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Weiye Loh

Report: Piracy a "global pricing problem" with only one solution - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...lem-with-only-one-solution.ars

Piracy Pricing Capitalism Globalization Income Inequality

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Over the last three years, 35 researchers contributed to the Media Piracy Project, released last week by the Social Science Research Council. Their mission was to examine media piracy in emerging economies, which account for most of the world's population, and to find out just how and why piracy operates in places like Russia, Mexico, and India.
  • Their conclusion is not that citizens of such piratical societies are somehow morally deficient or opposed to paying for content. Instead, they write that “high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”
  • When legitimate CDs, DVDs, and computer software are five to ten times higher (relative to local incomes) than they are in the US and Europe, simply ratcheting up copyright enforcement won't do enough to fix the problem. In the view of the report's authors, the only real solution is the creation of local companies that “actively compete on price and services for local customers” as they sell movies, music, and more.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Some markets have local firms that compete on price to offer legitimate content (think the US, which has companies like Hulu, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft that compete to offer legal video content). But the authors conclude that, in most of the world, legitimate copyrighted goods are only distributed by huge multinational corporations whose dominant goals are not to service a large part of local markets but to “protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits.”
  • This might increase profits globally, but it has led to disaster in many developing economies, where piracy may run north of 90 percent. Given access to cheap digital tools, but charged terrific amounts of money for legitimate versions of content, users choose piracy.
  • In Russia, for instance, researchers noted that legal versions of the film The Dark Knight went for $15. That price, akin to what a US buyer would pay, might sound reasonable until you realize that Russians make less money in a year than US workers. As a percentage of their wages, that $15 price is actually equivalent to a US consumer dropping $75 on the film. Pirate versions can be had for one-third the price.
  • Simple crackdowns on pirate behavior won't work in the absence of pricing and other reforms, say the report's authors (who also note that even "developed" economies routinely pirate TV shows and movies that are not made legally available to them for days, weeks, or months after they originally appear elsewhere).
  • The "strong moralization of the debate” makes it difficult to discuss issues beyond enforcement, however, and the authors slam the content companies for lacking any credible "endgame" to their constant requests for more civil and police powers in the War on Piracy.
  • piracy is a “signal of unmet consumer demand.
  • Our studies raise concerns that it may be a long time before such accommodations to reality reach the international policy arena. Hardline enforcement positions may be futile at stemming the tide of piracy, but the United States bears few of the costs of such efforts, and US companies reap most of the modest benefits. This is a recipe for continued US pressure on developing countries, very possibly long after media business models in the United States and other high-income countries have changed.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11
     
    A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can't be stopped through "three strikes" Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That's because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is "better described as a global pricing problem." And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.
Weiye Loh

Congress told that Internet data caps will discourage piracy - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...caps-can-discourage-piracy.ars

Data Cap Capitalism Pricing Internet

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • While usage-based billing and data caps are often talked about in terms of their ability to curb congestion, it's rarely suggested that making Internet access more expensive is a positive move for the content industries. But Castro has a whole host of such suggestions, drawn largely verbatim from his 2009 report (PDF) on the subject.
  • Should the US government actually fund antipiracy research? Sure. Should the US government “enlist” Internet providers to block entire websites? Sure. Should copyright holders suggest to the government which sites should go on the blocklist? Sure. Should ad networks and payment processors be forced to cut ties to such sites, even if those sites are legal in the countries where they operate? Sure.
  • Castro's original 2009 paper goes further, suggesting that deep packet inspection (DPI) be routinely deployed by ISPs in order to scan subscriber traffic for potential copyright infringements. Sound like wiretapping? Yes, though Castro has a solution if courts do crack down on the practice: "the law should be changed." After all, "piracy mitigation with DPI deals with a set of issues virtually identical to the largely noncontroversial question of virus detection and mitigation."
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  • If you think that some of these approaches to antipiracy enforcement have problems, Castro knows why; he told Congress yesterday that critics of such ideas "assume that piracy is the bedrock of the Internet economy" and don't want to disrupt it, a statement patently absurd on its face.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11
     
    Internet data caps aren't just good at stopping congestion; they can also be useful tools for curtailing piracy. That was one of the points made by Daniel Castro, an analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) think tank in Washington DC. Castro testified (PDF) yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee about the problem of "parasite" websites, saying that usage-based billing and monthly data caps were both good ways to discourage piracy, and that the government shouldn't do anything to stand in their way. The government should allow "pricing structures and usage caps that discourage online piracy," he wrote, which comes pretty close to suggesting that heavy data use implies piracy and should be limited.
Weiye Loh

Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...spite_Google_s_efforts_to_curb

Piracy Open Source Android

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Some have argued that piracy is rampant in those countries where the online Android Market is not yet available. But a recent KeyesLabs research project suggests that may not be true. KeyesLabs created a rough methodology to track total downloads of its apps, determine which ones were pirated, and the location of the end users. The results were posted in August, along with a “heat map” showing pirate activity. 
  • In July 2010, Google announced the Google Licensing Service, available via Android Market. Applications can include the new License Verification Library (LVL). “At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users,” according to a blog post by Android engineer Eric Chu. “It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.”
  • Justin Case, at the Android Police Web site, dissected the LVL. “A minor patch to an application employing this official, Google-recommended protection system will render it completely worthless,” he concluded.
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  • In response, Google has promised continued improvements and outlined a multipronged strategy around the new licensing service to make piracy much harder. “A determined attacker who’s willing to disassemble and reassemble code can eventually hack around the service,” acknowledged Android engineer Trevor Johns in a recent blog post.  But developers can make their work much harder by combining a cluster of techniques, he counsels: obfuscating code, modifying the licensing library to protect against common cracking techniques, designing the app to be tamper-resistant, and offloading license validation to a trusted server.
  • Gareau isn’t quite as convinced of the benefits of code obfuscation, though he does make use of it. He’s taken several other steps to protect his software work. One is providing a free trial version, which allows only a limited amount of data but is otherwise fully-featured. The idea: Let customers prove that the app will do everything they want, and they may be more willing to pay for it. He also provides a way to detect whether the app has been tampered with, for example, by removing the licensing checks. If yes, the app can be structured to stop working or behave erratically.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10
     
    Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb
Weiye Loh

The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/ent-a-box-office-record-120508

Piracy Movie Profits

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the US. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher. Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these “pirates” do not all count as a lost sale.
  • We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.
  • downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.
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  • A recent study showed that the US box office is not suffering from movie piracy, but that there is a detrimental effect on international box office figures. The researchers attribute this impact to the wide release gaps, which sometimes result in a high quality DVD copy being available on pirate sites while a movie is still showing in theaters. These high quality copies are more likely to “compete” with movie theater attendance and if a movie is not showing in local theaters at all, it definitely has the potential to impact future attendance. This is even more true for the DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales. High quality pirated copies are direct competition and can impact revenues.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 May 12
     
    Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie's profits, it's really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.
Weiye Loh

Making Music in Singapore | informed intuitions - 0 views

www.informedintuitions.com/...making-music-in-singapore

Piracy Music

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 12
     
    "All sharing is not piracy. Some of it is just actually sharing…. In order to protect some people from piracy we have also violated the rights of many more to share…In the Web 2.0 world, we are all producers of data. We not only leave traces but also put out material of cultural significance-from videos of dancing babies to knowledge that we want to share-through these peer-2-peer networks. A sudden collapse of this infrastructure almost seems to show how it is only the money-making material that is important to the state…"
Weiye Loh

Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...spite_Google_s_efforts_to_curb

Priacy Open Source Android

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • lot of Android applications are being pirated. The openness of the platform has made it easy for people to steal applications without paying for them.
  • growing popularity of the OS with enterprise users and developers is creating greater urgency, as pirated code robs developers of revenue and the incentive to remain committed Android. (See Android Set to Rule Over Apple and RIM Operating Systems.)
  • Network World's Android Angle blogger, Mark Murphy, bluntly noted a year ago that “Right now, it is very straightforward — if you publish on Android Market, your application will be made available for free download outside of the Market.” He added, “This is part and parcel of having an open environment like Android.” The then-current Android Market copy protection mechanisms “have been demonstrated to be ineffective.”
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  • What’s especially galling to professional developers is watching sales plunge as piracy rates soar. “The current issue we face with Android is rampant piracy, and we’re working to provide hacking counter measures, a difficult task,” says Jean Gareau, founder of VidaOne, an Austin, Texas, software company that specializes in health and fitness applications for a variety of operating systems.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10
     
    Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb
Weiye Loh

Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists - microbiology, genomics... - 0 views

www.lifescientist.com.au/..._years_ago_say_astrobiologists

Cancer Evolution Life

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • astrobiologists, working with oncologists in the US, have suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago.
  • Read more about what this discovery means for cancer research.
  • The genes that controlled the behaviour of these early multicellular organisms still reside within our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check.It's when these newer controlling genes fail that the older mechanisms take over, and the cell reverts to its earlier behaviours and grows out of control.
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  • The new theory, published in the journal Physical Biology, has been put forward by two leading figures in the world of cosmology and astrobiology: Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University; and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University.
  • According to Lineweaver, this suggests that cancer is an atavism, or an evolutionary throwback.
  • In the paper, they suggest that a close look at cancer shows similarities with early forms of multicellular life.
  • “Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when humans were nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells. “We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said.
  • One piece of evidence to support this theory is that cancers appear in virtually all metazoans, with the notable exception of the bizarre naked mole rat."This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics," they write.
  • the genes that controlled this early multi-cellular form of life are like a computer operating system's 'safe mode', and when there are failures or mutations in the more recent genes that manage the way cells specialise and interact to form the complex life of today, then the earlier level of programming takes over.
  • Their notion is in contrast to a prevailing theory that cancer cells are 'rogue' cells that evolve rapidly within the body, overcoming the normal slew of cellular defences.
  • However, Davies and Lineweaver point out that cancer cells are highly cooperative with each other, if competing with the host's cells. This suggests a pre-existing complexity that is reminiscent of early multicellular life.
  • cancers' manifold survival mechanisms are predictable, and unlikely to emerge spontaneously through evolution within each individual in such a consistent way.
  • The good news is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they're susceptible to treatment, it's unlikely they'll evolve new ways to get around it.
  • If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism," they write.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11
     
    Feature: Inside DNA vaccines bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon Alexion acquires technology for MoCD therapy More > Most Popular Media Releases Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists Feature: The challenge of a herpes simplex vaccine Feature: Proteomics power of pawpaw bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon Immune system boosting hormone might lead to HIV cure Biotechnology Directory Company Profile Check out this company's profile and more in the Biotechnology Directory! Biotechnology Directory Find company by name Find company by category Latest Jobs Senior Software Developer / Java Analyst Programm App Support Developer - Java / J2ee Solutions Consultant - VIC Technical Writer Product Manager (Fisheye/Crucible)   BUYING GUIDES Portable Multimedia Players Digital Cameras Digital Video Cameras LATEST PRODUCTS HTC Wildfire S Android phone (preview) Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 digital camera HTC Desire S Android phone (preview) Qld ICT minister Robert Schwarten retires Movie piracy costs Aus economy $1.37 billion in 12 months: AFACT Wireless smartphones essential to e-health: CSIRO Aussie outsourcing CRM budgets to soar in 2011: Ovum Federal government to evaluate education revolution targets Business continuity planning - more than just disaster recovery Proving the value of IT - Part one 5 open source security projects to watch In-memory computing Information security in 2011 EFA shoots down 'unproductive' AFACT movie piracy study In Pictures: IBM hosts Galactic dinner Emerson Network Power launches new infrastructure solutions Consumers not smart enough for smartphones? Google one-ups Apple online media subscription service M2M offerings expand as more machines go online India cancels satellite spectrum deal after controversy Lenovo profit rises in Q3 on strong PC sales in China Taiwan firm to supply touch sensors to Samsung HP regains top position in India's PC market Copyright 20
Weiye Loh

Author Paulo Coelho supports piracy: "share to get revenue" - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...ts-piracy-share-to-get-revenue

Piracy Profits

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 09 - Cached
  • A year ago, exciting news about publishing 2.0 reached the blogosphere. Thriller writer Paulo Coelho had started to tell people how he was using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more
  • His American publisher wasn’t too pleased though. After a rather imitating call from CEO Jane Friedman, Coelho chose a middle way and made the book viewable – but not downloadable. The torrent links are still up there though. Why? Coelho: “You’ll have to share in order to get some revenue”.
  • “At the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt your sales. People download the book but don’t read it They wait for the hard copy anyway”, Coelho continued. “Don’t be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.”
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 09
       
      Reminds me of music downloads... some people, including those I know, actually download music for free and if they like it, they'll buy the CD. 
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Nov 09
     
    Allowing people to download his books for free actually increases Coelho's book sales. 
Kathleen Tan

Forthcoming Leona Lewis tracks leaked onto the net by hackers - 11 views

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1207707/Forthcoming-Leona-Lewis-tracks-leaked-internet-highest-profile-hacking-case.html Basically, hackers managed to gain access to unreleased tracks...

