have been looking at a new secret project, 'Canvas' which aims to ;

...combine TV, radio and high-definition services with on-demand catch-up and archive programming provided by technology such as the BBC's iPlayer and ITV Player, as well as films, web content and interactive TV services.

• Will Real's courtroom drama hit the big screen?
• Real DVD Copying Case Gets Off To An Inauspicious Start 
• MPAA vs. Real: Five reasons why Hollywood will win
  

Just a few links that we think might be of interest...

We've all heard of the 'Bill of Rights' - how about a 'Technology Bill of Rights' and it proposes an interesting media right - the right to use content purchased on any device at any time;

Article 6. Any media content legally purchased by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time
Yes, the DRM article -- this one comes directly from the problems facing a large number of people who "purchased" content such as songs from online retailers, only to completely lose access to those purchases when the retailer decided to shut down the authorization servers or similar issues faced by anyone spending money on digital goods. If a person has purchased media, they should be able to retrieve that media on any device they control at any time: from a PC to a Mac to an iPod to whatever. The entertainment industry has long had a built-in media control device simply due to the distribution method of that media -- the cassette, the CD, the DVD. With digital files they lose that control, but that shouldn't mean that the purchaser should lose their rights to use their purchase either. I'm not going to go further into this debate, since both sides are deeply entrenched already.

The answer is unknowable, of course, and the file-sharing community will no doubt point to the big total as proof that piracy doesn't really hurt the studios, at least not when it comes to theatrical boxoffice. But a close look at the numbers suggest the leak indeed might have cost Fox. How much? Tons of variables are at work here; everything from mixed reviews to swine flu....

Additionally, I'm honestly of the view that internet piracy really doesn't substantially impact the bottom line on most blockbuster movies. The folks that are downloading the film are doing so knowing that they're getting a different experience - no one that cares is fooled into thinking that can "replicate" the movie-going experience. And if they don't care, you can't harness that money. It is lost, because if they don't care about the substantial differences between seeing a crappy, unfinished version of a movie on a 14" screen and seeing a polishing, 5.1 Dolby surround sound version on a giant movie screen (not to mention the atmosphere opening weekend brings), you're not going to convince them to spend a dime on your film....

And here is another good links (with comments from Tom from plugincinema) - on the excellent p2p foundation website:

My analysis of the Pirate Bay, based on my research thus far is at best it will be a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution and at worse it will still further damage them. To elaborate, I believe that p2p follows the pattern of evolution and any prosecution/legal change acts as a new environmental hazard - some forms of p2p will be impacted by the change and others will be immune and survive, then thrive in the gap left behind. Just as ’species’ is an attempt to place a classification around an always changing pattern of life, ‘copyright’ is an attempt to place a legal boundary around an always changing pattern of ideas.

There is another factor to consider that some are reporting as significant, the drop in Swedish p2p traffic when the law changed to make it easier to presecute individual illegal file traders which in an article in the International Herald Tribune is being seen as part of a series of victories against piracy that might mean copyright can win. It can’t. However this, like the Pirate Bay victory, is no more than an single change to a single environmental factor and the mass of p2p will simply evolve round it using other techniques (IM or virtual hardrives as in S.Korea) and betters p2p software such as encrypted and dark-nets (as in Japan).

And as if to answer the predictions, we found this; New law increases demand for anonymous web surfing.

Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, recently tweeted that “[The] Pirate Bay trial will change things the way the Napster shutdown changed things.” That’s an interesting thought. Of course, the Napster shutdown didn’t change too much for file sharers, who just migrated to other platforms. But the trial against and eventual demise of Napster changed P2P as a whole, because it led to the emergence of Gnutella and KaZaa, both of which eventually became more mature technologies, capable of handling far greater numbers of file sharers with a lot less infrastructure.

Some folks at Microsoft Research of all places have come up with a clever way for you to save electricity and increase your ratio: The researchers have built the prototype of a new network adapter called Somniloquy that can download data via Bittorrent and even offer basic Instant Messaging capabilities while the PC is in sleep mode.

Apparently there will be appeals, but at this point the verdict is;

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

But, of course, what happened post Grokster should give you an indication of what will happen here: basically, the entertainment industry will gleefully declare victory, and make statements about how this is a major victory against "piracy." But, in actuality, the exact opposite of that will occur. Unauthorized file sharing continues (or even increases) and it becomes that much more difficult for the legacy industries to win back customers and embrace these new, useful and efficient tools of distribution and promotion. It's a classic case of winning the battle and losing the war.

On Friday, the film studio 20th Century Fox — owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate ruled by Mr. Murdoch — became angry after reading Friedman's latest column, a review of 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine,' a big-budget movie that was leaked in unfinished form on the Web last week. Friedman posted a mini-review, adding, 'It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer.' The film studio, which enlisted the FBI to hunt the pirate, put out a statement calling Friedman's column 'reprehensible' while News Corporation weighed in with its own statement, saying it had asked Fox News to remove the column from its Web site. 'When we advised Fox News of the facts,' the statement said, 'they promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.'"

