Mistake Shows Need for Clear Communication in Piracy Discussions

Let's say that I download the last episode of the recent season of Lost via BitTorrent. It's not yet available on DVD and I get broadcast TV in my home. Is this theft? Some in the entertainment world say yes. Here's an example:

In a demonstration for BusinessWeek earlier this year, Attributor executives showed how many times scenes from "The Sopranos" had appeared on 20 leading video sites since they first aired on TV. In all, 1,500 scenes from 52 episodes had been viewed 32 million times. For Time Warner's (TWX) HBO, those viewings might have brought in more than $1 million, said Attributor Chief Executive Officer Jim Brock. [Emphasis added.]

The quote talks about and HBO series which people do pay to see (by subscribing to HBO) but I've read similar statements regarding broadcast TV shows too. But here's the catch:

It turns out that Brock was estimating revenue from advertising that did, or could have, run next to the "Sopranos" clips. I'm glad I asked, because there's a big difference between an overlooked opportunity and outright theft.

Here is exactly where we need to separate the hype from the reality. Is the company losing money because of theft or because of their lack of understanding and missing of an opportunity?

Read the full article at Tools of Change for Publishing.

Understanding Anti-Piracy Enforcement

TorrentFreak has a great post explaining some of the most common misconceptions about anti-piracy enforcement today. They are:

1. There have been very few actual legal cases, as yet, that have involved torrents.
2. The majority of copyright cases are CIVIL, not criminal
3. What most people think of as being the law, often isn’t.
4. The RIAA and the MPAA never get involved in anti piracy evidence collection directly.
5. Most of the time, people are going from what someone they have met on a forum had read in an IRC channel.

Each of these are addresses in detail on TorrentFreak.

One bielyon dollars!

Ok, I exaggerate a little but this is getting a smidge ridiculous. The MPAA is demanding $15.4 million from The Pirate Bay to "cover the damages they suffered from 4 movies and 13 TV-episodes that were made available via the popular BitTorrent tracker". Sorry, but by that logic, never mind the insane math involved in coming up with that number, the MPAA should be suing Google too since I can find torrents of The Pink Panther via their search engine too.

Pirate Bay's response: “The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with,” Sunde added. “And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record.”

BitTorrent without the hassles

I'll stick with Azureus as it allows me to do many things to control my Torrents but for those not willing to put in the effort, try FireTorrent. This is a simple Firefox add-on that allows you to download torrents. It just adds a new "torrent" tab to the Downloads screen and takes over whenever you click on a link to a .torrent file.

CIL2007: Web 2.0 and What it Means to Libraries

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project

• "I adore librarians"
• Ask a Ninja: What is Podcasting
• The Starting Point
• Tim O'Reilly & John Battelle
• The Web as platform
• netscape v google
• doubleclick v adsense
• akami v bittorrent
• harnesing collective intelligence
• data is the next "intel inside"
• software above the level of a single device
• rich user experiences
• Changes
• cashing - peer to peer
• britannice - wiki
• personal sites - blogging
• evite - upcoming.org
• doubleclick - adsense
• ofoto - flickr
• taxonomy - folksonomies
  
  
• etc
• Web 2.0 meme map
• 6 hallmarks of the Web 2.0 world that matter to libraries
• The Internet has become the computer
• # of computer users is indistinguishable from # of Internet users
• Broadband availability up
• Internet users # up
• wireless connectivity up
• people go online from more places
• # of people accessing internet from libraries has doubled in past 4 years
• broadband turns the internet into a destination
• broadband intensifies people's internet use and it becomes more serious
• broadband makes video a big part of the internet experience
• broadband make people's internet use more social
• Tens of millions of Americans, especially the young, are creating and sharing content online
• 55% of teens have profiles on social networking sites
• 20% of adults have profiles on social networking sites
• SN Profiles: Switchboards for social life
• Teen girls more likely to use all SN features
• 51% of young adults have uploaded photos / 37% of adults
  
  
• 39% of teens share their own creations / 22% of adults
• 33% of teens are tech support for their families & orgs / 13% of adults
• 25% of kids / 33% college students / 12% adults have blogs
• 27% of teens / 14% adults have their own Web site
• 26% teens / 9% adults have created mashups
• 19% teens / 9% adults have an avatar to interact with others
  
