I’ve got a suggestion for Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes fame.

Stay the hell away from technology stories because you are coming of looking like an idiot who doesn’t have a clue. Not to mention that you also start sounding like some shill for whichever organization will benefit from the scare tactics you are using in your segments.

The last time you tried to instill fear in everyone was when you were reporting making up shit about the horrendous Cornflicker virus that was going to take down the Internet in one fell swoop. It didn’t matter one bit that the virus would only infect Windows computers. Nope this nasty little virus was going to destroy the Internet.

To make matters worse the security software company she talked was some dude from Symantec and in the end the whole segment ended up sounding more like an ad for Symantec.

This is a video of that show

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Now fast forward to tonights show where once again Leslie is doing a segment of the incredible evils of movie piracy and how it was costing the movie industry billions of dollars and taking food out of the mouths of hard working actors and movie crews. She even had Steven Soderbergh in the interview chair going on about how bad this piracy thing was.

Of course this was all tied in with organized crime and people using their family to shield them while they filmed the movies playing in theaters. Now anyone who has even watched an illegal downloaded movie will tell you how bad these CAM movies are yet these are the very same movie that industry representative say are killing the movie business.

The one man that Stahl used in the segment was caught with a large amount of burned CD and computer equipment that had been used to upload these “industry killing” versions of movies. This apparently is where the real money is made according to Stahl and interviewees. The only problem is that no-one told Stahl that you don’t have to pay anything to download the movies just as you don’t pay to upload them for distribution.

There is no substance to this segment other than following the “industry representatives” lead on how terrible this all is and how the whole industry is losing money because of these evil people.

Substance like the fact that this has been one of the best years on record for the industry at the box office and it’s not even over yet.

Substance like the fact that the chances are that those terrible people who are downloading absolutely crapping versions of movies probably wouldn’t pay to go and see them in the first place.

Substance like the fact that those big budget movies that are losing money are general crap that no-one wants to see in the first place.

Substance like interviews with people like Cory Doctorow, Michael Mesnick, and others who have been following this subject for a long time and unlike the industry flack that Stahl was fawning over they actually have real figures to defend their arguments.

>In the end this 60 Minutes segment came off just as biased and stupid sounding as her piece on the infested Internet. So here’s a suggestion Leslie. when it comes to technology stories I strongly suggest that you run in the other direction because you – and or your production crew – don’t have a damn clue.

Here is tonight’s segment on how the movie industry is being killed off by evil pirates.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

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It’s not like the MPAA is going to run into the shadows with its tail tucked between its legs but US District Court Judge Stephen Wilson served notice to the organization that it hadn’t proved that torrent site Isohunt has broken any US laws.

The lawyers for the MPAA have been trying to convince the judge that Isohunt had encouraged and contributed to the infringing activity of the site users. The judge has given the MPAA until September 15 to file any briefs to convince him that Isohunt that any direct infringement by users who live in the US.

While the MPAA has been silent on the judge’s decision the lawyer for Isohunt, Ira Rothken, thinks that the MPAA lawyers are going to have a hard time providing specific examples of infringement happening in the US.

"Our view is that it would be difficult if not impossible," Rothken said, "to be able to trace any direct infringement to the users of the Isohunt’s site in a manner that would hold Isohunt responsible for the infringing conduct. I think the judge’s order will hopefully demonstrate to the court that Isohunt, besides lacking knowledge of direct infringement, can’t possibly be held liable for users conduct, especially since any such conduct occurs after they leave the site."

Rothken is hoping to argue Isohunt’s case before a jury, something that no other BitTorrent sites have managed to do.

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In some ways you have to admire the audacity and amount of hot air that lawyers for the entertainment industry can expel. Nowhere though is this type of verbal buffoonery more apparent than the defense they use to prop up the concept of DRM’ing our music and movies.

A good example of this attitude can bee seen in the submissions made to the Copyright Office during its triennial DMCA review by Steven Metalitz, a Washington lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA and other rights holders. This is his response to the Copyright Office over the possible exceptions that would allow users to legally strip DRM from content if a store closes and takes down the authentication servers.

"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so."

Source: Ars Technica :: Big Content: ludicrous to expect DRMed music to work forever

Talk about priceless but it doesn’t stop there. He continues on with this

"To recognize the proposed exemption would surely discourage any content provider from entering the marketplace for online distribution… unless it was committed to do so… forever. This would not be good for consumers, who would find a marketplace with less innovation and fewer choices and options."

Even as Amazon and iTunes make music available without any form of DRM we still get this lawyer blow hot air up everyone’s butt. It’s no wonder that people are getting fed up with the whole entertainment industry.

No related posts.

