Will copyright become unenforcable (and useless) someday? Now?

[begbert2]

@Mr2001

You could use two projectors equipped with polarizing filters (seriously, how could you not think of that?), or simply discard one of the recordings and watch the movie in 2D.

The amount of effort in setting up two perfectly synchronized video projectors would be extreme; it’s worse than useless if they’re not preciseley matched. (Seriously, how could you not think of that? ) Also, now note that that free movie on the internet is going to cost you two projectors, two DVD players, and, as noted, not a snowball’s chance of actually getting them matched up right.

I’m willing to concede that some dude might set up a highly technical and carefully rigged homebrew home theatre just to prove he can do it. Heck, he’s the guy who’ll have also cracked his second copy of the original device open and figured out a way to intercept the digital signal to the projectors! He’ll have made a perfect copy of the movie; he’ll have defeated the system!!

Good for him. The important thing, that the moviemakers care about, is that

@me

most importantly it would totally prevent the average person from playing back any copies sent out by that elite haxxor, especially on the original unit (without which you would at best get a 2-d result). In short this doodad would blow the crap out of the illegal copying and distribution of movies.

I don’t claim I’m perfect (except between 11:15 and 11:17 pm on even thursdays, right then I’m really hot stuff) and yes, a really, really motivated guy could manage to succesfully view his analog copy the movie. He might even manage to hit the play buttons on his remotes simulaneously again and watch it a second time! But unless you come up with a better trick than the ones you’ve mentioned, this system has still achieved the aim of being too inconveneint for the average consumer to bother trying to crack it. Which is really all that matters.

[Ms2001]

@begbert2

The amount of effort in setting up two perfectly synchronized video projectors would be extreme; it’s worse than useless if they’re not preciseley matched.

So he’ll throw away one recording and watch the movie in 2D. Won’t matter a bit to the people who happily download camcorder bootlegs.

Of course, if in-home 3D projection ever takes off, there will have to be some way for people to make their own 3D home movies and play them back, don’t you think? It’d be a matter of weeks before someone converted one of those projectors to play back their bootleg recordings.

But unless you come up with a better trick than the ones you’ve mentioned, this system has still achieved the aim of being too inconveneint for the average consumer to bother trying to crack it.

Only if he demands a perfect reproduction of the original experience. As we’ve seen from camcorder bootlegs with poor picture quality, DVD rips with all the special features missing, and MP3 files encoded with Xing at 112 kbps, the average downloader has flexible tastes.

[The_Hamster_King]

@Mr2001

And then we’ll see a shift away from casual copying done in the home, toward copying done once by professionals in underground bunkers, who then distribute the data over the internet to average consumers. This is already what happens with hard-to-copy media like PC games, GameCube games, and cartridge games.

And if this sort of copying becomes rampant, home distribution of entertainment products will simply STOP. The film studios could survive just fine with only theatrical releases – that’s how they operated until VCRs hit big in the 1980’s. If there’s no way to make money off a DVD release, why would a studio bother?

[Szlater]

@Pochacco

And if this sort of copying becomes rampant, home distribution of entertainment products will simply STOP. The film studios could survive just fine with only theatrical releases – that’s how they operated until VCRs hit big in the 1980’s. If there’s no way to make money off a DVD release, why would a studio bother?

What a lot of nonsense.

The revenue from DVD rentals/sales exceeds the revenue at the box office, there is no way that the entertainment companies will eliminate such a profitable side of their business.

[begbert2]

@Szlater

What a lot of nonsense.

The revenue from DVD rentals/sales exceeds the revenue at the box office, there is no way that the entertainment companies will eliminate such a profitable side of their business.

As was stated, this would only occur when DVD rentals/sales become unprofitable.

[Sage_Rat]

Given the right hardware and protocols it would be entirely possible to stop* piracy, I just thought I would mention.

