Exit Stage6: A Step In The Right Direction

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

So DivX Corporation’s Stage6 has croaked. The service’s ‘goodbye, cruel word’ note says it was a victim of its own success, but that it proved ‘it’s possible to distribute true high definition video on the Internet’.

What it really showed is how deliriously inefficient streaming video is, whether it’s high def or otherwise. It cost at least  $1m a month to run Stage6 with its 17.4 million unique users a month, whereas (at an informed guess) The Pirate Bay costs about $50,000 a month all-in for its 92.5 million. That’s $57,000 per million users for Stage6; $540 per million for The Pirate Bay (not including people using its tracker without visiting the site, which adds a lot of Mininova’s traffic as well, not to mention the other big indexes.) So at the very least, The Pirate Bay is a hundred and five times more efficient than Stage6 was.

But inefficiency is not the only reason the service is no more, while the vilified Pirate Bay, Mininova et al. are still with us. Stage6 was also a lot more illegal than a BitTorrent tracker — whether it pretended to be complying with the DMCA or not. Surprisingly under reported after the abrupt demise of the service was the 6th Feb US court ruling against DivX’s attempt to establish its protection under the DMCA’s safe harbour provisions ahead of a legal battle with Universal Music Group. My reading of the company’s consequent, speedy exit from the stage (and correct me if you think I’m wrong) is that Stage6 didn’t have the cash or confidence to test its luck any further. (How much this affects DivX as a whole remains to be seen. But only six days after the court decision, Jerome Vashisht Rota, the inventor of DivX and a major shareholder in DivX corporation, was openly dumping stock.)

It’s not hard to read the tea leaves. While GooTube (famously being sued by Viacom on pretty much the same grounds) probably won’t lose sleep, smaller players eating their lunches off of pirate content will be paying very close attention. VCs burning money on pushing streaming media to the masses will at least want to imagine some returns on their investment rather than the further expense of executives in the dock.

Why is this a step in the right direction? Because for all the hyperbole in the mainstream (and sometimes online) media about the YouTube or Google Video or Stage6 ‘revolution’, the relationship to media they offer us is far too traditional. Come to this place. Be served your media (and suck down your advertising along with it). Go away again. Yes, we can upload material, but I’m not the only one who feels that this wasn’t the primary function of Stage6, even if it did distribute about 50,000 copies of STEAL THIS FILM II before its demise. No need to share, no need to understand the technology, no need to think. It’s what they called ‘lean back’ media: millions of people slouching thoughtlessly in front of an marketing-emitting portal.

The promise of P2P is a thorough breakdown of the kind of power that congeals in a portal like Stage6. A user-owned, user-operated infrastructure that doesn’t require massive investment, doesn’t by default allow oligarchs to make more money from us. A disruptive, mutable infrastructure that brings media to us in the context we choose, forcing a massive re-think about what, why and how we create — as inviduals, as businesses, as a society.

It is lazy for us to rely at all on portals like Stage6, but worse than lazy, it’s dangerous. It suggests we don’t value the potential autonomy P2P offers us. Our old media masters profited from control of content: are we really so happy to swap them for new ones who profit from control of our eyeballs? However lazy we are, I think that most of us are able to see that that this isn’t a model that we want to encourage. The demise of Stage6 and the portals that will follow gives us cause to think about strengthening our infrastructures: and that can’t be a bad thing.

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Piece for Broadcast

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Here is a piece I have just produced for Broadcast magazine.

——

Paul Getty’s proclamation that ‘intellectual property is the oil of the twenty first century’ may one day become infamous. In the network age, scarcity-driven ‘commodity’ models of media are under threat. Desperate to maintain this precious but increasingly ephemeral substance, the entertainment industries have demanded all sorts of remedies, technological and legal, pushing authorities to take increasingly expansive views of existing copyright laws.

Disturbingly, the latest anti-filesharing schemes being trialled around the world pose grave risks to all of our civil liberties. A green paper on the creative industries published on Friday 22nd February was the first hint that Britain may buckle to pressures from the likes of IFPI by insisting internet providers take action against users suspected of downloading TV, films and music without permission. Users targeted under the provision risk having their internet access suspended if routine scrutiny of their net use raises a red flag. While the intention here is to send a warning signal to downloaders, the fact is that European law doesn’t allow for such incursions on our privacy in the name of protecting business.

The question is what constitutes an appropriate response to radical changes in communications technology, such as we investigated in STEAL THIS FILM, funded by Channel British Documentary Film Foundation and downloadable for free at www.stealthisfilm.com. The social changes brought about by new communications technology — from the printing press to the VCR — have always been resisted by those whose religious, secular, or capitalist empires depended on the previous order. Ultimately, attempts by the entertainment industries to reverse the possibilities suggested by peer to peer technologies will be just as futile as their forbears’.

While quick to accuse and punish, incumbent operators of the media machine have thus far shown themselves negligent in offering positive alternatives to customers increasingly disenchanted with the old models. From the DRM’ed, country-restricted, low-quality BBC iPlayer to the continued attempts to the price of MP3s keep elevated, the industry is staking out the terms of a battle it will lose. What our film asks you to be part of is the creation of a new model, based on a good understanding of technologies, that can let us recognise the many virtues of peer to peer distribution while allowing creators to produce great content. This may be a transformation of the industry as it exists today, but with a little application, it can be one for the better.

