Tag: piracy

Netflix And The Return Of The Dark Torrents Of The Internet

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The rise of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and the online streaming services looks to be driving a growth in BitTorrent usage and media piracy. When consumers are given easy and almost friction free access to the media (even if it’s a £10/month fee) they’re going to stay there, rather than explore the darker corners of the internet. While there are still questions over revenue distribution (especially with streaming music services) this is still a better option for creators than having everyone pirate the latest album or TV series. The problem is that the myriad of services, all with their own monthly

The legions of staff employed by NBC to stop piracy speak out

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In 2009, Mr. Skinner’s unit sent out 427,000 takedown notices. But last year, as illicit videos became more prevalent, that number grew to 3.9 million. For “Suits,” the unit has sent out more than 40,000 notices. Strike that, they’ve only got twenty employees and lots of automation to try and stem their share of “$58 billion of losses” (a number made up by the MPAA). But the WSJ article shows a huge amount of ‘reaction’ to the issues, and no proactive reasons to try and provide a better solution for people who want to watch NBC’s content.

Smart thinking from Belladonna on the piracy of their third album

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Belladaonna‘s Dani Macchi, via Facebook, on scoring 20,000 downloads of their new album,” And There Was Light…” Wow, almost 20.000 downloads in a week! Yes it’s an illegal download website, so we won’t see a penny out of all these downloads… but it’s hard for us to give a damn about that, we are too busy celebrating the fact that so many people chose to add our beloved latest album in their collection! Pop quiz, is Macchi right? I think the honest answer is yes. If someone had approached the band and said they could get their music into the

Gerry Rafferty sang “take the money and run”, but where’s the money in music today?

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I’ve spent this week talking to music labels (three, to be exact, none of which would allow attribution for anything that they said), previously-huge artists and those who one day will be. My  goal was to find out how artists were finding ways to make money in an era where digital piracy is rampant. As many people as you’ll talk to, that’s how many different stories that you’ll find. But some of the people who would allow themselves to be quoted had some great insight and we’ll talk about that here. The Next Web talks to a Steve Lawson about

Dear movie industry, have you learned from Napster?

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Bill Wyman (no, of NPR, not the Stones) lays it al out in depth over on Slate. The trouble facing the movie industry right now is the same one the music industry had to confront 10 years ago. This is the summing-up sentence I referred to above.The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or TV shows you want is to get them illegally… Again, to belabor the obvious: The illegal version isn’t just free. It’s better. Update: This is really a "blog post to which the answer is no", but Tom Sizemore points out on Twitter the