Encrypted file system
Encrypted RAM
Tamper-proof CPU and Encryption Unit with stored keys
Network connection to a central server that verifies the Encryption Unit by its keys before the machine will run

It’s entirely possible for this to happen. Some of it already is for embedded systems.

Or easier would be the centralized computer idea where instead of having your own computer, you would just have a terminal and rent time off a central server.

• “Render unfeasible” more accurately

[begbert2]

QUOTE=Mr2001]Of course, if in-home 3D projection ever takes off, there will have to be some way for people to make their own 3D home movies and play them back, don’t you think? It’d be a matter of weeks before someone converted one of those projectors to play back their bootleg recordings.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think there’s any reason why in-home 3-D is likely to take off in the near future, especially if the goal here is to deter the in-home bootlegging industry. The can easily enough argue that the equipment for making such movies is too large, complicated, and expensive for home use. And you know, they’d probably be right.

@Mr2001

So he’ll throw away one recording and watch the movie in 2D. Won’t matter a bit to the people who happily download camcorder bootlegs.
[…]
Only if he demands a perfect reproduction of the original experience. As we’ve seen from camcorder bootlegs with poor picture quality, DVD rips with all the special features missing, and MP3 files encoded with Xing at 112 kbps, the average downloader has flexible tastes.

Actually I’ve never seen any evidence that camcorder bootlegs with poor picture quality are what is posing the threat to DVD (or D3D) sales. It’s those perfect quality duplications of the movies that pose the risk, I think; care to pose an argument otherwise?

I think it’s fairly clear that my idle speculation has theorized a maching that would certainly cripple the illegal copy industry enough to give D3Ds a chance to sell. And, as noted, it’s just something quick that I came up with in five minutes. Maybe the actual version will overlay dynamic moire patterns over the video that are removed by the special chips in the glasses. Who knows?

[Justin_Bailey]

@Mr2001

Only if he demands a perfect reproduction of the original experience. As we’ve seen from camcorder bootlegs with poor picture quality, DVD rips with all the special features missing, and MP3 files encoded with Xing at 112 kbps, the average downloader has flexible tastes.

All the people I’ve met that use these kinds of low-quality bootlegs (and it’s a small handful at best) would NEVER buy any of the things they bootleg.

Everyone seems to forget that in these arguments.

[even_sven]

@Mr2001

YThere are a few very solid ways to communicate anonymously, from small trusted networks like WASTE, to obfuscated routing like Tor, to large projects like Freenet. If those “serious widespread lawsuits” materialize, expect to see a shift toward the use of such services - the main reason they aren’t already in use is performance, which may improve in the years to come, or may simply become less important as legal risks increase.

And, though these things may be made and used by pirates, people in opressed countries and god forbid should our own country start controlling information, these things may becomes very important to us all.

[scotandrsn]

@Mr2001

There are a few very solid ways to communicate anonymously, from small trusted networks like WASTE, to obfuscated routing like Tor, to large projects like Freenet. If those “serious widespread lawsuits” materialize, expect to see a shift toward the use of such services - the main reason they aren’t already in use is performance, which may improve in the years to come, or may simply become less important as legal risks increase.

Wow.

I used to think you had the faintest idea of what you were talking about with regard to such issues. Thanks for fighting my ignorance.

From the WASTE page at Sourceforge:

“Each link on the network is secured and authenticated, but messages are not secured point to point, which means a trusted user on the network can theoretically spoof and/or sniff traffic.”

So all a pirate hunter has to do is get themselves trusted on a network in order to render this method a WASTE of time. (Ha! I kill me!)

Considering that the bulk of illegal filesharing (hell, the bulk of consumption of new movies and music) are by people in their teens and twenties, who have shown themselves repeatedly willing to allow sexual predators access to sensitive information on their MySpace accounts, this will be a piece of cake.

