As part of my job, I have been scouring the Internet looking for illegal uploads of movies produced and released by my company. It seems that here in Vietnam at least, there is a dominant video streaming model done by these illegal movie sites:
- register a Vietnamese-market oriented domain on an overseas registrar and hosting;
- upload the movies to YouTube, 4shared, Dailymotion and many other similar sites, sometimes using private accounts with private links;
- make a landing page for the movie with all the links to the clips uploaded to the various video/storage services, sometimes using a proprietary Flash player based on JWPlayer;
- place a disclaimer on every page that the site does not host the content, thus the site is fully legal;
- sell ads on the page.
This is just wrong.
I'm all for the reform of copyright enforcement, but I still support the basic concept that the copyright holder should have some say on any exploitation of their content, and receive a share of any money made from it. A more flexible, liberal concept of copyright and copyright enforcement, should still benefit the creator.
How do we reform copyright law? I don't have any details yet, but perhaps more flexible controls for use, reuse and derivatives; positive enforcement i.e. making it attractive for people/businesses to support copyright... But this is something that needs a lot of thought and discussion, and perhaps needs an enormous reworking of the copyright concept. Perhaps abolishing copyright ownership altogether? Who knows. The shorter-term solution is innovating the business models and the customer experiences, but still, in my opinion, these kinds of websites need to go. File-sharing is one thing, but making money of somebody else's work - without permission and any revenue share - is downright wrong.
[...] I have mentioned in a previous blog post, the current pace of technological advances and the multitude of ways one can enjoy music (read: [...]
ReplyDeleteSo how do you combat that? If its offshore registrar, offshore hosting, and the content is not hosted on their server, how would you get their information to prosecute them? What would you do?
ReplyDeleteOr is it just one of those things where you just move onto the next site?
Well, we can't prosecute them, that's for sure, but since they take the video content from other services and restream it through their site, our best efforts would be just taking down the content at the source (I.e YouTube, Dailymotion, etc).
ReplyDeleteYou simply can't fight piracy, but you can only minimize its impact.