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Comment On “The World’s Creative Hub”

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

This is a longer version of the piece I have just written for The Guardian newspaper,  I’m not sure whether it’s destined for the Comment or Comment Is Free section. It also has the benefit of having links.

—

Filesharing is the favourite whipping-boy of an entertainment industry refusing to update its business models for the P2P generation. The latest result of their pressure on the UK government is a Green Paper on the creative industries titled ‘The World’s Creative Hub”, due to be published tomorrow, that will recommend ISPs be legally required to take action against users suspected of downloading copyrighted material without permission. Should they fail to mend their ways, such users face eventual termination of their internet access.

There’s not much mystery about how all this will work. Bargain-basement host Tiscali have already been operating a similar scheme in co-operation with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). The ISP has been monitoring Bittorrent ’swarms’ sharing copyrighted works, and harvesting IPs to see how many in the swarm are their own customers. As the UK’s Register reports, the system is already in disarray over arguments about who should pay for sending warnings and shutting down customers’ access.

British citizens should strongly object to these proposals. As security expert Bruce Schneier writes, in Europe, any database of electronic information that can be traced to individuals is regarded as a threat to our fundamental right to private life. Requiring ISPS to snoop on our activities reverses ISPs’ recognised role (under the 2002 E-Commerce Regulations) as ‘mere conduits’ who are not responsible for the contents of the traffic flowing through them. A recent European Court ruling requires specifically that member states deciding to obligate ISPs to disclose personal information about suspected file sharers should do so with due respect for citizens’ privacy. In addition, there are two Europe-wide sets of standards applying to the kind of activity proposed here: Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights on private life and the Council of Europe’s Convention 108 on Personal Data Processing. They require that the purpose of the interference with privacy be ‘legitimate’ and ‘proportional’.

’Proportional’ means that a government wishing to force ISPs to take this kind of action has to be able to show it can achieve its stated purpose. These proposals are hopelessly inadequate in this respect, as any basic diligence should have shown. It is impossible to monitor even a small proportion of potentially infringing BitTorrent files available, and even then BitTorrent traffic is only one filesharing protocol amongst many. Moreover, those for whom downloading has become their primary way of consuming media will simply protect themselves by using other systems, or already available encryption. These proposals therefore represent, at best, a spectacularly expensive way of inflicting symbolic punishments on an unlucky few. Proportional they are not.

Language like ‘national security’ and ‘public safety’ is often used to describe what counts as ‘legitimate’. Incursions on our privacy are permitted under EU law, but only in cases that ’satisfy a pressing social need’ – not, as is the case here, merely to comply with the wishes of a powerful business lobby. ISPs will resist this because they know that acquiescing will be expensive and expose their businesses to massive liability. We citizens must resist it on the grounds that is unacceptable to sell our privacy to support an outmoded industry. Enough of our civil liberties have been eroded under the shibboleth of terror — let’s not have them further eroded under that of piracy.

Interestingly, ISPs complying with the proposed requirements might face an unexpected cost. The world’s larger Bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay — on which almost all torrents are hosted — has an acceptable use policy which is actively being violated by the kinds of things Tiscali is doing. ‘They are not legitimate users on our system,’ says The Bay’s Peter Sunde, ‘and we do not accept their harvesting of IPs, since it’s not productive. Breaking into our system when you’re not invited is a violation of our terms of use. This means these ISPs have to pay a basic fee of five thousand Euros, plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation.’

With the government’s proposals looking technically and legally suspect, as well as increasingly expensive for ISPs, perhaps it is time to investigate new business models for the entertainment industries? P2P distribution represents an unprecedented opportunity for creators to distribute their work cheaply and efficiently to people who want it. All we need now is a progressive business model that can once again recognise sharing as a a virtue, not a vice

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Buying The DVD: Unhelpful And Unethical

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

This is the first installment of a bi-weekly piece I’ll be writing for TorrentFreak. I’m really excited about getting a column back after Channel 4 binned me over a year ago :D (but then they never really understood what I was going on about.)

—-

These last few years P2Pers have got used to TV entertainment ‘our way’: unfucked, de-loused, delivered efficiently in economical, good-looking codecs. Because we rarely turn it on, it’s been easy to forget just how cynical, unsatisfying and downright venal television, as a distribution medium, has become. Whether it’s the stupor-inducing gambling channels dedicated to parting fools from their money, the late-night pseudo-porn selling premium-rate phone sex, or the corrupt ‘competition’ call-ins plaguing the UK’s prime-time (even that Holy of Holies, the BBC), there’s the unavoidable sense that TV is on the rocks. Anyone who’d have you believe filesharers are the only scourge afflicting an industry that would otherwise be healthy is smoking crack, in the business, or both.

This is why Tape It Off The Internet seemed like such a good idea until you actually started trying to use it. There are just not enough good shows being made to justify something as complicated and involved as TIOTI. Enter all your favourites and share them with strangers ‘just like you’ and discover… what? That there are only seven good shows in the world at any one time, you were already watching six of them, and they’re all in the Pirate Bay’s Top 100 anyway. When you strip away the hours of dross and advertising, the truth is that the world’s mighty entertainment infrastructure is only capable of producing half a dozen hours of passable content a week. Maybe it’s because they spend the rest of their time on lawsuits.

