The 5 minute segment focused on an MPAA funded study by a group called the RAND corporation. The study – which was widely criticized early last month – is back with a new coat of paint. This time though, it’s being broadcast to the movie-going British public with the appearance of solid fact, and has addressed none of the questions we brought up just after the study was released.

Perhaps the choice of interviewees might shed some light on ‘why?’ a bit better.

* Keiron Sharp – Director General, Federation Against Copyright Theft.
* John Woodward – CEO, UK Film Council.
* Gregory Treverton – Director of RAND, the study’s authors.
* Callum McDougall – Executive Producer for Quantum of Solace.

This selection seems to be a bit one sided to say the least. If you’re wondering what’s so special about the last name, it might be because you didn’t go to see that film at the cinema. Just before the film was played, a short advert voiced by Quantum star Daniel Craig, talked about how “piracy was costing people jobs”.

McDougall also gave a speech last winter to a UK copyright industry lobby group saying how the industry will fall “like a house of cards” if downloading continues at current levels. This same group, the Industry Trust for IP Awareness, tried to push much the same message on terrorism and piracy almost 5 years ago.

One of our readers was angered by the bias of the segment and wrote a complaint to the BBC. After a few weeks of waiting a reply came back from BBC Complaints, and it was none too satisfying.

Thank you for your e-mail regarding ‘Film 2009 with Jonathan Ross’ as broadcast on 31 March.

I note you felt the report on this programme about copyright theft wasn’t adequately balanced as it only featured interviews with people from the film industry. I appreciate you felt we allowed a distorted view of this issue to be portrayed and note you have strong views regarding this matter.

This report focused in on a legitimate problem for both the film industry and the authorities as they try to tackle what is an ever increasing and profitable criminal activity. We feel the report outlined the laws surrounding the issue of film piracy adequately and that the interviewees from the film industry were entirely appropriate people to comment on the problem.

Impartiality is the cornerstone of all our output, and we feel this report was fully balanced in it’s coverage of copyright theft. Nevertheless I appreciate our audience has a wide range of opinions and inevitably this means that not every viewer will agree with the content of every programme we broadcast. We know all our editorial decisions are subjective and we’d never expect our audience to agree with every decision we make.

With this in mind that I’d like to take this opportunity to assure you that I’ve recorded your comments, including that you believe this topic deserves a more in depth investigation, onto our audience log. This is an internal daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to many BBC staff including senior management, producers and channel controllers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Regards

Liam Boyle
BBC Complaints

Of course, there’s also a fine piece of irony in this show. The preceding segment was about a film called ‘The Boat That Rocked‘, a film about a 60’s pirate radio station. The irony is that it’s written and directed by one Richard Curtis. The same Richard Curtis that last year co-signed a letter to The Times urging ISPs to stop piracy.

It seems it’s only ok to profit from piracy, if you’re making a film about it.

UPDATE: The video of the segment is now available.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

To add to the excitement there are also plans to use BitTorrent to distribute the show and source material. The BBC is one of the partners in the EU funded P2P-Next research project that uses BitTorrent technology to shape the future of web based TV delivery. BitTorrent is very effective in reducing bandwidth costs and thanks to technology developed by the P2P-Next team it can also be used to stream TV-shows, and even live video.

The BBC is not offering BitTorrent downloads or streams for R&DTV just yet, but they do hope to use P2P-Next (and therefore BitTorrent) for future episodes. This could be done by embedding BitTorrent powered streams in their site or alternatively they could offer regular .torrent downloads.

R&DTV is published in a full 30 minute version and a brief 5 minute edition offering just the highlights. Both are available in various video formats but that’s not all. For every episode, all of the source material – including raw footage not used in the full show – is also included in the so-called asset bundle.

In true BitTorrent style the downloads come with a ASCII art Scene-inspired NFO file disguised as readme.txt. “We’re pretty excited and ask you to please tell us what you do end up doing with the asset bundle, so we can learn what works and what does not work and fix it next time we release another asset bundle,” the BBC writes on the download page where the show is posted.

We applaud the BBC for being one of the few content publishers not to shy away from BitTorrent and file-sharing in general. We’ve previously written about Norwegian state TV that launched its own BitTorrent tracker, but unfortunately they forbid people from redistributing or remixing their shows.

