5 million Star Trek pirates vs. 1 FCC broadband plan

Paramount Pictures says that, in the months following the theatrical release of Star Trek, the media company tracked more than five million IP addresses that downloaded one of six camcorded copies of the movie. The first was in Russian, but it was followed by editions from the Philippines, the Ukraine, Spain, Germany, and finally the United States. Who does Paramount blame for this? Pretty much the entire Internet, it seems, including google.com, youtube.com, Microsoft’s bing.com, yahoo.com, and, of course, millions of ‘Net users.

“Just five years ago, one had to be computer literate and exceedingly patient to pirate movies,” Paramount wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on Friday. “Today, literally anyone with an internet connection can do it. Clunky websites are being replaced by legitimate looking and legitimate feeling pirate movie websites, a perception enhanced by the presence of premium advertisers and subscription fees processed by major financial institutions.”

Piracy, Paramount warns, “has advanced from geek to sleek.” All the more reason why content providers “must have the legal and regulatory flexibility to use technological tools in partnership with Internet service providers to stem the tide of online copyright theft.” The letter does not elaborate on what kind of “technological tools” Paramount would like to use.
Don’t mean much without content

Oddly, the media company has filed these comments with the FCC’s request for feedback on its National Broadband Plan, which the agency must write and hand over to Congress by mid-February. The Notice of Inquiry, which the FCC released in April, says the plan will focus on “the build-out and utilization of high-speed broadband infrastructure.”

But the Motion Picture Association of America, of which Paramount is a member, argues that it is content that drives the urge for broadband. The Commission gave the MPAA an audience for this argument at an FCC broadband workshop held this summer titled “The Role of Content in the Broadband Ecosystem.”

There Dan Glickman of MPAA pressed the thesis. “You can’t have good connections, good pipes, good delivery systems that mean anything unless you have good content that people like,” he explained. “And the reverse is true. All the good content in the world don’t [sic] mean much if you can’t find a delivery system to pipe it through. And you have to provide the incentives for both to be able to continue their work.”

“Incentives” is probably a euphemism for copyright policing, of course. We’ll get back to this content-moves-the-Internet theory later, but first, let’s look at Paramounts’ version of how Star Trek was purloined by a cast of millions.
Piracy propagation

Paramount’s filing includes a tracking chart of all the different bootlegged editions of Star Trek that the company says made their way across the global film market (the image is a little difficult to follow unless you expand it to about 33.3 percent). The studio released the film worldwide on May 8. That very day a Russian language theater-goer camcorded a copy and premiered it on the Internet, the studio explains. It wasn’t a high quality product, but soon other trekkies recorded a better soundtrack from theaters, and merged it with the Russian effort. Various translations then made their way across Europe and the Far East, until a superior Ukrainian edition surpassed them all and became the dominant bootleg edition.

By September, very high quality pay-per-view versions and ripped DVD copies were available in English, Italian, French, German, and Russian. As of the third week of that month, 5,320,000 downloads or views had been served via 73,625 URLs, Paramount estimates.

The studio says it came to its five million plus illegal downloads estimate via a “forensic technology” provided by the BayTSP content tracking company. Paramount contends that the number may be higher, because BayTSP does not track video streams. “Streaming video is particularly appealing to consumers, as hulu.com and youtube.com have learned,” the movie maker warns, “and that appeal has been exploited by sophisticated criminal syndicates now operating professional-quality but illegal websites.”

The bad guys

But Paramount’s FCC letter doesn’t just blame “illegal websites” for the Star Trek diaspora. Its taxonomy of scofflaws lists Google, Yahoo, and Bing right up there with minova.org, rapidshare.com, and megaupload.com. Why are they included in the mix? Paramount says its rogues gallery can be divided into six groups of scoundrels: “aggregators” like zml.com; “cyberlockers” that allow users to upload files to URLs, then share them on Facebook and Twitter; “leech sites” that facilitate links to content; and, of course, “user generated sites” and “p2p” apps like BitTorrent and Limewire.

“Search engines” like Google and company, however, aren’t innocent by-standers, Paramount warns, because they “provide quick and easy access to pirated movies through keyword searching, and in some case, sponsored search results.” All in all, almost a third of the top 100 websites ranked by Alexa serve up pirated content in some way, Paramount contends.
Anyone can do it

Then, of course, there’s John and Jane Q. broadband user. Paramounts’ letter includes a “geek to sleek” chart that notes that while, back in the day, only “computer literate” individuals could pinch copyrighted content, now “anyone” can do it. And, while early exchange sites had a “clear sense of piracy,” now they sport a “legitimate look and feel.”

It’s not hard to sense where this is going—calls for the FCC and Congress to let studios form partnership with ISPs to unleash the cyberdogs of copyright war: deep packet drones, lawyer-bots, takedown ninjas, and whatever other digital wedgie-deliverer a vendor premiers at the next MPAA technology show.

And so, concludes Paramount, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan “can only serve as a successful road map for ubiquitous broadband if the government recognizes the vital role that high quality, high value content plays in driving adoption of new technologies.” Thus, copyright theft surveillance becomes synonymous with national broadband planning. “The prevalence of pirated material online provides a strong disincentive for investment in motion pictures and other professional video content, which are well-understood to be key drivers of broadband adoption.”
Is content king?

But analysts disagree as to how “key” content really is in the broadband adoption equation. University of Minnesota digital technology scholar Andrew Odlyzko warns that the “content is king” stance is essentially a myth. It isn’t content that drives Internet adoption, he argues, it’s connectivity among users. The balance of worldwide telco revenue (perhaps as much as 80 percent), Odlyzko notes, still comes from voice. “And the bulk of the remainder is from other connectivity services (such as texting, or, to the extent one can allocate revenues from Internet access, from email).”

Indeed, wireless data revenues come “overwhelmingly” from texting, he adds. “Connectivity has always been valued far more than content.” Still, Odlyzko thinks that the ‘content is king’ myth will dominate decision making about broadband, both at the business and government level. And that’s certainly where Paramount’s Star Trek letter is going.

“The flood of stolen content currently available online,” the studio warns, “including every major theatrical film within hours of release—poses an immediate threat to the motion picture industry, which in 2007 supported 2.5 million jobs, $41.1 billion in wages, and had a trade surplus of $13.6 billion.”

The FCC will clearly be pressured to incorporate some sort of copyright policing into its broadband plan. But the bigger fight may occur if studios pick a fight with members of the private sector: the search engines. – Ars Technica