MPAA: Antipiracy is now 'content protection'
LOS ANGELES--The six largest Hollywood film studios are apparently dissatisfied with the way their trade group has waged war on illegal file sharing. CNET News has learned that at least three leaders of its antipiracy operations have been fired.
Among the three who were quietly ushered out of their posts at the Motion Picture Association of America three weeks ago was Greg Goeckner, the MPAA's general counsel. The others were the MPAA's director of worldwide antipiracy operations and its deputy director of Internet antipiracy. Goeckner will remain with the MPAA until the end of the year.
Other MPAA staffers were let go as part of a dramatic restructuring of the piracy-fighting operations, which included dropping the word "antipiracy" in favor of the term "content protection."
According to two sources in the film industry, the MPAA's antipiracy leadership had failed to impress studio executives, some of whom were concerned that the unit lacked aggressiveness. The reshuffling at the highest levels of the MPAA's antipiracy efforts will undoubtedly be seen as a black eye for MPAA CEO Dan Glickman.
An MPAA spokeswoman declined to comment on the firings but said that Daniel Mandil, an MPAA senior executive vice president, has been named general counsel and chief of content protection. He will oversee the association's combined legal and antipiracy efforts.
The shifts come as the sharing of movie files continues to creep toward mainstream adoption. In the past, digital copies of movies were too big to transmit easily on the Internet, but file-sharing technologies are improving, and sending large movie files is becoming easier.
Hollywood fears that the pirating of movies will become as common as the illicit sharing of music files. Studio insiders say they know that the answer isn't lawsuits but the hope is that Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, and other bandwidth providers will help them thwart file sharing at the network level. So far, though, the music and film industries have failed to get the major ISPs very involved.
As for Glickman, the whispers from studio execs for over year is that the former U.S. secretary of agriculture (under former President Bill Clinton) hasn't been very effective since taking over at the MPAA in 2004. One source said that Glickman won't make it to the end of his contract, which runs out in September 2010.
The MPAA denied an impending early departure for the executive.
"This week Dan Glickman met with several of the MPAA member company studio executives, as he often does," said Angela Martinez, an MPAA spokeswoman. "During those meetings he reconfirmed his plans to continue in his role as chairman and CEO through the remainder of his contract. They welcomed that commitment and expressed their continued confidence in him."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
Many of us (the smarter ones) will not use our credit cards over the internet. Having data available to us from the industry we know that the internet is still not a safe place for any personal information. If you don't believe it, just search through CNET for stories about credit card numbers being stolen. Google it, and you'll be amazed how many card numbers get stolen.
Physical media is also still the safest way to store movies. I still have a few movies from back in the VHS days, although I have now burned them all to DVD.
I'm glad you like down-loading and streaming movies. However, that does not apply to all of us.
Really, people forget that most movies and music are now available on cable TV.... if you have that, you can get most of the movies and music in question, so I see nothing about going online and 'illegally' downloading the thing in question in higher quality. We have ALREADY PAID for the movie through our cable TV or satellite TV subscriptions in almost all cases, so there is nothing wrong with going online and downloading it.
Paranoid much?
You do realize that giving your credit card to a brick and mortar business is even less safe don't you? Guess where all credit card numbers, including yours, is available, whether you buy things on the web or not?
Oh that is right, it is all online.
lets not for get who is actually behind the MPAA - RIAA, these are the companies that need to be targeted and boycotted into changing their ways, purchase only 2nd hand media and do not purchase anything branded sony, why allow the fecktards to dictate Orwellian hardware DRM designed to take away rights not to stop piracy anymore.
Name and shame the companies as all the **AA trade group name is for is to protect the corporate globalists from bad press.
RIAA, CRIA, SOUNDEXCHANGE, BPI, IFPI, Ect:
# Sony BMG
# Warner Music Group
# Universal Music Group
# EMI
MPAA, MPA, FACT, AFACT, Ect:
# Sony Pictures
# Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
# Universal Studios (NBC Universal)
# The Walt Disney Company
# 20th Century Fox (News Corporation)
# Paramount Pictures Viacom?(DreamWorks owners since February 2006)
=====================
If Sony payola (google it) wasn't bad enough to destroy indie competition you have this:
Is it justified to steal from thieves? READ ON.
RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/29/0335224.shtml
"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/24/14132
Hear Hear!
And I can definitely see why the new phrase was chosen.
"Content protection" conveys a sense of urgency. Like the content is an endangered koala bear that needs...protection.
So follow the music industry into a self defeating war on piracy and punish your users, the motion picture industry will only suffer more and more as they lock down their products and frustrate it's users.