Remember how you can scan any bar code with an android phone and it will tell you where to find that product for cheaper? A new Android application called BarTor (formerly ScanTorrent) can scan any DVD bar code and then signals either uTorrent or Vuze on your PC to download the movie from BitTorrent. How long do you think this will last?

There is an interesting interview with the spokesperson from The Pirate Bay in regard to the recent trial.  He is predicting an 'epic win':

Right now, yes. I’m very happy about it and I still predict an EPIC WIN for sure. But you never know. We expect a win but we’re prepared for the worst case scenario, so that we don’t get too beaten up if that happens.

Noted!

Courtisane Festival
Film, Video & Media Art
23-24-25-26 April
Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Cinema Sphinx, Bank van de Arbeid, Film-Plateau

Het volledige programma online/The full programme online 1 april
www.courtisane.be

A pretty angry sounding row has broken out over the rights to streaming music videos in the UK, and as a result a large number of videos are blocked;

Patrick Walker, YouTube's director of video partnerships, told BBC News that the move was "regrettable" but that it continued to talk to the PRS.

"The more music videos YouTube streams, and the more popular those music videos are, the more money YouTube will generate to share with the PRS and its song writers. It's a win-win arrangement.

YouTube, however, cannot be expected to engage in a business in which it loses money every time a music video is played - that is simply not a sustainable business model." he said.

Steve Porter, head of the PRS, said he was "outraged... shocked and disappointed" by YouTube's decision.

In a statement, Mr Porter said the move "punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent".

Also, in other news, the people behind the audio/video cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video - FFmpeg, have released version 0.5!

The government-owned Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) has set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute their TV-shows. After a successful test last year they plan to release more DRM-free TV-shows via BitTorrent, using the same tracker software currently in use at The Pirate Bay.

ITV is to cut 600 jobs, slice £65m from its programme budget and look to sell Friends Reunited and Freeview business SDN as it reported an adjusted pre-tax profit fall of 41% in 2008.  Michael Grade, the ITV executive chairman, said the advertising market was "the most challenging I have experienced in over 30 years in UK broadcasting".

For decades, the big three, now big four, networks all had the same game plan: spend many millions to develop and produce scripted shows aimed at a mass audience and national advertisers, with a shelf life of years or decades as reruns in syndication. ... Ratings over all for broadcast networks continue to decline, making it harder for them to justify their high prices for advertising. Cable channels are spending more on original shows, which bring in new viewers and dampen their appetites for buying repeats of broadcast shows. For the networks, the crisis is twofold: cultural and financial. For viewers, the result is more low-cost reality shows, prime-time talk and news programs and sports from the institutions that once made 'Hill Street Blues,' 'All in the Family' and 'Cheers.'

Thus far many of us are used to seeing content as a set form - so an 'album' (around 12 songs) or a 'film' (around 2 hours long) - but now with interactive forms of media, so what is this?

The app, called 'The Presidents' Music — PUSA,' sells for $2.99 on the App Store (iTunes link) offers users access to four full albums, including the band's early 'lost' recordings. This includes the previously-unavailable FroggyStyle — 'unless you have one of the 500 cassettes the band sold in 1994, you've never heard this before,' reads the app description. The app also features a number of extras and exclusives that the band says are updated regularly, and fans can read the band's blog directly from the app on their iPhones or iPod touches.

An album?  yes and more.  A blog link?  yes and more!  Next we'll see a film-app...

Today sees the start of the court case between p2p torrent-indexing website, The Pirate Bay and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry who are claiming more than $100m in damages.  This is an important case as it will impact on perceptions of p2p and the IFPI has but a lot of its eggs in this basket (so to speak) but oddly it is also not an importnat case as chances are it will not do much more that pose a temporary blip to p2p sharing. 

Here's a few links on the case;

The definitive primer on the case.

Follow events on Twitter.

News from the Press Conference.

As they sage says, may you live in interesting times...

We're really pleased to offer the entire of our 2004 book, 'Plug In & Turn On: A Filmmakers Guide to the Internet' as a free PDF... 

This book is about web filmmaking: the brash offspring of networked technology and digital media. Although immature, web filmmaking's growth has been rapid, with hints of a nascent potential. Whilst films have been widely available for consumption, web films are accessible in terms of production and distribution as well – and herein lies the promise for web filmmaking.

Physical copies are also still available from our shop. 

On the subject Lev Manovich, who wrote the forward to our book, has a new book out, free to  download.

Mike Dicks, a producer who specialises in interactive and social media, is trying to make a movie by bringing together skills via Facebook. He's inviting people to join the group 'Who wants to make a movie?' and needs a large number of members to influence his potential funders.

Simply by joining the group you are helping progress the project. Once you are a member you can take part in the process of making the film if you wish. Pass the idea on to anyone who might be interested.