By using a Creative Commons license the BBC seems to understand that this is one of the key elements of 21st century broadcasting, and we hope to see more initiatives like this in the future.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

With today’s compression and hard drive technology, we can store hundreds of movies in a very small space indeed, but before the mainstream uptake of digital technology, storing video or music was a very expensive and resource-hungry task. Recent news from the BBC gives us a taster of how difficult things had become for them in the 1960’s, with the public broadcaster finding itself squeezed by lack of funds and lack of storage space, and even having to resort to erasing TV shows it had previously made.

One such TV show that suffered was Dad’s Army, a sitcom about the Home Guard in World War 2. The series ran for a huge 80 episodes on TV and made further appearances on radio, film and stage. The show pulled in 18 million viewers an episode during the 1970’s and still appears on TV today. Last night a very special episode aired on the BBC.

Room at the Bottom, an episode presumed lost by the BBC when it was erased to save space and money over thirty years ago, appeared on TV last night. The original show was in black and white (the color version was erased, along with the audio) but experts recreated the color version from the black and white source. But what about the lost audio?

Ed Doolan MBE is a presenter on BBC Radio WM, but back in 1969 before he worked for the BBC, he was a very naughty boy. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, Doolan recorded many shows, including the audio from the ‘lost’ episode when it first aired, and has kept the recording ever since. Today, far from hauling him over the coals, the BBC has used Doolan’s illicit copy to help bring the show back to life.

Last night, millions of Dad’s Army fans enjoyed the ‘lost’ episode of their beloved show and you can bet that not a single one would be calling for Doolan to be sued. In the end, the ‘good’ in his piracy leads to enjoyment for millions, and that can never be a bad thing.

It’s only when we lose something that we truly appreciate its full value and, thanks to file-sharing and the Internet, we are now in the enviable position of never having to apply the words ‘rare’ or ‘lost’ to any media ever again. And even though companies want to make media less accessible with their DRM, in the longer term, no-one will thank them for locking away history.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“Today, piracy has become more and more like, someone who likes freedom, someone who likes information exchange” says Peter. “It’s only positive, it’s only, only good and you know, that is piracy according to some people, and you get labeled as a pirate.”

Peter then goes on to state some of the objectives and motivation behind running the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker: “We’re fighting, The Pirate Bay is fighting for freedom because we don’t want to be information slaves, we don’t want to have someone else decide what we should and shouldn’t think.”

Despite massive effort by the music and movie industries to create a negative image of piracy, for some, the term ‘pirate’ has lots of positive connotations these days and Peter is happy to be labeled as one: “We call ourselves pirates because the recording industry is calling us pirates and we think it’s a cool thing to be a pirate. It’s people today that want to share information and the internet has changed how people actually distribute music and movies so the industry is very scared of the change.”

Most modern-day media pirates would agree, piracy hasn’t always been easy. Tools haven’t always been readily available nor priced in a way that makes piracy accessible to all. The internet – providing worldwide communication and information interchange for everyone who accesses it – has changed all of that. Putting that genie back in the bottle may prove impossible, says Peter:

“Previously we wanted to have information free but it was hard and the Internet has made it easy. This is an evolution that’s needed and I think in a hundred years we’re gonna look back at this period and say: “We were so stupid to even try and stop it”

But the movie and music industries are attempting to stop it and they do not consider themselves stupid for trying. Indeed, the movie industry in particular is putting huge resources into trying to curtail piracy and has put significant amounts of effort into shuttering The Pirate Bay.

“Getting all of the industry against you makes it very hard,” says Peter, “it is so important that the people can communicate and they want to stop this for, you know, economical reasons – and they’re not even right about the economical aspects.”

The BBC interviewer questions Peter on this point: “You say they are wrong about the economical aspects but they would say: ‘I own this film, I own this music, and you are stealing this from me’. How are they wrong about the economical aspect?”

“Well, what we’ve seen in the music industry is that interest is growing, more people are interested in music and they spend more money than ever on music, but the record industry is shrinking because nobody wants to buy CDs anymore, it’s an inferior product, you can’t put the CD directly on your MP3 player.”

Indeed, the music industry has been incredibly slow to adapt to the digital revolution, in the main preferring to insist that people continue to buy their music on plastic discs, instead of the incredibly popular, flexible (and easily copied) MP3 format. Peter believes it’s about control:

“They don’t want to sell MP3s because they feel they don’t have the control they used to have, so they don’t understand that they are losing out on money because they are not following how the industry is changing.”