One of these rare hours is The Wire. If by some small chance you’re not mainlining it already, think yourself lucky. You have four back seasons to enjoy, of what is quite possibly the last great show television will produce before it’s entirely superseded by — well, by whatever is coming around the way.

I’m not sure anyone has ever attempted to make a show of this scope: The Wire’s by-all-accounts-not-very-nice creator David Simon (Homicide, The Corner) has said his theme over the series’ five years has been ‘the decline of the American empire’ — which means decay of the cities through poverty, of traditional jobs, of the education system, of the police force and of the media. For those getting restless at the back, the show’s also got the slickest, nastiest drug slingers you’ll see on screen and is so realistic that the Baltimore Police have apparently complained it reveals too much about how crimes are — or are not — solved; apparently real thugs love it as well.

Find it and download it — though probably David Simon doesn’t want you to and neither does HBO, which has been actively poisoning Torrents of its other shows. Tell everyone you know about it. Maybe those of them still rocking TVs will raise the show’s increasingly dismal viewing figures.

Or maybe that’s no longer the point. While I sympathise with the plight of the David Simons, David Milchs (Deadwood, John from Cincinnatti) and Joss Whedons (Firefly) of this world, and would like to help them in future endeavours, I specifically do not sympathise with the plights of the craven, dim-witted, played-out producers that surround them on all sides. And by ‘playing fair’ and buying the DVD or the cable package, besides the fact that most of our money is not going to the creators and their families, aren’t we really saying we accept the meshwork of shit in order to get the two or three gems that occasionally sift through it? Aren’t we signalling the industry that there’s something we still find acceptable about their way of doing business?

Now I suppose this could seem a bit extreme to some. But again and again in blogs and comments about shows like The Wire you hear ‘I’d pay for this if…’ — if it wasn’t DRM’ed all to hell like HBO’s own online offering, if it was freely shareable, good to be watched whenever, wherever, on whatever, without constant interruption by adverts. The kicker is that we’re not only unable legally to liberate and re-distribute shows from the broken, corrupt mechanisms of television and DVD distribution: we also have no way of supporting creators like David Simon and crew outside of it.

This means that right now, people still stupid or unfortunate enough to sit in front of TVs watching months-old shows or paying massive cash-or-attention premiums for the new ones are heavily subsidising us P2Pers. This is genuinely immoral, because we’re really exploiting people less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, we should be helping them out of the wasteland, and thinking of new ways to get the creators we like creating outside the prison of mass distribution. It cannot be that we are able to figure out how to make GNU-Linux – a world-class operating system — together, but not to make a dozen decent shows a year.

The irony is that TV series really feel like they’re coming into their own, just as the media that spawned them is dying. From the ‘high art’ of Deadwood and John From Cincinnati to the epic modern-day myth of Lost to the (dare I call it) Beckettian dark comedy of Trailer Park Boys, the drawn out tales of our series (often consumed a ’season’ at a time: I know at least three people waiting for The Wire to finish before downloading it) are an undeniable core of our emerging P2P culture.

We are the most passionate viewers ever, talking and writing profusely about the media we love, analysing, promoting, hosting free screenings… And they need us as much as we need them — all of these shows, without exception, enjoy their primary life on the networks, through our blogs, comments, reviews, remixes and fan fiction. Lost in particular has learned that incorporating online feedback can make a great (if utterly Shaggy Dog) story.

Can we find a way to get the shows we want made without buying the goddamn DVD? I remember this guy talking really sensibly a couple years ago about how Joss Whedon could get to make another season of Firefly, and we got this project back up his musings. Why didn’t Whedon try it? Because someone else owned his ideas? Perhaps it could have worked otherwise, and maybe it could work for the future. If you’ve got ideas, throw them in the comments box below. And if you have time in between catching up on The Wire, read this by the venerable guru of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly — I’m going to try to get him into the next installment of STEAL THIS FILM. See you around. I’ll be back in two weeks to pick up the pieces.

Filed in Intellectual Property, Post, Pirate, Projects, Mine, Rants, STEAL THIS FILM, Thoughts, Random, torrentfreak | | Permalink | Comments (0)

STEAL THIS FILM II screenings and coverage

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

I’ll use this post as a place to record STEAL THIS FILM II coverage I have noticed. Usually this means it will be a substantial post or a well-known publication.

(I note that many blogs and online publications simply re-iterate all or part of the text from the front page of STEALTHISFILM.COM, and/or Wikipedia, and/or BoingBoing. So it is worth getting a Press Pack up for a project even if it’s going to be mainly for bloggers. We/they appear to be as lazy as mass media journalists most of the time! Maybe if some of the people who are screening the film would write up audience responses that would help. Or maybe we should publish some of the thousands of responses that have been mailed to us… I also think it is not too shabby in this context to think about identifiying people who might like to write about the film and asking them to do so directly: many people are happy to link us, few are happy to put together three paragraphs of original material on us. Is this a hangover from the mass media?)

I recently heard (thanks to Rasmus and Ronaldo) that STEAL THIS FILM made the front page of some Brazilian newspapers. I hadn’t really realised that it was so big over there.