I realize that smokers are the lowest scum of the earth lately and that we get bastardized and ostracized worse than the homeless, the drug addicts and the drunks but now we are being told we’re worse than rapists and terrorists. At least that is the position that The American Medical Association Alliance is taking when it comes to the movies. Yes, that’s right our favorite people in scubs is lobbying the Motion Picture Association to apply a mandatory R-rating to any move that has smoking in it.

This is because, according to a report just out via CNN, these green suited goodie two shoes are blaming movies for being the cause of one-third to one-half of all young smokers in the United States. The prime example of the incredible social pressure being applied to our weak-willed innocent babies to get them hooked on smoking is the gratuitous smoking in X-Men Origins: Wolverine

American Medical Association Alliance President Sandi Frost used as her chief example of a movie with "gratuitous smoking" this month’s blockbuster "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," which was rated PG-13 "for intense sequences of action and violence, and some partial nudity."

"Millions of children have been exposed to the main star of the film, Hugh Jackman, with a cigar in his mouth in various scenes," Frost said. "I’m willing to bet that not one child would have enjoyed that movie or Mr. Jackman’s performance any less if he hadn’t been smoking."

Of course Twentieth Century Fox, the studio responsible for the movie, have come out saying otherwise

A spokesman for Twentieth Century Fox, the studio responsible for the Wolverine movie series, said Jackman’s cigar was never lit and it was limited to just two scenes.

In one scene, the cigar is shot out of his mouth, prompting Jackman’s Wolverine character to suggest its loss would lead to clean living — an anti-smoking statement — the studio spokesman said.

He said that while the Wolverine character has a cigar in his mouth in almost every panel of the comic book series, producers made "a conscious decision" to limit the cigar in the movie.

This hasn’t stopped the doctors though in their push to have the MPAA add smoking to its list of factors used in determining the ratings given to movies. A list that runs from cursing, lewd gestures right up to rape and terrorism.

The MPAA has come out and said though that they have already been doing this to an extent for the last two years. Angela Martinez, an MPAA spokesperson, said that smoking is rated like all the other factors which includes sex and violence. This isn’t enough for the doctors though because they what it to be an absolute condition of a movie getting the R-rating not just a factor.

As a side note it took me longer to find a graphic with Wolverine smoking a cigar than it took me to write the post and it wasn’t even a great graphic at that

[hat tip to Newsarama Update: I should also give proper credit to Russ over at Newsarama for the inspiration for this post's headline - sorry about that Russ]

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At the end of March of this year I wrote a post about Mininova’s interesting attempt at providing musicians with a storefront on the site for their music. This was a part of their move to try and legitimize torrents as a way to download legal music files. Now it would seem that they are going even further down that road by instituting a content recognition filter system for all torrent file uploads in order to reduce the number of torrents pointing to illegal media files.

One of the interesting things about this is that system being used isn’t one that the team behind Mininova selected themselves. Instead it was one selected by the media companies that currently have a lawsuit pending against the torrent search site. Up until this point Mininova has always been trying to use the “we’re just a search engine” defense and are protected by the DMCA Safe Harbor exemption. As Ernesto at TorrentFreaks points out this has obviously changed.

Additionally Ernesto reports on the negative reaction from the users of the torrent site

The response from Mininova’s users is mostly negative, with one commenter saying “Shame to see such a nice site decide to go hang itself,” and another adding “Wow, guess you guys are caving under the pressure. Too bad its all over now.”

This raises a rather interesting thought. Piracy is going nowhere, no matter how hard the entertainment industry tries, and for sites like Mininova; as well as other popular torrent sites, these ‘illegal’ torrents are what bring people in. Take away those files and you are endanger of losing the biggest reason for people to use your search engine over some other one. They are in fact what is called in the real world of marketing – loss leaders.

So rather than doing everything they can to remove those files and lose users in the process why not use them to your advantage. The idea here being that you clearly label them as pirated files but at the same time provide links to legal versions that are of better quality and faster download. Pull the users in with the lure of easy to find pirate torrents and then convert them into legal owners of those self-same files. It’s not that hard to do and the benefits far outweigh treating everyone as a criminal before giving them an options to be customers.

Where on one hand Mininova look so much like a forward thinking web business it now looks like nothing more than a lackey for the very people that the majority of their users hate. I wouldn’t be at all surprise to see Mininova pay dearly for this move as users begin looking elsewhere. It is another case where everyone loses.

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They force things like draconian digital rights management on entertainment and software producers because they don’t want to lose a single penny. Of course it isn’t just the trade organizations like the RIAA, MPAA or their software counterparts. It is also the corporations producing the mass quantity; much of which is pure dribble to begin with, that issue the marching orders or end up paying for the lawyers suing people into the poor house.

