Sony movie boss touts 3 strikes scheme
p2pnet news view Politics | Movies:- Michael Lynton (right), chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, is the latest Hollywood boss to try to pressure Britain into turning the entertainment cartel inspired Three Strikes marketing plan into official government policy.
Yesterday, p2pnet pointed out MPAA Bob Pisano is in England to suggest traffic throttling rather than outright disconnection is the way to deal with alleged ‘illegal’ file sharers, with Rupert Murdoch’s Times Online acting as the conveyor of this news.
According to Hollywood’s MPAA — and Lynton — camcording criminals are to blame.
However, although you won’t see it mentioned in the mainstream media — or by Lynton — leaks of screeners, work prints, preview releases and other movie industry ‘product’ show up on the P2P networks all the time, thanks people working in one capacity or another for the studios.
Not only but also, the many millions of DVDs routinely pumped out for retail sale serve as templates for organised criminal counterfeiters and duplicators who sell the results on underground and black markets, as well as the street corners and flea markets of the world, as p2pnet has often noted.
Now, “Our film Michael Jackson’s This Is It opens almost everywhere in the world tomorrow,” Lynton writes, you guessed it, in Times Online.
With millions of Jackson fans on every continent, it wouldn’t make sense to do otherwise,” he says, going on »»»
But there’s another reason why simultaneous worldwide releases of big movies make sense: piracy. If Sony released it only in the US on Wednesday, by late Thursday it would be camcorded, uploaded on to the internet and available free to anyone with a broadband connection.
Unfortunately ‘day-and-date’ releasing doesn’t solve the problem of piracy. Many ‘art house’ or independent films cannot afford to open globally. They have to start in just a few cinemas in one nation. When such movies are stolen, it hurts their chances of building an international audience — robbing film-makers of entire markets where stolen versions of their work have proliferated online.
So the net is bad, BAAAAAD !!!
Then we get to the nitty gritty.
“The film industry has to change quickly, and we are working hard to do that,” Lynton says, adding, “to build the kind of marketplace that allows us to innovate and take advantage of the opportunities that digital distribution opens, we need help from those who make and enforce intellectual property laws.”
But, “I’m not talking about state-imposed preservation of the status quo,” he says, although that is, of course, exactly what he’s talking about.
Meanwhile, “but I do support proposals that target people who persistently upload content for illegal file sharing, so that they can be warned by their ISP to stop, or face temporary suspension of their account,” he states.
Who’ll be next to chime in?
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
p2pnet – Major Hollywood ‘anti-piracy’ shake up, October 19, 2009
p2pnet – MPAA boss pressures UK on 3 strikes scheme, October 26, 2009
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