From Folha:

“Grupo britânico pró-downloads ilegais lança segunda parte de documentário”

Produced by a group called League of Noble Peers, in reference to the “peer-to-peer” or P2P, exchange of files between users online, the film is a documentary in favour of the most controversial activity to arise from Internet use: downloading movies, music, books and other intellectual property without payment of copyright- – what the MPAA calls “piracy”.

“Many people believe that this change in communication is temporary, that it can be stopped by the entertainment industry preventing the exchange of files, this new way of thinking. We wanted to make a film to close this discussion, which showed that this revolution will not be reversed, ” said Director Jamie King, by telephone.

“Once people understand this, they can begin to think creatively about what will follow. Only when you believe that the old order will stop do you begin to consider what comes after — because you know the future is unwritten. ”

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u363525.shtml

Forward Escape is a weekly documentary video night at the New College of Florida. Topics include: Consumerism, History, Psychology, Technology, Drugs, Ecology, Marketing, Economics, Politics, and more. They are showing both parts of STEAL THIS FILM on the 4th March 2008.

 

South By Southwest Film Festival (Global Doc Days)
http://2008.sxsw.com/film/screenings/film/F12039.html. I am very pleased to see that our film has been selected for South By Southwest, the second international film festival at which it has been officially screened. The SxSW programme calls me an ‘anarchist professor’ which I really enjoyed:

Intellectual Property professor and anarchist Jamie King has become a figure-head for the pro-piracy movement. Steal This Film II explains how and why the war against file-sharing has been lost and the huge potential of new avenues of grassroots distribution, peer-to-peer networks and piracy that fly in the face of the old established Hollywood models.

NYU: http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/02/26/201/#more-201

A student from an NYU class posted a rather snooty ‘review’ which reminds me why I so dislike what the academy has become, partly cribbed from Felix Stalder’s piece on Nettime, partly interested, and partly distinterestedly muttering about the film’s relation to Henry Jenkins (who we tried to interview but wasn’t available.) One thing these students might muse upon, though I don’t imagine them as big musers, is their relationship to our work. Having ‘heard it all before’, they make no mention of the difference in the way our work has reached them, how they consumed it, and their relationship with us. May I sneer at that default New York liberal conservatism? Yawn.

SFC, The Other Cinema

Delighted to see this screening at The Other Cinema in sunny SFC, which we’ll be visiting presently:

OC inaugurates its 24th year with a festive celebration of the Open-Source spirit! Headlining is the West Coast premiere of Jamie King’s half-hr. Steal This Film (2), a spot-on primer on strategies of access and appropriation in today’s Info Age. Initiating the evening is local hero Rick Prelinger, in person, with a provocative performative lecture on motion picture archives.

STF II in the UK’s New Media Age:
http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/26562/New+site,+same+invaluable+content.html

STF II now on the syllabus at NYU:

http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/02/19/brief-concluding-the-2nd-travelogue/

STF II at the UK Green Party National Conference:

http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2008/Spring_2008_Timetable.pdf

Steal This Film II: Review

http://mikesheetal.com/en/2008/01/28/review-steal-this-film-ii/

‘Steal This Film Is A Must-See’:
http://newteevee.com/2008/01/04/steal-this-film-ii-is-a-must-see/

STF II on Creative Commons: ‘The League of Noble Peers has done it again’
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7789

STF ‘Most Important Film of 2007′:
http://www.informatik.umu.se/iit/?p=118

STF II on BoingBoing: ‘The Internet Makes Us All Into Copiers’:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/29/steal-this-film-part.html

‘Steal some popcorn and grab somebody’s chair, because this is going to be fun’
http://www.insideonlinevideo.com/2008/01/02/steal-this-film-ii/

‘one of those films that should air instead of news’
http://torrenttimes.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/steal-this-film-ii/

http://www.digital-rights.net/?p=1253

Inside Online Video, ‘Steal This Film II’:

Steal This Film (2006) was revolutionary in that it was the first documentary about filesharing not made by some offline media outfit looking to protect its own outdated business model. The sequel, Steal This Film II, goes even further with historical analogies and contemporary examples of how “piracy” is nothing more than a fiction created by whiners losing control of information in the face of technological advances. This film is well-timed, released days before the 25th anniversary of ARPANET’s historic switch to TCP/IP

… The Gutenberg press was initially condemned by commoners as the work of the Devil, and later suppressed by aristocrats as a tool of rebellion. The same thing is happening to online video today — and we all know how big a hit Gutenberg’s thing became. Steal some popcorn and grab somebody’s chair, because this is going to be fun — unless, of course, you work inside offline video.

 

Paul Glazowski, Mashable,‘Steal This Film 2: Nets Bigger Donations Than First Attempt’:

TorrentSpy relayed the financial results for the first four days of “Steal This Film 2’s time out on the open market, and how interesting it was to see the average payment being presented by those who downloaded the new production. The magic number? $15.Before I go out on the record here as supporting the pay-what-you-will financial model being employed by more and more music acts and various other businesses, all of which have received a fairly significant boost of attention following Radiohead’s much-publicized distribution of its new album In Rainbows, we should certainly point out the fact that, despite the sizable sum of contributions for “Steal This Movie 2” made recently, the majority of downloaders have indeed avoided tossing so much as a penny into the piggy bank the film’s creators put in place. (The same results can be found for most all efforts stipulated above as well.)Still, one can’t be anything but impressed at how much traction the donation process has in fact garnered in the last several months. Reading Jamie King’s (the producer of “Steal This Movie 2”) response to the returns given by viewers is rather thought provoking. It almost leaves one contemplating the possibility of turning such an open-ended payment system into a viable financial model.