Tor and Freenet both work on the same way: by trying to obfuscate the origin of network packets by making each and every message go through an extra series of routers. Neither changes the basic fact that TCP/IP sends the IP number of the sender’s host with every packet. Breaking these would be simple matter of gaining access to the input and output of each extra host, or accessing its log file, to compare similar incoming and outgoing message content. Again, if someone is paying you enough to trace the packets, they will be traced.

You could make it very difficult by increasing the number of extra steps a packet had to take to get to its destination until it became prohibitively expensive to trace them, but performance will obvioulsy take a hit.

And once any of these systems gets too many users hooked in, as you speculate will happen if enforcement increases, performance suffers further, leading to a great loss in convenience, which is the main reason so much piracy is occurring in the first place.

[jayjay]

So which will lose the media conglomerates more profits, people pirating content or people deciding that the media conglomerates are making the act of enjoying entertainment far too difficult (through endlessly annoying piracy-prevention schemes, like Sony’s secret little gifts to your hard drive or CDs that don’t play on your computer) and simply boycotting those companies?

[The_Hamster_King]

@jayjay

So which will lose the media conglomerates more profits, people pirating content or people deciding that the media conglomerates are making the act of enjoying entertainment far too difficult (through endlessly annoying piracy-prevention schemes, like Sony’s secret little gifts to your hard drive or CDs that don’t play on your computer) and simply boycotting those companies?

It’s a constant balancing act. The more sales a company loses to piracy, the more financial incentive there is to impose draconian copy-protection schemes. Pissing off a substantial fraction of your consumers is a lousy way to do business, but it’s preferable to losing ALL your consumers to ubiquitous free copies of your product.

Media companies are NEVER going to give their product away for free. Even if they wanted to (which they don’t) it’s not an economically viable business model – without a stready revenue stream from current products there’s no way to finance future products. If copying increases to the point where it’s ubiquitous then the media companies will be forced by economic necessity to impose protection mechanisms that are a huge pain in the ass. At the most extreme this will result in the elimination of home consumption entirely.

You want to see the new James Bond movie? Well haul your ass down to the movie theater the way your grandad did. And be prepared to have your bag searched at the door to make sure you’re not carrying a video camera.

Were this to ever come about it would totally suck. It would be a lose-lose proposition for everyone involved. It would be a loss for consumers who are forced to jump through annoying hoops to get the entertainment they want. And it would be a loss for the media companies who would see a large drop in revenue from people who are pissed off by the protection measures. But something like this is inevitable result if copyright becomes unenforcable.

[Lemur866]

I’m not sure how much market there will be for proprietary machines like this. You’re going to buy a separate machine to display Sony movies, another for Universal, one for each studio?

We’re much more likely to move to a universal system. A computer with the right software and hardware can play any media format. It seems to me that instead of physical disks we’ll have streaming media. So you won’t go to Target and buy a Tru-Hyper-Blu-DVDrX-4D-withSmelloVision disk of the latest Tom Cruise movie. You’ll just click the on-demand button on your cable-box/computer, and the movie plays, and you pay for it in some undetermined way.

A pirate could grab the bits as they’re streaming and download that movie to his computer, and make himself as many copies as he wants. Except who’s going to have the storage space for hundreds of movies? If the price to watch a particular movie is small enough, or is rolled into an all-you-can-eat price model, and the ability to call up any movie or TV show is easy enough there’s no need to keep a local copy of the movie. Yeah, you could spend a month copying your favorite movies onto some local storage medium, and cancel your cable subscription, and you’ll be able to watch all those movies for free as often as you want. Except you’ll have to trade with other people for new movies or movies you didn’t bother to download? And if the movie subscription price is rolled into your internet service provider charge, you’re cut off from the internet unless you pay the monthly charge.

You’ll never be able to download everything you’ll ever want to watch or listen to. It will just be easier and more convenient to pay your monthly bill, and only a very few people are going to bother with piracy. Why pirate when everything ever made is available on demand for a few pennies?

