The movie industry is not happy with the ever-increasing piracy rates and has called out Google and other stakeholders to “do more” to help. At the same time, Hollywood keeps emphasizing the many legal options that are available to the public.

A few months ago the MPAA launched the website WhereToWatch.org which provides an overview of dozens of legal video outlets that are available in the United States.

“Audiences want seamless access to film and TV shows. Our industry has listened, and we are now delivering more choices than ever before,” MPAA boss Senator Dodd said at the time.

“There have never been more ways to access movies and television legitimately online, and those platforms continue to grow and develop thanks in large part to a copyright system that encourages innovation, risk and growth,” Dodd added.

While this sounds great, the WhereToWatch site doesn’t change the fact that many of the newer releases are simply not available online due to artificial release lags. After a movie’s box office premiere it usually takes months before people can access it online.

This mismatch prompted public policy researchers at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center to take a close look at the online availability of some of the most pirated movies. On the newly launched Piracydata.org the researchers use TorrentFreak’s weekly lists of most pirated movies combined with information from CanIStreamIt to come up with an overview of the availability of these titles.

The results from this week are listed below, and it’s clear that half of the movie titles don’t have any legal options at all, while none are available for streaming.

TorrentFreak talked to Jerry Brito, director of Mercatus Center’s Technology Policy Program and one of the people behind the PiracyData website. Brito tells us that the MPAA and RIAA complaints that Google is placing pirate search results above legal alternatives was one of the motivations to look into the legal availability.

“We are compiling a dataset to help answer the question: Are the most-pirated movies available legally online? With only three weeks of data, the answer seems to be that very few are available legally. We’ll get a clearer picture in the months ahead as the dataset grows,” Brito says.

The lack of legal alternatives they have found so far means that Google sometimes has no other choice than to place pirate sites high in the search results, as there simply are no authorized options available.

“One implication may be that when movies are unavailable, illegal sources are the most relevant search results, so search engines like Google are just telling it like it is. That is their job, after all,” Brito says.

While the current dataset is limited to three weeks, it’s quite telling that of all movies listed none was available for streaming, while only 20% could be rented.

Brito notes that the data doesn’t prove a causal effect between availability and piracy, but that it’s clear that Hollywood can “do more” to increase access to popular movies themselves.

“While there is no way to draw causality between the fact that these movies are not available legally and that they are the most pirated, it does highlight that while the MPAA is asking Google to take voluntary action to change search results, it may well be within the movie studio’s power to change those results by taking voluntary action themselves.”

“They could make more movies available online and sooner, perhaps by collapsing the theatrical release window. Now, their business model is their prerogative, and it’s none of my business to tell them how to operate, but by the same token I don’t see how they can expect search engines and Congress to bend over backwards to protect the business model they choose,” Brito adds.

Whether Hollywood will take up this suggestion has yet to be seen. Some movie studios have experimented a bit with shorter release delays, but unlike the TV and music industry it is still the core of its business model.

Update: The PiracyData website included some wrong data initially, the article has been edited to correct this.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Pirates are ruining the industry and are the direct reason for the loss of thousands of jobs, they say. Better copyright protections are the solution, they conclude.

A recent example of this reasoning was displayed by MPAA boss Chris Dodd earlier this week at the CinemaCon meeting in Las Vegas. Dodd told the audience that copyright protection has always been vital to the US movie industry, and it’s copyright that has allowed Hollywood to thrive .

The MPAA used this to emphasize that the movie industry and the tech sector have a mutual interest in strong copyright legislation. Or put in his words:

The truth is that neither the content nor the technology industries could survive without strong protections for intellectual property.

Many of you are familiar with how the name Hollywood became synonymous with the birth of the American film industry. It was in Jacob Stern’s horse barn, at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, the story goes, that Cecil B. DeMille screened the first full length feature film 100 years ago.

Well, when it comes to the tech sector, replace “Jacob Stern’s horse barn” with “Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room” at Harvard, and you have almost the same story with the birth of Facebook.

In these and countless other examples throughout our history, the ability to give birth to an idea and convert it into economic success, whether it is the content of a film or the technology of the internet, depends on copyright and patent protection

An interesting argument, but also an unfortunate one. Not only because Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of stealing the Facebook idea himself, which Hollywood turned into a movie recently. But also because it’s easy to argue that the American movie industry was built by copyright “thieves.”

In fact, Hollywood wouldn’t be what it is today if a bunch of rogue filmmakers hadn’t fled New York early last century. This “pirate” version of the movie industry history starts with one of America’s greatest innovators, Thomas Edison.

Little over a century ago Edison stood at the cradle of the filmmaking industry. He was the first to invent a device through which people could project film and obtained many movie related patents. To make money from his hard work he asked a licensing fee from those who were making movies with his technology.

This licensing requirement motivated a group of rogue filmmaking pirates to flee New York, including a man named William. They left for the then still wild West, where they recorded many films without a license until Edison’s patents expired. These pirates continue to do business there today in a place they named Hollywood. William’s last name? Fox.