But it’s the ‘reproduction pirates’ – file-sharers – that are taking over the ship now. They’re everywhere says the BBC, and they’re multiplying. Tarleton Gillespie, assistant professor at the Department of Communication, Cornell University explains:

“The generation that scares the music industry more is the next one, the one that’s coming up now because they’ve never known anything different. There’s always been peer to peer [for them], there’s always been very easy ways to get on whichever service you want and the music is there. So the question of how to get it…it’s not backroom dealing or someone setting up a table on the street corner, it is always there, so the music industry is struggling because they have to figure out how to convince that generation to think of anything other than “this is the easiest and most free way to get my music.”

The full 3-part article accompanying the podcast can be found here.

The podcast itself can be downloaded here, and is packed with lots of information, provided free of charge, without DRM, and in convenient MP3 format. How media should be.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of the biggest names taking part is the BBC, who will use the new BitTorrent client to stream TV programs. Other partners in the P2P-Next project are the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The main goal is to develop an open source, BitTorrent-compatible client that supports live streaming.

Approximately 50% of the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time download TV shows. The current project will help broadcasters to find better ways to reach this online audience, and offer high quality on-demand television.

“This cooperation with both the British and German public broadcasters indicates that P2P is here to stay. We welcome the decision of the European Union to award this proposal around P2P. This means that Europe can expand it’s roughly two year lead in this important area,” Tribler’s Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak.

“Tribler serves as a testing ground for several world-first innovations. It serves as a living lab for P2P research. Key to our endeavor is an academically pure architecture: no central servers exist in Tribler in combination with being backwards compatible with BitTorrent,” Pouwelse added.

As part of the project, the Tribler team, together with Harvard researchers, implemented the “Nobel prize winning” mechanism design theory into their BitTorrent client. The ultimate goal is to encourage people to share as much as possible without imposing share ratio sanctions, and to let users moderate the available content.

BitTorrent sites are watching the P2P-Next project closely, and some might even be interested in experimenting with the new technology. We asked Johan Pouwelse if he sees possibilities to collaborate with BitTorrent sites, and he said: “We are creating tools for traditional broadcasters and also new entrants to the distribution market.”

I guess we should take that as a yes.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Curtis illustrates his point by comparing the rise of Neoconservatism in America and the Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East. He argues that both are closely related, and that both parties profit from misconceptions, and exaggerated, illusory threats.

To date the series of documentaries was never shown on American TV. Curtis tried to get it on American TV, but he was told by a head of the leading networks that there was no way they could show it. ‘We would get slaughtered if we put this out,‘ was the response of the man in charge of one of the leading TV networks.

The three documentaries first aired on BBC TWO in the autumn of 2004. An updated version was broadcast in late January, 2005. The series been shown in several other countries and is now available as a free download.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This does not mean that people watch less TV overall. In fact, the opposite might be true. A recent study CBS poll showed that P2P TV increases the overall time people spend watching TV. However, it is an indication that times are changing, and TV broadcasters will need to make more content available online.

Availability will automatically lead to more fans because nobody will ever miss an episode. Just look at the popularity of TV shows like LOST on BitTorrent. More fans could mean more TV watching, which will lead to more income if TV broadcasters find a good way to monetize their content.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today, legal implementations of BitTorrent are not new anymore. The BBC, Sky and NTL are using BitTorrent to spread movies and TV-shows. The MPAA signed an agreement with BitTorrent to fight “illegal” filesharing. Allpeers, a BitTorrent extension for the popular browser Firefox just received a huge sum of money. BitTorrent inc. is even opening its own online video store.

The legal opportunities are endless. People might want to focus on that instead of blaming a tool for things that might be illegal somewhere.

Like Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, an OECD economist in its IT division states

“Peer-to-peer technology will be among the essential components of everyday communication … chilling its legal use is like being against the steam engine in the 19th century,” said .

Even Adrian Strain, a spokesman for the music industry’s lobbying group, the IFPI said

“Everyone agrees that P2P is a fantastic technology but we will have to see whether it can be successfully converted into a legitimate and commercially viable business model,”.

So stop suing and get to work!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.