[Chronos]

The amount of effort in setting up two perfectly synchronized video projectors would be extreme; it’s worse than useless if they’re not preciseley matched. (Seriously, how could you not think of that? ) Also, now note that that free movie on the internet is going to cost you two projectors, two DVD players, and, as noted, not a snowball’s chance of actually getting them matched up right.

You’re already presuming that the consumers are willing to buy a 3-d projector, though. So some third party just makes their own brand of projector, which can play both authorized and unauthorized copies. Those people interested in pirated movies would just buy one of these third-party projectors (which are aligned just as well as the “real” ones) instead of, rather than in addition to, the one the movie companies want them to buy.

[Lemur866]

One thing I don’t think people quite understand (at least for music and books) is just how little the musicians and authors really get compared to how much the CD or book retails for. Usually it works out to pennies per copy, and only the really big names can demand better contracts for themselves.

So if I could download a whole CD for one dollar, and $0.95 of that dollar went to the musician, they’d make much more than they do today and that’s not even counting the increased sales that the decrease in price would bring.

If downloading a legal copy is really cheap and easy then there’s no real incentive to pirate a copy. And if the artists get the same or more compensation for each work sold, despite it being much cheaper, then the incentive to create new works still exists.

In the internet age the cost of distribution asymtotically approaches zero. So even very very small amounts of compensation delivered directly to the creator become magnified greatly.

The model can be as simple as: Go to the artist’s website, enter your credit card number, download everything that artist has ever produced, and pay something less than you pay today for a full CD, and the artist gets all of it, after paying their web host and the CC company.

[Ludovic]

@Pochacco

Even if they wanted to (which they don’t) it’s not an economically viable business model – without a stready revenue stream from current products there’s no way to finance future products.

Good thing I’m not interested in entertainment “products”. Execs who think of them as such deserve what piracy and apathy they get. Those who appreciate and cultivate well-made art deserve the profits (ironically enough.)

[Happy_Clam]

One thing I don’t think people quite understand (at least for music and books) is just how little the musicians and authors really get compared to how much the CD or book retails for. Usually it works out to pennies per copy, and only the really big names can demand better contracts for themselves.

So if I could download a whole CD for one dollar, and $0.95 of that dollar went to the musician, they’d make much more than they do today and that’s not even counting the increased sales that the decrease in price would bring.

If downloading a legal copy is really cheap and easy then there’s no real incentive to pirate a copy. And if the artists get the same or more compensation for each work sold, despite it being much cheaper, then the incentive to create new works still exists.

In the internet age the cost of distribution asymtotically approaches zero. So even very very small amounts of compensation delivered directly to the creator become magnified greatly.

The model can be as simple as: Go to the artist’s website, enter your credit card number, download everything that artist has ever produced, and pay something less than you pay today for a full CD, and the artist gets all of it, after paying their web host and the CC company.

This is, of course, true of music, which also has relatively low production costs- but what about film? Part of what produces the “magic of hollywood” today is huge overheads for massively expensive films (especially increasignly popular computer-animated features), which necessitate a high revenue intake and blur the line between artist and producer so much that the simple distribution system you suggest would no longer work. While I agree that music copyright is probably a lost cause (if not now, in ten, twenty, fifty year’s time), doesn’t it seem as though film piracy really could seriously damage the industry?

[Lemur866]

But film has already has two distribution models besides home video, theater and broadcast. Unless you can put a 30 foot screen in your home you just can’t duplicate a theater experience. And studios routinely stream their movies FOR FREE on broadcast TV, and get paid via commericials.

Right now home video is a huge profit center for movie studios, they make more from home video than they do from theatrical releases. I just can’t see this lasting. The studios did learn one very important lesson from DVDs…they make much more money with cheap DVDs than they did with expensive VHS versions. People will pay $12 for a DVD copy of movie, even if they only end up seeing it once or twice. But very few people would pay the $30-40 or so they tried to charge for VHS copies. Instead they’d rent movies whenever they wanted to watch them.