Mike Jones Digital Basin, part of Digital Media Online, Inc., ‘the world’s largest publisher in the digital media market (with over 1 million unique visitors on a monthly basis)’, ‘Steal this Film‘:

We live in an age where the world’s corporations have told use emphatically that we NEED a ‘digital lifestyle’ and should have it NOW…! And so, like dutiful little lemmings, we went out and did just that – we bought all those machines and devices they insisted that we buy and we hooked them up to the ‘information super highway’ that they said we had to connect to… But now they’re angry at us; they’re very afraid of what we might do with the devices of the digital lifestyle that they told us we had to have.Turns out the devices and machines we bought have only ONE purpose, only ONE function, only ONE true ability – the ability to Copy, the ability to Replicate and the ability to Diseminate. Whether big or small, thats what a computer does. It makes copies, it stores copies and it distributes copies. But now the movie studios and record companies and software developers are all very grumpy at us for using the devices to do exactly what they’re intended to do….?

Images For The Future (a project from the Dutch Film Museum, Institute for Sound and Vision, Centrale Discotheek Rotterdam, National Archives, Association of Public Libraries and Knowledgeland), ‘Recent views in the ongoing copyright vs. open access debate’:

Copyright used to be a very specialized field of law, but over the last few years, it has become a highly political topic, where discussions routinely tend to include issues such as freedom of information, human rights of access to knowledge, democracy etc.. These lively discussions take place in every thinkable media forms.Steal This FilmThis premise is the starting point of the documentary Steal This Film II, released a few weeks ago. Through interviews with Yochai Benkler, Brewster Kahle, Rick Prelinger, Laurence Liang and many other influential thinkers, Steal This Film brilliantly explores current changes in the way media is produced, distributed and consumed. It traces back the roots of piracy to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and continues makes the case how file sharing is the fundamental structure of the internet. For copyright holders, this results in serious headaches. As Aaron Swarts, co-founder of the social news website Reddit.com states: “there’s no one you can go to and say: stop the file sharing – it’s just not built that way” If you haven’t downloaded the documentary yet, you can do so online: at Steal This Film II.

Mark Pesce, Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century. I’m delighted Mark is using STEAL THIS FILM II in his teach materials at Screen Training Ireland — it’s included in his seminar packs. We hope to hear from them, or you, if you were at these sessions!

‘In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace. The ability to “hyperdistribute” a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were part-and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theaters and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the capability to “tuning into” a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has simply asserted its control over distribution. This is not about piracy. This is about the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary.’

Zero influence, ‘Steal This Film Too‘:

a surprisingly good documentary about piracy. It offers some tales and insights into the intrinsic need for sharing/copying in a networked world. Unfortunately, it’s very anti-media industries and thus it falls down on being a balanced understanding on the impact of piracy for the future of production.This approach to debate on how we all use duplication and derivatives in communication prevents a resolution for artists and brands developing a workable relationship; the constant baiting against the entertainment industry alludes to a belief that they are no longer needed, referring to the London Grime scene as an exemplar in production. Grime is a true grass roots movement, but like every home producer knows, you still need professional production values to make the craft shine. There’s a big difference between ‘home recordings’ where you’re ripping a DVD for sharing via bittorrent and ‘home recording’ where you’re making something from existing culture, something with a new construct, architecture, aesthetic or utilitarian purpose.

simpleRECURISION, ‘What the One-Sided Coin of the Mind can Buy‘:

In Steal this Film, an indignant rabbit salesman (in a cute cartoon metaphor) refuses to lower the price on his rabbits, even though they are multiplying and, so, arguably, becoming a cheaper commodity, due to a high amount of supply. Eventually, the salesman fails to make a sale and a little girl steals one of the rabbits “because there are so many.” Mhumm. If a man sells rabbits at a price no one can agree to, either there is a problem with the rabbits, or there is a problem with the price. As hateful as all things Apple are to me, their post-Napster single-song-purchase model has revolutionised the reproduction of cultural information and people have come in droves to vote for it with their wallets. Suddenly, the price for the rabbits was right, despite a potentially-infinite amount of rabbits available for sale. So what is the problem here? Is the consumer now jealous of the producer for finding an infinite income source? Perhaps. (This would explain why we now often prefer to pay for seeminly-unreal objects with non-existing payment.) Why does not the consumer find his own rabbit to sell? Is the rabbit a commodity the consumer does not need? Why can not the producer then adjust his supply and his price – and go on, uninterrupted? Whether we like it or not, the world is driven by simple and fundamental laws of market economics and human psychology. So what if the market is now no longer local? So what if we can buy and sell bits of data (which also happen to be music) at incredible speeds? Oh, right, we are applying economic theory to that which we have declared to be not real, and herein, as our good friend Hamlet tells us, lies the rub.