Learn from the music industry be open and allow users to enjoy the content they want. If you use protections make it invisible to the user, if users start to run into problems with DRM or annoying warnings they will find different avenues for enjoying movies and shows.
Just like saying crippled vs disabled or physically challenged. Anything to make it sound nice. They aren't protecting anything but themselves. Should be called "Old business model protection".
I wonder what kind of fun techdirt.com will have for us on this! :)
Right, the ISPs are not police. They provide a service and get paid for the service. The ISP's rely on customers to make money. They are not going to risk losing customers just because the music and movie business can't adapt to the times. Why is it the ISPs fault that the MPAA, etc, can't innovate? Why should the ISPs have to risk it's business so that the MPAA can make a profit?
And btw, I agree as well. :P
Net neutrality isn't necessary, if and only if we separate content providers from service providers. Allowing cable companies and telcos to offer high speed internet was a bad idea to begin with.
But yeah. What comes around goes around. Eventually they'll receive their dues, according to what they've done.
Um...too late? The pirating of movies has been as common as music for over 6 years now. As soon as DVDJon bypassed the content protection of DVD's it's been commonplace. When DivX used to be DivX ;-) it was commonplace.
The MPAA is going to have to realize that people are coming to the realization that music and movies (entertainment in general) should NOT be a business that insists on selling you numerous copies of the same thing over and over and over again.
It's not a lost sale.
Yes, I could pirate movies off the internet if I wanted. But I don't because I like having the physical media and I buy most of my content on spur of the moment at the store based on what is on sale. Often I don't even go into a store with the intent of buying movies, but if there is a good deal on something, I might be tempted to get it.
Come to think of it, I may just hit Walmart up on the way home and see what's in the bargain bin. Never know what you'll find there. Of course, there's stuff there that I woudln't buy OR download free as it's not even worth the time to download (Can we say Spiderman2?).
Agreed, for once Dan, good points. One thing I like to add, is that these 'cam' quality movies are often worse than a 2-3 year old VHS tape left to rot in you attic.
Every time we hear about how much money the (movie, record, software) companies are losing they include every copy made. The fact of the matter is a lot of those copies (the vast majority) would never have been purchases and do not represent lost sales.
I also would rather buy a movie on physical media to add to my 600+ collection than download it from the 'net through P2P (risking viruses, trojans vast amounts of wasted time etc) or legally because you get no media and have to use a digital file. You also don't get a nice case with artwork and whatever extras might be available.
Plus a lot of older "B" movies that I find lots of fun to watch are just not available from Internet sources. If I would exclude movies I would never purchase because they just aren't my cup of tea, what's left would likely show that I already have as many or more movies than most of these Internet sources.
However, I am not against ripping these movies I purchase so I can use them on whatever devices I choose. If these companies can stop people from exercising their right to fair use, then why should I feel guilty about ripping their DVDs? *** for tat.
What about if I was referring to a t i t mouse? It would have come out as a ***mouse.
Silly people.
CONTENT PROTECTION!!!!
HD DVD at least had a contractual provision for a backup/replacement copy, even if they hadn't really figured out yet how to implement it. I'm certain the MPAA and studio executives are relieved that BD+ has no such "problem".
Go ahead, ignore the lessons of the computer games publishers in the '80s. Ignore the recent lessons of the music industry. Lets see how far it gets you...
To the MPAA and RIAA.... STOP WITH THE FREAKING 'content protections'! They are doing nothing more but pissing off your customers, who are basically told when a disk gets damaged to 'go out and buy another one'. If you would offer CHEAP REPLACEMENT of DVD's and Blu-Ray's to people, people would be MUCH more willing to buy your products.
Also, start realizing that many people like myself want to put these things on a hard drive, ripped from the disk in a better compression format.... make that legal as long as we are not sharing them with someone outside of our family.
Approved Player
Approved Cable
Approved Signal
Approved Content
Well, what's next? Approved audience?
;-)
- by Forked_Tongue October 16, 2009 10:07 PM PDT
- [quote]which included dropping the word "antipiracy" in favor of the term "content protection."[\quote]
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (58 Comments)Let's call it what it is, the studios are "Big Brother", the words they want us to use is "newspeak", and the business model they want to use is "1984". Sorry we don't want your draconian dictatorships to interfere with our entertainment, redesign and redevelop your business model and many more people will buy instead of "share" your products.
I'll advise everyone to become familiar with "blocklist" or "peerguardian", sooner or later they're going to try to nail us for converting our purchased media to our personal players or playing them on newer hardware.