So charging less can sometimes make you more money.

Now imagine a system where every movie ever made is available on demand, and the price is (say) $1.00 or $2.00 per view. That’s almost free. Who’s going to bother keeping a vast library of pirated movies when everything ever made is available online? It would be worth paying that small fee just to avoid having to curate your collection. No more NetFlix, no more video store, no more DVD sales. Just the entire history of cinema at your fingertips, along with every commentary track, alternate language track, fan edit, subtitle, making-of, or pop-up-video style commentary ever made, whenever and where-ever you want, on any player.

Such a system would be easier and more convenient and arguable CHEAPER than piracy, once you factor in hunting down pirate copies on the warez sites, getting a broken pirate copy, having to find a new one, curating and storing all your pirated copies, digging the particular pirated disk out of the box in the closet, and so forth.

See, what all these media have in common is that there is a fixed cost to create the work, but in tomorrow’s networked economy an essentially zero cost to distribute the work. So it doesn’t matter whether you have a million people paying ten dollars, or ten million people paying one dollar, you still make the same amount of money. And really really cheap legal content can be nearly as cheap and easier to access than “free” pirated content, and still bring the creators as much profit, if not more.

[begbert2]

@Chronos

You’re already presuming that the consumers are willing to buy a 3-d projector, though. So some third party just makes their own brand of projector, which can play both authorized and unauthorized copies. Those people interested in pirated movies would just buy one of these third-party projectors (which are aligned just as well as the “real” ones) instead of, rather than in addition to, the one the movie companies want them to buy.

And the third party gets themselves sued out of existence by simultanoues attacks from all four major members of the Cinema Guild. A company breaking the patents on the hardware and media format is a visible and stationary target; it hasn’t got a prayer. If it’s an overseas company, they’ll buy a political party or two (bulk discounts!) and set an import tax on them that costs more than the unit takes to manufacture. All in all, third-party units are a non-factor. (I mean, we’re already presuming that the major competing movies studios and electronics manufacturers all banded together enough to agree to one secure system. That’s a heck of a lot of collective weight they have to throw around.)

I will concede that I’m assuming that consumers are willing to buy the latest major advance in video technology. Or at least that they will be when nothing new is released on any other format.

@lemur866

People will pay $12 for a DVD copy of movie, even if they only end up seeing it once or twice. But very few people would pay the $30-40 or so they tried to charge for VHS copies. Instead they’d rent movies whenever they wanted to watch them.

Good lord, what maniac was trying to sell you VHS? In my experience, new movies on VHS sold for pretty much exactly the price you’d pay for the same movie on a new DVD now: $20. Granted that prices on older DVDs are now dropping quicker than VHS’s did, but then the VHS media was more expensive to produce, so there are more costs to be covered. But still, $40??

Ummm, anyway, I’ve begin to get the impresstion that there are people who make and store copies of blockbuster rentals, so apparantly $2 a viewing really is too expensive for some people. Also note that we already have movies circulating around the system; I don’t see why people are going to stop doing that just because somebody saved them the trouble of driving down to the store to get that first digital copy. It seems there really are people out there who want to pay nothing for what they get.

($40?!? :eek: )

[The_Hamster_King]

@Ludovic

Good thing I’m not interested in entertainment “products”. Execs who think of them as such deserve what piracy and apathy they get. Those who appreciate and cultivate well-made art deserve the profits (ironically enough.)

Good entertainment execs understand both the “art” and the “product” sides of the business. Creative vision is important, yes, but just as important is the ability to execute and deliver. Making movies and videogames is an INDUSTRY, not a game for artsy dilettantes. That means that at many stages of the production pipe it’s very useful to treat the work as “product”. In a discussion of the economics of funding movie production the “art” side of the equation doesn’t really matter.

Sorry if a glimpse inside the sausage factory makes you uncomfortable … .