  
• 15% teens / 8% adults have created videos
• Even more internet users are accessing the content created by others
• Long Tail audience
• 46% of young users read blogs
• 44% of young adults seek info in wikipedia
• 14% of young users download podcasts
• many are sharing what they know and what they feel online and this is building conversations and communities
• 33% of young adults have rated a product, person, or service online
• 32% of young adults have tagged content
• 25% of YA have commented on videos, also blogs & photos
• tens of thousands are contributing their knowhow and processing power
• 40% of users participate in peer-to-peer
• grid computing
• open source movement
• online Americans are customizing their online experiences
• 40% of YA customize news and other information pages
• 50%+ of YA on specialty listservs
• 25%-33% of YA get RSS feeds
• 5 issues libraries and all online participants must struggle to address - Pam Berger - http://www.infosearcher.org/
• Navigation
• transitioning from linear format to nonlinear in format
• Context
• learning to see connections
• Focus
• practicing reflection & deep thinking
• Skepticism
• learning to evaluate information
• Ethical behavior
• understanding the rules of cyberspace
• The Machine is Using Us
  
  

Technorati Tags: cil2007

Dewey Torrents

In today's unshelved. (I still haven't seen 300 yet. Guess I'll need to wait for the DVD at this point.)

BitTorrent humor

Today's Real Life comic takes on "watching" UK TV via BitTorrent. I have this conversation with myself all the time. (Doctor Who Series three starts this Saturday! Guess what I'll be watching on Sunday.)

Done the Impossible

This will make so of you finally learn how to use a BitTorrent client.

Vista and Azureus

Well, my Bittorrent client Azureus had a bit of trouble with Vista a first. There were two problems. First, all existing torrents continued to work as they should but all new torrents told me that they didn't have permission to write to whatever folder I tried to put them in to. Second, the program was leaving what I can only call artifacts on the screen. For example, I would click File, then Exit and the Exit menu item would stay on the screen hovering in place in front of everything else unless I either rebooted or chose to switch users and just logged back in as myself. (Both of these totally refreshed the desktop thereby removing the artifact.) So how did I solve these problems?

1. I typically save my torrents to a external hard drive (F:). What I found (through a bunch of online searching) is that Azureus under Vista will only save new torrents to a shared folder that is not marked as read-only. So, (since I couldn't change the read-only setting on the rood of a drive,) I created a new folder (F:\Torrents), set it as shared on my network, and then unchecked the read-only attribute. I can now save torrents to that directory.
2. The artifacts was solved by updating my video driver through Gateway's support site. (As I did with my sound card driver.) A reboot, and the artifacts stopped appearing.

I've got another issue with updating my BIOS that I'm working with Gateway to solve byt that's not really a problem as everything's working fine (as far as I can tell) and the "issue" isn't causing any additional problems. I'll post more about that one once the issue has been solved.

Zudeo powered by Azureus 3.0

I've started playing with the new 3.0 version of the Azureus BitTorrent client and their Zudeo directory/store of legal Torrents. Here's the first thing I found, Batman: Dead End, an amazing fan short-film pitting Batman agains not only the Joker but also a Predator and an Alien.

Wikipedia CD 1.0 available via BitTorrent

You can now download via BitTorrent a CD version of "2000 hand-picked articles of particular interest to schools or children (Geography, Science, Dinosaurs, Plants and Animals). The articles were hand selected off the English Wikipedia by volunteers working for SOS Children, checked for suitability to children and cleaned by hand and script. The CD includes only thumbnails of images." More details on how the collection was generated can be found on the BitTorrent site.

Why Bittorrent Works

If you're familiar with Bittorrent but aren't sure how or why it's different from other P2P technologies check out Why Bittorrent Works from Torrentfreak.

Vista Torrent Update

Following-up on my post from yesterday, it seems that Microsoft doesn’t like the Vista torrent and has sent “cease and desist” letters to the two sites hosting it. One has taken it down the other hasn't. Just for that, I feel like downloading it myself.

