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Putin: Pirate Site Blocking Has Failed to End Piracy

Posted: 29 Mar 2014 03:04 AM PDT

In the early days of 2013 it became clear that after years of wavering, Russia was finally going to get tough on Internet piracy. Despite outcry from Internet giants such as Google, and Yandex, the country's largest search engine, the government pressed ahead with its plans.

On August 1, 2013, a new law was passed which would allow sites to be blocked at the ISP level if they failed to respond to copyright infringement complaints in a timely fashion. But despite the legislative teeth, file-sharing sites were not blocked, with many simply complying with takedown demands as required by law.

In January 2014, however, the government said that the law was actually having the required effect, with the number of Internet users purchasing legal content going up by 30%. But at the same time there were complaints.

The founder of IVI.ru, the country’s leading source of Hollywood-licensed video, said that his company had not benefited from the law. And now it seems that the law’s lack of success is being admitted be people right at the top – the very, very top.

During a meeting with members of the House of the Federation Council, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the legislation introduced in August 2013 had failed to meet its objectives.

“This is an extremely important area, and we still have very much to do here,” he told the meeting.

“Even after we have adopted these solutions for intellectual property protection in the field of cinema, recent analysis has shown that it does not work as effectively as we expected.”

Putin added that despite the new law, pirate movies can appear on websites anywhere and completely undermine the framework.

“The effect is that all of our protection is reduced to zero,” the President said.

But even though things aren’t working, there are no signs of any retreat. Instead the Russian government is looking to get even more aggressive.

“It is necessary to consider additional steps to protect intellectual property rights,” Putin concluded.

Work is already underway to expand the current legislation to encompass all content since right now only video is protected. The government is also looking at introducing fines for errant hosting providers and wants to find a way to permanently close sites persistently engaging in piracy.

“Sites engaging in piracy professionally (it’s their business) should be closed,” said Vladimir Medina of the Ministry of Culture.

But the idea that closing sites will solve the problem was dismissed by a representative from the body in control of .ru domains. Noting that she is reminded of the “Streisand Effect”, where suppressed information only leads to wider dissemination, Olga Alexandrova-Massine said people will find a way to access blocked content.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Early iTunes Release Boosted Movie Piracy, Anti-Piracy Group Says

Posted: 28 Mar 2014 12:09 PM PDT

There are many factors responsible for people illegally downloading content from the Internet. Of course, some just like the idea of something for nothing, while others may not have the means or ability to pay, but pricing is only part of the story.

After a decade-and-a-half of consumers crying out for content to be made available online in a timely fashion, only now are there truly encouraging signs that the entertainment companies are at least on the right track, with the music industry making better progress than most.

But with its emphasis on keeping theater, PPV, DVD and other revenue channels sacred and in a pretty strict sequence, Hollywood has other ideas. The studios are still years away from debuting all movies online and in theaters on the same day which inevitably leads to piracy.

This week, however, an MPA-affiliated anti-piracy group claimed that having an early online release only leads to movies being pirated more.

The debate surrounds the Lars von Trier movie Nymphomaniac [trailer:NSFW], a controversial two-part drama starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and featuring Christian Slater, Uma Thurman and Willem Dafoe. It documents the decades-long destructive sex life of its lead character, Joe.

The movie had its theatrical release in its native Denmark on Christmas Day 2013 but no copy appeared on torrent sites. Usually a movie would then get released in theaters in other countries, but instead it appeared on the U.S. version of iTunes on March 6, 2014. Shortly after the movie appeared illegally online, and quickly became a bit of a hit.

Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance said it hired US-based MarkMonitor to track downloads of the movie and discovered that in the first two weeks after airing on iTunes, the movie was illegally downloaded more than 283,600 times. By March 24 that number had increased to almost 349,000 downloads.

Commenting on the findings, lawyer and Rights Alliance chief Maria Fredenslund said that the large number of illegal downloads go towards dispelling the notion that people download less when content is made available quickly online.

“We often hear the story that if only the movies came out earlier in the legal market, then it would reduce piracy on the web,” Fredenslund told DR.dk.

“Here we see that the number of illegal downloads actually explodes while the film is being made available on the U.S. iTunes.”

But while there can be little doubt that the copies currently circulating online are from U.S. VOD sources, stating that an online release caused all this piracy isn’t really the full picture. What Rights Alliance didn’t mention was that the movie didn’t hit U.S. theaters until March 21, which left a two-week plus window in which piracy could thrive.

Also complicating matters is that distributor Magnolia Pictures only released the movie to 22 theaters on March 21, with just another 17 gaining access today. The rest will have to wait well into April, by which time part two of the movie will already be debuting.

But despite the doom and gloom coming out of Denmark, Magnolia Pictures says the movie is “doing very well.” Nymphomaniac’s budget was less than $5 million with Magnolia reportedly paying $2 million for U.S. rights.

Finally, it’s interesting that Rights Alliance admit that when they did their tracking of Nymphomaniac downloads they only came across 1,003 Danish IP addresses pirating the movie.

Did giving the movie to Denmark first contribute to that low amount? Or maybe it’s because Danes have become so familiar with obtaining foreign IP addresses to get around a 2008 blockade of The Pirate Bay and gain access to the U.S. version of Netflix, they have since disappeared into the crowd.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.