What to expect...
... Extraordinary Rendition in an infeasilbly large Diplomatic Bag to be made to face his accusers in their Court.
Big Content goes after Kim Dotcom
Kim Dotcom is getting all outraged again and banging the freedom-of-something gong with his usual enthusiasm after six Hollywood studios slung a sueball his way. In a court filing you can see in PDF form here, twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros all take issue …
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 09:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I find it amusing
"That Hollywood is suing anyone over IP rights"
Gee, Edison stole something 140 years ago, and so everything made today should be free? Wow. That's a real mature outlook you've got there. I am impressed by your sophistication.
Movies cost money. Most movies are flops and fail to recoup. The movie industry employs tens of thousands of production staff, writers, cinematographers who deserve to be paid. If enough morons don't pay, I guess you can get your kids to do a puppet show from behind the sofa.
I'm sure it'll be almost as good as 2001 or The Matrix. Almost.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 09:58 GMT MrDamage
Re: I find it amusing
Most movies "fail to recoup", not due to piracy, or being bad, but by this wonderful little device called "Hollywood Accounting".
This is the same "Hollywood Accounting" that had Universal studios in court trying to claim that the Lord of the Rings trilogy made next to nothing so they wouldnt have to give Peter Jackson his fair share of the profits.
Besides, if you read the comment to which you replied, it wasnt about Edison stealing, its about how the movie industry moved to get away from Edison so they could steal from him.
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Wednesday 9th April 2014 01:47 GMT Tapeador
@MrDamage Re: I find it amusing
"Most movies "fail to recoup", not due to piracy, or being bad, but by this wonderful little device called "Hollywood Accounting"."
While tax losses can indeed be valuable to some companies, and there have indeed been known to be some dubious arrangements involving investment banks, these are actually ways of injecting MORE actual revenue and investment into the industry, rather than less - the expenditures they incur, do genuinely go to hiring people to master their art, pay their bills, and keep their skills up for another day when they'll make the next masterpiece which will give you joy at the movie theatre. The accounting trick is to show that a loss was made.
However PIRACY is a different matter. It can only divert revenue away from the industry and the very real jobs it creates. The truth about business is when you're in it, revenue broadly must match investment in the long run. If there is some additional injection from investment banks trying to make a deliberate loss, that's a bonus, but at the end of the day, you can't buck the market, and the market needs buyers.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 11:41 GMT Chairo
@ AC: Re: I find it amusing
Hmm, where in my post did you read, that I support infringement (not stealing, btw.)? I just find it amusing, that it hits Hollywood. Btw. Have you even heard of Edison? 140 years ago? And he stole what?!? Talking about sophistication... Are you American? If so, then shame on you, sir.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 07:41 GMT Eradicate all BB entrants
Time for some flaky ......
...... analogies.
When they attack ISP's it is like arresting the Highways Agency because a house burglar used the motorway to transport his ill gotten gains from one location to another. Going after the sites like torrent/MU is similar to arresting the staff of a motorway service station, as the above miscreant used the car park to move the goods from one car to another.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 08:46 GMT Tony Paulazzo
Litigators will need to “pierce the corporate veil” to link van der Kolk, Ortmann and Dotcom to the copyright infringement to succeed.
American Corporations who own the entire media take foreigner to American court where it's already be proven the American DOJ is utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt in its search to attain guilty pleas (for lower prison sentences), so as to 'prove' how only the guilty are ever accused...
I personally think Dotcom is a big bully, happy to infringe and who made a lot of money from it, unfortunately he's met an even bigger bully with the colossal resources of the NSA to 'find' anything they need to fuck him over.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 08:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
"an even bigger bully with the colossal resources of the NSA"
Are you on drugs?
The MPAA may love to have the entire NSA (or even any of it) working against piracy sites, but it doesn't.
Add up the revenue of all the "Big Content" in the world, and it's still smaller than Google, Amazon and Verizon combined. Look it up.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 21:45 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Optional
"Add up the revenue of all the "Big Content" in the world, and it's still smaller than Google, Amazon and Verizon combined. Look it up."
You mean the people who producrd star wars and were forced into lives of penury because of it?
Or do you mean people like Alec Guinness and the rest of the cast who were offered shares in the profits and ended up using Megaupload to try and get their money back by selling bootlegs on Sunday markets?
I remember Van Morrison telling me that that is how he got started. He downloaded all the songs he wrote, sang and played on from Megaupload and sold them at his gigs to help pay for fuel, tyres and wear and tear on his 2nd hand Ford Transit; after that, he said, he never looked back.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 18:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: MD5
I don't think that was his (Kim's) point, but consider this:
You have permission from the content creator to distribute content X.
I don't have permission from the same creator for the same content X.
If you and I are both using the same service for distribution, and the takedown mechanism uses md5sum(X) is the trigger, then an automatic system will remove not only my copy of X, but the valid, authorized, legitimate copy of X of yours.
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Thursday 10th April 2014 08:45 GMT Richard Wharram
Re: MD5
That was his point. He was playing the consumer champion via a technical limitation that is easily rectified. It is just posturing.
Dropbox and others use SHA for the of same purpose and manage fine. The files aren't deleted if they match a banned hash but simply can't be shared. See the Dropbox article the other day.
As to your example, that's the flaw in the Megavideo model which means that content owners would never consider it as a distribution platform. Kimble is playing it as a personal storage platform but monetising it as a distribution platform. If it really was a personal storage platform then they could have taken the measures that Dropbox et al do. But they didn't want to because they would have lost users. Not all users wanted to stream copyrighted content admittedly but many did. Steps are available to reduce copyright violations as others already do but Mega chose not to take them.
Down vote away. Those are simply the facts about that part of the case. I'm saying nothing about the rest of it.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 15:10 GMT jellypappa
Most movies are flops and fail to recoup
so most movies flop because of freetards, not because they are crap movies and no one pays good money to watch them.
having been involved in the movie busuness for many years, one of the main reasons movies fail to recoup is the high salaries paid to actors, think of the money pot as a upside down pyramid, the stars get the biggest wedge, often at the cost of the many talented people who work hard long hours on a production.
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Tuesday 8th April 2014 19:50 GMT jellypappa
Re: The truth
interesting video, seems like the only way us plebs can take control, is to stop giving them our money for their products/services, we all stop going to the cinema, stop renting or buying DVD's only download and use freeware. our wallets/credit cards will be our weapons of choice, by choking off there access to our money.
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This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