Filed in Documentary, Projects, Mine, STEAL THIS FILM | | Permalink | Comments (1)

‘The Future Doesn’t Care About Your Bank Balance’… But the 1/1000 Do!

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Raw numbers can’t convey the excitement of releasing STEAL THIS FILM II at the end of 2007, but here they are anyway: in the first 4 days there have been approximately 150,000 downloads (we haven’t checked how many views there have been on bittorrent.com, Stage6, Joox, YouTube, Google Video and everywhere else the film has been uploaded, hard since there are multiple copies on each) , around 5000 seeders at any one time on The Pirate Bay’s trackers; and approx. $5000 in donations.

steal this flm site

That last figure is especially pleasing, not just because it represents cash in the bank for our next project, GHOST SHIFT, part one of the series THE OIL OF THE 21ST CENTURY, but because each of these people has personally chosen to support us completely voluntarily — and in most cases, donated significantly more than they would have had to pay for a DVD or a cinema ticket. While a rough calculation (the numbers are rough, we’re not statisticians!) suggests about one in a thousand people seeing the film choose to support us, we are seeing an overwhelming proportion of donations in the range $15-40.

 The Few, The Generous Few

This means we have solved one of the ‘problems’ thrown up by STEAL THIS FILM I, in which we asked for donations of $1, and received thousands of them. PayPal took round about 30 cents of each of these, and after the cost of transferring to our bank account, that left not so much of the generous donations to work with in the real world.

We addressed this problem in STEAL THIS FILM II’s release by suggesting (but not requiring) donations of $5 or more, and incentivising the already-existing generosity of the P2P community by offering a ‘mystery gift’ for donations of $15 or more. (The mystery gift really is cool by the way.)

What we discovered is that (as one of my colleagues put it) people want that gift. Over 90% of people donating are deciding to go over the artificial $15 threshold we set. But I don’t think people literally ‘want that gift’; I think they want an excuse to be generous!

stf ee

Some comments about this. In STEAL THIS FILM I, we envisioned millions of viewers of which a large-ish proportion would donate small amounts of money. What we actually got — and were delighted to get — was millions of viewers of which a small proportion donated a small amount of money. Even this early in the day, the STF II experience shows something that is obvious in retrospect: the people who are choosing to voluntarily support us are passionate about the STEAL THIS FILM project (not just about the documentary per se, clearly, but about the future it suggests). And quite naturally, those few people are prepared to go rather further than a $1 donation.

STEAL THIS FILM AS DISEASE VECTOR

Who are the 1/1000: what characterises them and sets them apart from others? It’s difficult not to be reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s <em>http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.htmlt</em>:

Potterat [...] once did an analysis of a gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, looking at
everyone who came to a public health clinic for treatment of the disease over the space of six months. He found that about half of all the cases came, essentially, from four neighborhoods representing about 6 percent of the geographic area of the city. Half of those in that 6 percent, in turn, were socializing in the same six bars. Potterat then interviewed 768 people in that tiny subgroup and found that 600 of them either didn’t give gonorrhea to anyone else or gave it to only one other person. These people he
called nontransmitters. The ones causing the epidemic to grow — the ones who were infecting two and three and four and five others with their disease — were the remaining 168. In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs — a town of well in excess of 100,000 people — the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basi-cally frequenting the same six bars.

Who were those 168 people? They aren’t like you or
me. They are people who go out every night, people who have vastly more sexual partners than the norm, people whose lives and behavior are well outside of the ordinary.

Now, I’m not saying that STF II supporters are going around giving anyone gonorrhea; but I’m interested whether there’s any other relationship between the 1/1000 who donate and the 168/100,000 (basically the same ratio) who spread STDs in Colorado Springs. Perhaps it’s a proportion of people who just really, really like STEAL THIS FILM — but as much as that would be nice to believe, I’m more inclined to think it’s a group of edge-surfers trying to do what they can to help move things along.

GIMME GUANXI 

guanxi

Trying to understand more about the relationship between The League Of Noble Peers and the 1/1000, I came across the idea of Guanxi for the first time. From the wiki linked to the book Guanxi: The China Letter, this definition:

Guanxi is a Chinese term, generally translated as “networks” or “connections,”… a useful reminder that trust, understanding, and personal knowledge can be vital components of economic relationships. Most guanxi relationships are based on individuals’ having something in common… may be the fact of having attended or graduated from the same school, having the same place of employment, working in the same industry, or coming from the same village or region. In addition, guanxi relationships may sometimes be established through gift giving or personal favors…. Guanxi relationships often have a strong emotional element, something easily overlooked by outsiders.

The essence of guanxi is that each relationship carries with it a set of expectations and obligations for each participant.

Now, this isn’t the first time someone has noticed the relevance of Guanxi to network culture. In Guanxi: The Art of Relationships, Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates’s Plan to Win the Road Ahead, ‘good’ Guanxi is defined as

trust (respect and knowledge of others), favor (loyalty and obligation), dependence (harmony and reciprocity, mutual benefit), and adaptation (patience and cultivation).

