Comments on: Paramount COO Blames Drop.io, Boxee and Mininova for Piracy

By: Don’t look to Hollywood for insights on piracy, part 1 | Digitalwerks

Don’t look to Hollywood for insights on piracy, part 1 | Digitalwerks — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:28:39 +0000

[...] Commentators knowledgeable about the P2P world pointed out the numerous technical inaccuracies contained in Huntsberry’s presentation, particularly in his list of piracy assisting offenders that included such Internet giants as Google, Yahoo, but also promising technology start-ups like Drop.io and Boxee, not mention electronics makers like Apple and Sony. The heavy-handed nature and basic cluelessness of the talk, now widely distributed by YouTube, has received a great deal of mocking, yet the comedy has obscured the larger issues that the workshop discussed and Hollywood’s stated analysis of piracy. Now that the entire transcript of the workshop is available, I thought it would be worthwhile to dig a bit deeper, and look at not only what Huntsberry’s presentation reveals, but also examine what the other Big Media representatives had to say. (although, if anybody has a copy of the Powerpoint deck Huntsberry showed, I would love to get a copy) What we see is both more damaging to Hollywood’s credibility when speaking about piracy, but also raises disturbing questions about their vision of the Internet more broadly. In part 1 of this post I’m going to look at the scenario Hollywood paints of current piracy, while in Part 2 I will show how far off the mark they are and why their prescriptions should be dismissed as both inaccurate and likely to cause more harm than good. [...]

By: Bookmarks for September 25th from 08:35 to 17:03

Bookmarks for September 25th from 08:35 to 17:03 — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:25:57 +0000

[...] Paramount COO Blames Drop.io, Boxee and Mininova for Piracy – He then proceeded to showcase how easy it is to get pirated content by going to two sites not on the Alexa list: Mininova and Drop.io. Mininova is “clearly an illegal web site,” according to Huntsberry, who proceeded to search for this year’s release of Star Trek. He picked one of the results and started to download the torrent. Seems like a clear-cut case of a site out to ruin Hollywood, right? Well, if would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that Mininova has started to test the proactive removal of infringing content through a filtering system supplied and controlled by the Motion Picture Association of America, according to court records (PDF) and a Torrentfreak article. Paramount, of course, is a member of the MPAA. [...]

By: Nicholas j. Robinson

Nicholas j. Robinson — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:58:40 +0000

When will they learn this is not a fight worth fighting? There are bigger fish to fry. My thoughts here:
http://www.nicholasjrobinson.com/blog/?p=453

By: In this blog post I’ll pat myself on the back as I attempt to get back into blogging | Nicholas j. Robinson

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:50:35 +0000

[...] about Paramount COO Frederick Huntsberry is a great example. Freddy ol’ boy, your studio has done some great stuff, but please, leave [...]

By: Franklin

Franklin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:05:46 +0000

Seriously, these guys should be embracing projects like Boxee.

Boxee + Apple TV + Hulu is way more convenient than going to Mininova, finding a good torrent (that's not on private trackers), waiting for it to download, re-encoding (if necessary) and transferring it to the Apple TV.

You're never going to stop "hard core" pirates, however, if you make it easier to spend a few bucks and get instant gratification (through something like Boxee) you're going to get way more "casual" pirates watching movies that way then spending the time to do it "the hard way".

By: Contentinople - Steve Donohue - News Bits: Jackson Rules Summer Online Videos

Contentinople - Steve Donohue - News Bits: Jackson Rules Summer Online Videos — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:47:48 +0000

[...] Pictures COO Frederick Huntsberry is so concerned about online piracy that he reportedly asked the FCC to keep a presentation on movie theft that he gave the commission off its Website. Huntsberry was [...]

By: Bookmarks for September 24th through September 25th

Bookmarks for September 24th through September 25th — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:57:44 +0000

By: Deprogrammer9

Deprogrammer9 — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:14:11 +0000

I love Boxee & open source freedom. I really dislike corporate suits who talk as if they understand what is going on. Evolve or die Paramount, simple logic wins every time.

By: avner ronen

avner ronen — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:30:39 +0000

drop.io is an amazing service to share legitimate content (photos, music, presentations, etc.) at Boxee we use it to share lots of stuff among the team.

btw, drop.io limits the file size to 100MB, which makes it unfriendly for people who want to share pirated movies.

according to his point of view any product that enables people to find stuff (e.g. Google), share stuff (e.g. drop.io) or is open (e.g. Boxee) is an enabler for piracy. a rather bleak view of both technology and human nature.

rather than try to fight technology, embrace it. make all your movies available online (for rental and/or purchase), then make sure people can find your movies on Google, watch them on Boxee and share them on Facebook.