Windows Vista Torrent

Not only is beta 2 of Windows Vista abailable but it's available as a torrent. Unfortunately, it wasn't officially torrented by Microsoft but it is a step in the right direction.

Doctor Who Episode 2.02 Torrent

Doctor Who Episode 2.02 Torrent
Originally uploaded by travelinlibrarian.

The second episode of the new Doctor Who series (season for those insisting on using American terminology) finished broadcasting about four hours ago. Already there are more than 350 full copies available via BitTorrent with more than 2200 people actively downloading it. I think this says somehting about the show's popularity, don't you?

Doctor Who Series 2 Podcast

Doctor Who Series 2 Podcast Image
Originally uploaded by travelinlibrarian.

Unless you've been living under a rock (or just don't care,) series two of Doctor Who started this past Saturday in the UK. (Yes, you can find it on BitTorrent.) The news of additional coolness is that Mr. Davies is producing a podcast of episode commentaries. You can find it via iTunes (just search on "Doctor Who") of, for those of you that are iTunes-less, the URL for the feed is http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss/2006_commentaries.xml.

Doctor Who: Series 2 Preview

Broadcast on BBCi last night at 8pm local, this three minute preview of series two is now available via bittorrent. The quality isn't great but it still gave me goosebumps. (The verbal oneupsmanship between Rose and Sarah Jane is priceless.)

Ring... "Hello, IT. Did you turn it off and on?"

Ever worked in an IT department? Know anyone who does? Just find "computer people" a little bit odd? If you answered yes to any of these questions you need to be watching the Brit-com The IT Crowd. As I understand it, the show is not being broadcast but being shown online in a DRM'd format available only in the UK. However, it seems to be poorly implemented DRM, and so far the first five episodes have been liberated and are available via Bittorrent. (If you don't know what Bittorrent is, check out the Wikipedia article. My client of choice is Azureus.) This show is just too damn funny to miss!

Piracy Is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV

Piracy Is Good (live)
Originally uploaded by travelinlibrarian.

The online article is great but to get the full impact you need to watch the live presentation version. (bittorrent link)

Third session of "Tech Terms" Web session added

The September 23rd and 30th sessions of the Tech Terms Web seminar has filled in less than 48 hours. Due to this overwhelming response, a third session has been scheduled for Friday, November 18th at 10am MDT.

* * *

Do you know what podcasting is? Or phishing and malware? If you want to learn what these and many other tech terms mean, you'll want to sign up for a free BCR Web Conference.

BCR's internet trainer, Michael Sauers, will be doing a one hour presentation on "Tech Terms: What’s Hot, What’s New, and What You’ve Got to Know." If you're not familiar with Wikis, RSS feeds, or BitTorrent, you will soon be hearing about them from your patrons. This presentation will make you more comfortable with these terms.

This free webinar is scheduled for Friday, September 30, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., Mountain time. Because a limited number of seats are available, registration is REQUIRED. To register, complete the online form available at http://www.bcr.org/training/workshops/register.html

Free Seminar: "Tech Terms: What’s Hot, What’s New, and What You’ve Got to Know"

The September 23rd session of myTech Terms Web seminar has filled in less than 24 hours. Due to this overwhelming response, a second session has been scheduled for Friday, September 30th at 10am MDT. Those in non-BCR states are welcome to register but preference will be given to registrants from BCR member libraries.

* * *

Do you know what podcasting is? Or phishing and malware? If you want to learn what these and many other tech terms mean, you'll want to sign up for a free BCR Web Conference.

BCR's internet trainer, Michael Sauers, will be doing a one hour presentation on "Tech Terms: What’s Hot, What’s New, and What You’ve Got to Know." If you're not familiar with Wikis, RSS feeds, or BitTorrent, you will soon be hearing about them from your patrons. This presentation will make you more comfortable with these terms.

This free webinar is scheduled for Friday, September 30, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., Mountain time. Because a limited number of seats are available, registration is REQUIRED. To register, complete the online form available at http://www.bcr.org/training/workshops/register.html

TorrentSearch

Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent has launched a new search engine on the official BitTorrent site that searches the P2P system. Here's one interesting example.