 

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?sid=b9211463d78db40cd697ba96676542fd&gid=6115877596

It looks like the next more my Google could be it's GDrive (also see here);

The Google Drive, or "GDrive", could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user's personal files and operating system could be stored on Google's own servers and accessed via the internet.

This was always going to be the natural evolution of the 'cloud computing' approach.  So all of your video content would be in one place - online.  It is not clear how hard-drive intensive tasks such as video editing (especially in HD!) might fare on such as system and there is the issue of a loss of power to the cloud in exchange for the convenience:

It is this prospect that alarms critics of Google's ambitions. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a charity defending computer users' liberties, did not dispute the convenience offered, but said: "It's a little bit like saying, 'we're in a dictatorship, the trains are running on time.' But does it matter to you that someone can see everything on your computer? Does it matter that Google can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government?"

The End of America details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one. I took the message on the road, and one of those early lectures - at the University of Washington in Seattle, in October 2007 - was videoed by a member of the audience. Even with its bad lighting and funky amateur vibe, this video, posted on YouTube, has been accessed almost 1,250,000 times .  This was a humbling lesson. While a polemical argument in prose may reach tens of thousands of the usual suspects - formally educated people who like to follow such texts - the video version reached far beyond that audience.

After more than a decade of disappointment, the goal of marrying television and the Internet seems finally to be picking up steam. A key factor in the push are new TV sets that have networking connections built directly into them, requiring no additional set-top boxes for getting online. Meanwhile, many consumers are finding more attractive entertainment and information choices on the Internet -- and have already set up data networks for their PCs and laptops that can also help move that content to their TV sets. Amid other developments pegged to this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo Inc. and Intel Corp. plan to announce support from several major consumer-electronics companies to sell TV sets that come with software, dubbed widgets, that make it easier to call up Web content on TV sets using ordinary remote controls rather than computer keyboards.

The research showed that nearly 70 percent of online British adults who watch television go online while doing so, with 21 percent of 16-24 year olds always using the Internet while watching TV. And more adults who surf the web for content related to what they’re watching on TV are at the same time searching for products which appeared in the show (30 percent) than for the products which were advertised between the shows (27 percent).

They [the TV industry] must realize that television sets are nothing more than another screen for many types of content, not just on-ramps to network TV schedules.

What will happen in 2009?  There are plenty of predictions around;

The year of the mobile ?

"Mobile tools will certainly change the landscape, open spectrum will unleash the kind of creativity we've seen on the wired internet, and of course there will be many more YouTube/Facebook-class applications."

The year of games ?

"The games industry will continue to be the sleeping giant of the media sector, out-earning Hollywood and out-performing TV in terms of attention, yet still only getting media coverage when the tabloids get themselves into yet another tizzy about in-game violence."

It will be the year of twittering... And there are other predictions from here;

- In-Video advertising will grow… and begin to work
- Video will grow further as people’s appetite for online content moves significantly beyond 30-90 second clips

and ...

- Small businesses embrace video advertising
- Record year for video content consumption

To me, the future of music is really simple. It's cloud-based servers that have all of the music, TV, movies -- whatever it might be. Very rich application-driven PDAs, whether it's the iPhone or whatever else comes up, that has applications that I have yet to see. Like digital maids or valets, which go out and knows what your musical tastes are and your 20 friends, and finds that music and organizes it -- not the actual music but the metadata so you can pull it when and how you want it. ...I call it the "hassle factor" -- for $5 to $10 you get all the music you want without the pain of having to find it. So you get the new Killers album without even knowing the new Killers album is out, and it's automatically in your weekend listening folder because your digital valet got it for you. And if you want to know what your buddy Ken's listening to, then the valet checks out his playlist and copies it over for you.

It has been almost a year since the launch of the iPlayer (an online TV-on-demand service run by the publicly funded broadcaster, the BBC).  This has prompted much discussion and debate.  Here's a sample ;

The BBC iPlayer on-demand online TV catch-up service is a year old, but it cannot rest on its laurels...Such has been its impact on the media landscape, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since the BBC’s online TV catch-up service, iPlayer, was launched. It has even won over technophobes with its simple premise of “making the unmissable unmissable”

Plus then the BBC talked of offering the technology to its rivals as the BBC director general said "[The BBC should] share the benefits of its scale and security with the rest of the industry". However Channel 4 shot back calling these plans 'inaccurate'.

P2P applications continues to evolve and get more interesting.  Introducing LittleShoot - an in-browser p2p application...

Littleshoot is in short a browser-based P2P service that is based on the open source SIP protocol. The service also offers search and download capability for various other media services, such as Youtube, Yahoo's video search and Limewire / Gnutella.

It features a nifty integration of Yahoo's Flash media player, making it possible to play back MP3s you download right in your browser. One interesting technical aspect about it is that it making substantial use of Google's App engine. Fisk is also working on a Twitter integration right now that will make it possible to share media files through Twitter in your browser.

 There is more here too..