So Edison got no money from these Hollywood pirates. While today’s Hollywood would be up in arms about this gross circumvention of intellectual property rights, we should mention that Edison himself wasn’t squeaky clean either.

In fact, in 1902 Thomas Edison himself copied “A Trip to the Moon,” a movie from Georges Méliès, without permission to show it in US theaters. This overt act of piracy eventually resulted in the bankruptcy of the French filmmaker.

The above shows that it’s not a stretch to argue that the movie industry was built by pirates. Or to put it in other words, if early 1900 filmmakers would have paid for their licenses, Hollywood would probably have never been built.

But you won’t hear that from the MPAA of course…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It seems then, that instead of hiring, or listening to people who will tell them the truth, or at least explain what happens in a way they can understand, they listen to lobbyists who tell them a bunch of lies, and hand over some cash to ‘prove it’s true’. There can be little other reason for the actions of Congressman Howard L. Berman at a recent US Chamber of Commerce panel on ‘antipiracy’ held in Hollywood.

Variety is reporting that at the end of this get together, Berman promised legislation that will require ISPs to send warning letters to their users, if they access ‘pirated content’. He has reportedly said he’ll introduce legislation to this effect soon, maybe next month.

Now, whilst Congressman Berman is in some ways being a good politician, and representing his constituents (his district covers Hollywood) in this he will be acting in no-one’s best interests, except those of the rights-holding clearing houses. This scheme differs only slightly from the current questionable practice of sending letters, or filing John Doe suits, and attempting to intimidate regular citizens into paying large sums of money, by making the ISPs send the letters out automatically, without a rights holder noticing, and collecting evidence.

There are some problems, however, with the basic feasibility of this scheme. They are:

1. There is no easy way to tell if data being transmitted via a protocol such as bit-torrent, is protected by copyright at all
2. There is then no way to tell if the data is being transmitted by the rights holder, or with their permission.
3. Even if the data is copyrighted, and without the rights-holder’s permission, it may still fall under fair use.
4. ISPs are having enough problems with network capacity. To then have to devote more money and manpower to this will reduce further their ability to expand their services to cope with the latest demands.
5. Finally, since at least 95% of all material on the net is copyrighted to someone; it will take only a day or so before every net subscriber has acquired enough letters to warrant disconnecting their service.

Eric Clifford, founder of Fair Use day likened such legislation to “an information police state”. He then added, “what happens if I access my music files at home remotely?”

Of course, such a system would only work if everyone only used sequential, single-source, plain text data streams. Any requirement for ISPs to be able to monitor usage in the way Berman wants, would have to require this, and so it makes online identity theft easy and simple , no encryption, nothing from multiple sources, or out of order. In short, he wants to cripple one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, in order to preserve the 1970s business practices of some parasitic middlemen, whose entire reason for being is to make money off other people’s creative efforts. Rep. Berman, for your own sake, fire the fools advising you of things like this, and start listening to someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The script was uploaded to a popular semiprivate BitTorrent tracker by a certain “xbadwolfx” 6 days ago. He claims that it is the original copy, and that he has “friends in the company”, but reminds downloaders that the production team might have made slight changes to it after the time of his receiving it.

What’s interesting is that one of the concept images xbadwolfx uploaded to the torrent site displays the title of the movie as “Jurassic Park: New Dawn”, while another image says “Jurassic Park IV”. Both these images don’t match the title of the script, which is “Dawn of Extinction: Jurassic Park”. Also, one of the concept images has the year “2006″ printed on it.

Despite those discrepancies, the script itself seems to be legitimate. According to the uploader, it is confirmed that all the original Jurassic Park (1) characters are back. What’s yet to be seen is whether Hollywood will actually go ahead and make this movie.

We’re not linking to the torrent for obvious reasons. Although, it’s rather easy to find.

Update: Turns out, the script’s a fake. I guess we should have taken a hint when we found three different titles for the movie. Thanks to Icaterus for letting us know.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Swedish secretary of state Dan Eliasson confirmed the information stating:

I know that the USA has opinions as it comes to the effectiveness of our system when it comes to copyright and that Sweden and other countries aren’t following thier international agreements. There are sanction mechanisms in the USA, and this has been pointed out from their side.

The threats were successful, and Swedish politicians demanded the takedown of The Piratebay, which is obviously wrong. Toba from the Piratebay says:

In Sweden it is considered very important that the politicians do not interfere with certain cases of police work. So you might understand why people here are so pissed off about Bush, MPAA, fucking Tom Cruise or whoever it was being behind this big sabotage against The Pirate Bay.

More details in the subtitled Swedish news item below.

The torrent can be found here

Or watch in on Youtube

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Soderbergh discussed the possibilities BitTorrent has for Hollywood together with the MPAA’s Dean Garfield and Ashwin Navin from BitTorrent at the Tribeca Film Festival.

This is not the big breakthrough, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Via

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.