Why is it that the whole concept of the first sale doctine goes out the window the moment we move to digital goods. Just because you spend your hard earned money to buy something online in a digital format shouldn’t mean that it isn’t yours. That however is just what all these entertainment and software companies are saying. You can go to a bookstore, record store or gaming shop and plop down your money and that tangible item is yours. You could go the very next day and trade it in on something else and the store can sell it as used goods. You can sell it to your best buddy and no-one can tell you any different. Why – because you owned it – period.

In Canada when we go to buy any black media to copy onto (cassette tape, video tape, cd, dvd) there is a tax built into the price; otherwise known as The Private Copying Tax, that lets us make as many copies of something we want for our own private use. This has pissed off the folks like the RIAA and MPAA because it makes it next to impossible to enforce their perverse version of copyright law through our government. This is whyorganizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have been trying very hard to influence our Canadian government to change the laws – copyright laws that are in fact fairer to the content producers that anything the U.S. has.

It’s bad enough that organizations like this have gained the control they have in the US but this misappropriation of rights is now spreading beyond the U.S. borders and I’m sorry but it’s got to stop. As long as I am not breaking the law buy trying to profit from selling copies of things under sane copyright laws then why am I; and you being, treated like criminals. Why do we let this bullshit continue?

I’m an honest person as well I am sure that you are. Sure we’ve all probably downloaded something we shouldn’t have at some point in our lives but to continue to let these bastards extert the kind of power they have over our lives is just plain insane. Especially when you consider that we have the power to change this. A power so incredibly displayed by the Obama campaign – the power of the people. Not the power brokers, not the lobbiests but the power of the people to say enough is enough. They need to be told that we are not criminals and that both the entertainment corporations along with their trade organizations have no right to treat us as such.

The fact is that once we pay our money for a product; physical or digital, it is ours plain and simple. However until we tell these soulless greedy pricks to back off we get what we deserve. They aren’t going to stop doing everything they can to maximize every red cents they can regardless of our rights as consumers – as people. We are to blame for the situation we are in now and only we can change it. The companies won’t, the politicians won’t – we have to. But we’re too busy running to iTunes or other online entertainment content stores to get the latest and greatest even if we do whine and moan about things like DRM.

How do we change this? I don’t know because I don’t think this is important to enough people that any real concentrated movement to effect any change. Don’t bother crowing about Web 2.0 and social media and how it is changing things because right now those ideals don’t mean squat to the corporations and trade organizations. Just think though for a second if for even 6 months is not a thing was bought from iTunes, not a single game was downloaded or not a single pirated version made the rounds. How much of a change do you think could happen when all these companies that need our money in order to keep running suddenly are faced with this kind of action.

It could be done but honestly I doubt it will ever happen no matter what the power of the people showed during the election. I could be wrong but I don’t think so – what do you think?

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According to a c|net article posted today the MPAA has won a breach of contract lawsuit against China-based DVD player manufacturer Gowell Electronics. As a result the US District Court for the Central District of California has issued a permanent injunction against the company that prohibits Gowell from violating any terms of the Content Scramble System (CSS) license agreement.

Big deal right?

Well actually it is when you realize that it is this CSS licence agreement which enables the MPAA to enforce the manufacturers to employ the CSS technology. DVD manufacturers are required to sign if they want to sell DVD players in the US. It is this technology that controls the unauthorized access to and copying of copyrighted content on DVDs. As noted in the c|net article

The CSS license mandates the content protection that enables film studios to provide consumers with more than 84,000 DVD titles, including 12,000 new titles last year alone.

The motion picture studios are third-party beneficiaries of the CSS license and may enforce it against licensees who fail to comply with its terms.

While this is the ninth such case in which a court has issued a permanent injunction banning future violations of the license, this time the plaintiffs are allowed to review and test any new or re-engineered products that incorporate the CSS technology before going to market.

It is the last part of this where the boys at the MPAA must just be getting all excited over now because now they get to review any new DVD players that are coming into the US market. No incorporation of CSS then you don’t sell in the US. So in effect an entertainment trade group now controls what equipment you can buy in the US if it even hints at being a DVD player.

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The now-defunct site is accused of copyright infringement by the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA claims it facilitated the pirating of protected materials such as movies.

Now TorrentSpy’s attorney, Ira Rothken, is firing back for the first time since the fine was announced. Rothken tells CNET News the decision is an “abuse of discretion” and little more than a “Hollywood public-relations stunt.” Rothken goes on to say that TorrentSpy is currently bankrupt and couldn’t pay the fine anyhow.

“It’s obvious we are going to appeal,” he stated.

TorrentSpy has insisted all along that because it didn’t actually host files, it shouldn’t be held responsible.

Is it just me, or does this whole thing bring back bad memories of the never-ending Napster battle with the music industry nearly a decade ago? Maybe Lars Ulrich is out there reading this and has something insightful to say.

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