The fact that Guanxi is considered key to Gates’ ‘winning’ ‘the road ahead’ might make it a lot less attractive on the face of it, but I still think it’s an interesting way of understanding what is happening with our 1/1000. STEAL THIS FILM has helped to build what you might call an ‘affective bridge’ between ‘us’ (The League) and ‘them’ (the viewer), a reciprocal relationship that can express itself in a variety of ways: copying and redistributing, recommending personally, blogging, donating, hosting a screening, and so on.

Through the act of knowledge-sharing, ‘they’ are inspired to support ‘us’, trusting us to make more (or at least another!) film and release it in a similar way. What we learn from the (not infrequently moving) messages that come with the donations we’re receiving is that the 1/1000 are passionate about what they’re supporting. This is why it was a mistake to ask for $1: in fact, the 1/1000 were prepared donate far more to something they really cared about.

 ALL IN TOGETHER NOW

One of the most important things to observe is that in the course of this interaction, the distinction between us and them breaks down to some extent. While there is a core group at the center of the STF project, people really become part of it when supporting it, whether they’re sharing it on Bittorrent or donating $10. That’s really how we’re looking at it. There is no STF without those promoting it, advertising it, and distributing it. In this sense, we’re already a million miles away from the distribution systems of the past, which never implied such a degree of intimacy, such a blurring of distinction, between what was once called ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’.

One of the questions that has been asked repeatedly since the filesharing ‘revolution’ is about how artists will get paid after the media-as-commodity model is done and dusted. In STEAL THIS FILM II we (roughly) claimed that ‘the future doesn’t care about your bank balance’, and in a couple of senses that’s true: what’s going to happen is going to happen regardless how it afflicts those who bank on the current status quo in media — and we don’t think that being able to answer a business case for a thing is the most important condition for doing it, at all. Some people act like it’s all that matters.

That said, we’ve been personally involved in thinking about ‘remuneration’ for some time. And what we think the STF II experience shows is that there is hope after filesharing. More than hope. It even seems possible at this point that STF II might go into profit.

There are caveats. We lost money on the third day of distribution because PayPal, pretty much the only game in town at the moment when it comes to accepting donations from users, unilaterally declared us to be ‘in violation’ of their ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ because we were ‘promoting illegal activity’. Of course STF II doesn’t do that and once we pointed out to them why, they restored our account. But we lost a few hundred dollars in the interim. The current state of taking online payments is just woefully unfit for purpose. The commissions are too high and the level of service too low. Someone needs to step into this arena with a new attitude, though whether that is possible in the laundering-obsessed post 9/11 world is another matter.

Secondly, while the 1/1000 are our future, and we’re infinitely grateful for their existence, we still think it’s possible for them to become the 1/500, the 1/200 or even the 1/100, given the right encouragement and cultural atmosophere. (If we were speaking of the 1/200 right now, we’d have already covered half what we spent on the film.) Fifty years ago, Everett M. Rogers developed a theory of ‘diffusion of innovations’, that is, how new things spread through a society. His 1962 book was based on Depression-era rural sociology, such as how Midwestern farmers adopted hardier corn.

Adopter Categories

Rogers found that 2.5 percent of people in society were what he called ‘innovators’ in their contexts: brave visionaries, pushing change forward, for whom trying something new requires little justification. This leads me to wonder if the 1/1000 we’re currently encountering is the ‘bleeding edge of the ‘innovator’ group in media. Of course, we can’t be sure that the model we propose is the one that will prevail in the future, and the problem is that until we have a critical mass, other new potential innovators will not join it. (Other documentarists, for example, still see the STEAL THIS FILM model as ‘idealist’ and ‘interesting’ but fundamentally impractical: they are still betting the farm on traditional distributors paying them to show their works.)

After a critical mass is achieved, the benefits of using this model are clear. As my friend and fellow Peer Alan Toner writes,

there are nearly 5,000 seeds for the three different files containing [our] film, providing an effective speed equal to that obtainable by any motion picture studio employing global server co-location like Akamai and local caching services like Google, not bad for a bunch of amateurs working from the grassroots!

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PIRATE

Combine this with direct donations in which none of the viewers’ contribution is lost in defunct, superfluous, wasteful, physical product and no middlemen (!) and you have an overwhelmingly positive picture likely to prove exceedingly attractive to second-wave pioneers. What may surprise those who think that ‘we pirates’ against artists making money is that we’re working on ways to make this economy work right now. My friend Peter Sunde (Brokep), from The Pirate Bay, has been hard at work with his development team on an offering he hopes to roll out at the end of January: it will make it much easier for people to give donations and (hopefully) take some of the power away from PayPal.

‘I think that people will pay if there’s a simple solution,’ Peter says. ‘The payment solutions of today are not built for the new, network economy — they’re built around the old one. As we move away from the old economy, we’re here without a new payment solution.’

Brokep sees this, then, as a question of ‘payment models catching up with the distribution models.’I couldn’t agree more. The League Of Noble Peers are also working on a parallel system, and after discussions with The Pirate Bay, Mininova and Bittorrent, we also think it will have some part to play in making it easier for us to support each other making cultural works. (Sorry to be so mysterious, but Peter doesn’t want to say more about their project pre-Beta and we won’t say more until we’re at least past the first phase of development.)