Intellectual property hacking piracy

started by Kathleen Tan on 25 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
YongTeck Lee

Illegal downloaders may face ban from internet - 5 views

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090825/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_downloading UK may block repeated offenders who illegally download and share copyright films and music could find their internet access ...

piracy internet Intellectual property

started by YongTeck Lee on 25 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Meenatchi

China jails Windows software pirates - 8 views

Case Summary: The article is about an intellectual property infringement that took place in China. A court in Eastern China has sentenced four people to up to three-and-a-half years in prison for ...

Intellectual property rights software piracy

started by Meenatchi on 25 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Jun Jie Tan

Why Piracy is not theft. - 7 views

piracy commodity

started by Jun Jie Tan on 26 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...-sharing-the-global-future.ars

Piracy File-Sharing Music

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • a 2007 Journal of Political Economy study found that most downloaders would not buy that content, even if they couldn't share it. "Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero," the authors flatly concluded then. "Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period."
  • But a later 2010 meta-study by the same authors concluded that piracy did, in fact, account for a bit of the decline in music sales—around 20 percent. The other 80 percent could be chalked up to the sale of digital singles rather than whole albums and the rise of other media options like video games.
  • "Downward pressure on leisure expenditure is likely to continue to increase due to rising costs of living and unemployment and drastic rises in the costs of (public) services," says the report. Having less money for entertainment has played a huge role in the decline of items like CDs. A 2004 US Consumer Expenditure Survey showed that even spending on CDs by people who had no computer (and were therefore unlikely to download and use BitTorrent) dropped by over 40 percent from 1999 through 2004. "Household budgets for entertainment are relatively inelastic as competition for spending on culture and entertainment increases and there are shifts in household expenditure as well," the LSE study notes.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Content industry analyses of the file sharing phenomenon tend to downplay key sources of income for musicians, the LSE report charges, most notably revenue from live concert performances.
  • Legal file sharing also grew by nine percent globally in 2009, along with an eight percent increase in performance rights revenue.
  • So what is emerging is an increasingly "ephemeral" global music culture based not upon the purchasing of discrete physical packages of music, but on the discovery and subsequent promotion of musicians through file sharing. The big winner in this model is not the digital music file seller, but the touring band, whose music is easily discoverable on the 'Net. As with so much of the rest of the emerging world economy, the shift is away from buying things and towards purchasing services—in this case tickets to concerts and related activities.
Meenatchi

RIAJ push for mobile phone DRM across Japan - 2 views

Article Summary: http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/riaj-push-for-mobile-phone-drm-across-japan-20090915/ The article talks about the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) attempting t...

Digital Rights DRM

started by Meenatchi on 16 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Karin Tan

ASCAP Makes Outlandish Copyright Claims on Cell Phone Ringtones - 16 views

As is the beginnings of copyright laws, it is to place value on IP so that people will have the motivation and incentive to produce and create even more in the future. Therefore, by saying th...

Copyright

started by Jude John on 24 Aug 09 5 follow-ups, last by Karin Tan on 26 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

The Men Who Stole the World -TimeFrames- Printout - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...032304_2032746_2032903,00.html

Copyright Piracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10
     
    For Johansen as for all of the pirate kings, it was always about writing good code, and what good code does is give power to the people who use it. That's the real reason the pirate apocalypse never happened. The pirates never wanted music and movies and all the rest of it to be free - at least, not in the financial sense. They wanted it to be free as in freedom.
Weiye Loh

Can Creative Commons solve the digital rights problem? - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...he-digital-rights-problem.html

Creative Commons Copyright

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Creative Commons works by providing a framework for people to specify how their work can be used. Creators can use the Creative Commons website to choose the licence they want and generate the HTML code to include on their own website. The licences can allow people to copy it, remix it and share it and set various conditions under which those things can be done, for example allowing only non-commercial use of their work or allowing use only if they are credited as the source.
  • the licensing made possible new business models. She told the Telegraph that the existing system had failed because people saw the world as “either the chaos of piracy or the lockdown”. She added: “But the lockdown doesn’t work and it wouldn’t work even if it was ideal.”
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