What is also necessary is a spreading of the ‘generosity virus’, not just for STEAL THIS FILM (although boy, could we use it!) but for all independent creators who’ve dispensed with the restrictive, punitive, retrograde commodity model and chosen to work with a new, more far-sighted paradigm. In these first days of distributing STF II, we have learned that by setting aside the artificial barriers of DVDs, cinema tickets and pay-per-download, the way is cleared to a new world of voluntary, supportive donations. The sooner we all stop moaning about how ‘no one is going to make any money’ after P2P, we can get on with encouraging each other to look after our cultural environments. No one is saying we’re there yet, but like the man said, we’re beginning to see the light.

stf on tpb

Many ’small’ creators have protested that ‘we can’t all be STEAL THIS FILM’ — that is, we can’t all get sufficiently well-known to be able to garner enough donations to make a project financially viable. To an extent, this is true, although we suspect that a lot of creators make quite desultory attempts to market their works online. We can tell you that you can’t rely on Digg (only 1,500 hits from a front page article this time), Reddit (ignored us entirely), Slashdot (ditto) to alert people to your work — and in a sense, why should you? They’re just small interest communities that are artificially promoting stories into wider, temporary, public view. We have the feeling that these mechanisms are fairly brutal and subject to gaming, corruption and so on. ‘Preference formation’ — how we discover new stuff, stuff we like and will recommend to our friends, is incredibly important, because it precedes everything else, informs everything we may want to get involved with and support. Someone needs to get onto this now. As much as we need a better, (non-profit?) payment system, we need to think afresh about how to bring new material onto our personal and community horizons. No more Top 100s and Front Pages: these are just hangovers of mass media that needed massive numbers. We don’t: if we get only 1.8% of our current viewers (that is, those we have had in four days) to support us at the current average, we break even with STEAL THIS FILM. If we get Rogers’ 2.5% of ‘innovators’, we’ll actually be able to put something in the bank. And then it’s surely only a matter of time before others decide it’s time to bet their farms; and then we will all be winners, infinitely culturally better off than we have been able to imagine until now.

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Welsh Cawl

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

My mother (and probably her mother, but my grandma’s version of this became increasingly eccentric as she grew older) always used neck of lamb for this traditional Welsh dish.

Cover the lamb with water and add a whole onion, roughly chopped, peppercorns and salt. Bring the water to the boil and then allow to simmer until the meat falls easily off the bone.

Allow the stock to cool and skim off the excess fat, if you want.

The vegetables you will need are a small swede, two or three parsnips, three or four carrots, three or four large potatoes and about two or three large leeks.

Clean and prepare the vegetables and chop into sizeable chunks. One of the delights of this stew is largeish chunks of waxy potato saturated with the soup stock.

Melt some butter in a large pan and soften the vegetables in the butter. Start with the firm vegetables like swede and carrot and leave them to fry for a little while before adding the parsnip and potato.

Add the leeks when the rest of the vegetables are starting to soften. Then add back in your strained lamb stock and the lamb chunks. You may need to add a little extra water – just make sure the vegetables are covered at all times. Bring to the boil again and simmer for about one hour until the vegetables are cooked. >

Season with chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Serve with a good hunk of crusty bread.

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Not exactly counterfeit

Friday, December 28th, 2007

I’m experimenting with the title GHOST SHIFT for our next film; this article in FORTUNE Magazine has some interesting material about how use of factories after-hours delivers problematic perfect counterfeits. At which point does the copy cease to be a copy?

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PlusNet ISP (UK) Dishonest, Deceptive; Avoid

Friday, December 21st, 2007

The skinny: PlusNet changed my mum’s 2mb, unmetered internet service (purchased and installed by me) to an ‘up to 8mb’ heavily metered (4gb/month) service without telling her. Then, when I rang up to ask politely for it to be changed back to the unmetered service, they told me that this had never been, and was not now available. (I won’t go into the positively Orwellian double-think the telephone rep attempted when confronted with the advert in which they specifically promised ‘unlimited downloads.’) When I suggested it was a bit much to change a customer’s contract they told me (after a brief pause to check with management) that the terms of service my mum had agreed to permitted them to change the contract as much as they liked. They then unabashedly suggested I go complain to Ofcom if I was bothered, and laughed that I was ‘obviously trying to get an unmetered service’ as if that was a deliquent thing to want. When I asked what they could do for a pissed off customer (anyone who knows the UK’s DSL service knows that changing ISPs is corpracratic hell) they told me they could offer 6 months half price if I committed to another year’s contract. Since I assume that during that year they could change their service willy-nilly I think not. (UPDATE: As I thought at the time, this is just the deal (90 Days free) that they’re offering to new customers. Something really pisses me off about that: I specifically asked if this ’sweetener’ was something they were also offering to new customers and was blatantly dishonestly told no. But in fact, of course, that’s just shit. The six months half price deal is that same 90 days free deal dressed up differently. You suck, PlusNet. And you lie.)

So, just because I have a resonably high Google ranking: new customers looking for a good ADSL service in the UK avoid PlusNet and go with another provider. They used to be okay, but as this blog demonstrates, they’re now far from it. I’m cancelling my mum’s contract tomorrow. Merry Humbug.

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Imitation in Western And Chinese Thought

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

I’m transcribing part of a chapter from The Exemplary Society, Imitation in Western And Chinese Thought (This transcription will be lengthening and improving as I am able to add to it.)

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